3.7 sacred ground

While visiting an underground monastery on the friendly Neehani homeworld, Kes enters a portal and is zapped into a state similar to a coma – but untreatable. The Neehani minister says he cannot help, as the monastery is the domain of the  monks, and they believe that the spirits struck Kes down. However, it is revealed that the monks can pass through the portal safely, after conducting a ritual ceremony. Janeway asks to partake in the ceremony, citing precedent in an ancient Neehani legend of a king who cured his son in a similar situation. Janeway views the ritual as a series of challenges or tests, and believes that there will be a physiological or chemical change in her body as the result of those tests that will protect her – and reveal Kes’ cure. She finishes the ritual, is told that she knows everything she needs to cure Kes, and, having pumped info to the doctor by use of a subcutaneous sensor, she returns to the ship – only to find that what should be curing Kes, scientifically, is having the opposite effect. She returns to the planet once more, and it is revealed that because she pre-determined what the ritual was and what its outcome would be, she took away nothing but what she had brought. Once again she begins, but this time she keeps and open mind and listens. She is asked to make a leap of faith, to take Kes through the portal again, and is told if she believes that Kes will get better, she will. Against the wishes of Tuvok and Chakotay, she does, and Kes is cured.

In the final scene, as the doctor explains in medico-babble why Kes was cured, Janeway, uncharacteristically, stares off into the distance. She has been forced to look in the mirror, to deal with her need to have a scientific explanation for everything (indeed, one of the people in the ritual compares her worship of science as a ‘leap of faith’). Suddenly, she has to face the fact that science may have had nothing to do with what just happened.

Of note in this episode is the leaps and bounds of the doctor’s bedside manner (amazing considering he lost most of his memory in ‘Swarm’ just a few episodes ago. In one scene, he explains in detail to Janeway just how bleak Kes’ condition is, but when Neelix asks about her right after that, he simply says, "There’s been no change."