a type of family network which has Kim as a surrogate son. His separation from his nuclear family at a young age is described as cruel, and Janeway, Chakotay and Tuvok are highlighted as his de facto parents in the series. This motherly position was described by Michelle Erica Green in her review of the episode "The Disease" for TrekNation, who described certain scenes as Kim needing to request permission from "Mommy" in order to have a relationship with an alien. She felt that the disease itself caused the character to grow a "backbone" as he had rarely asserted himself previously to the Captain. Kim has been used to show the multiculturalism of Star Trek: Voyager. One scene, described by Elisabeth Anne Leonard, in the episode "Faces," featured a sweeping shot around the command table of Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, and Kim, showing a Caucasian race woman, a Native American, a man of Asian descent and a black Vulcan in a single shot. Kim's persistent optimism has been highlighted, with him being one of the few characters in the series who by the seventh series still believed that they would return home in their lifetime. Kim seemed to be frequently captured by alien species during the course of the series to the extent that it was described as one of the typical storylines seen in Voyager during an overview by The A.V. Club. The authors of the book Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos state that the episode "Deadlock," which featured the death of Kim, was one of several examples in the Star Trek franchise where the death of a major character is reversed by a parallel existence. Other examples included in The Next Generation with the return of Tasha Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and the death of Miles O'Brien in the Deep Space Nine episode "Visionary". They felt that Kim also shared another similarity with "Yesterday's Enterprise" in that in the episode "Non Sequitur", he feels that reality has been changed – which was similar to the experience that Guinan felt in The Next Generation episode. Amongst Kim's relationships included the relationship with a character on the ship's holodeck in the episode "Alter Ego", but after building a rivalry for the character's affections with Tuvok, he becomes disinterested after finding out that the character was being played by a real person. This relationship was highlighted