“Faces”
Written by Jonathan Glassner and Kenneth Biller
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 1, Episode 13
Production episode 114
Original air date: May 8, 1995
Stardate: 48784.2
Captain’s log. (Note: since the character of B’Elanna Torres spends this entire episode as two people, one human, one Klingon, the Klingon iteration will be referred to as “B’Elanna” and the human one will be referred to as “Torres.”)
A Vidiian scientist named Sulan wakes up his newest patient: B’Elanna, who is now a full Klingon. Sulan has extracted her Klingon DNA, converted it to energy and then back to matter as a fully formed person. He believes Klingons might be able to resist the phage that has been ravaging the Vidiians for so long, and that B’Elanna may hold the key to the cure.
Voyager is exploring a star system, having left Paris, Torres, and Durst behind to check out a planet. But Kim has lost contact with them. They return to the planet and scan, but don’t find them. Tuvok also notes that the caverns have a different formation than they did when they left the away there, but there’s no sign of tectonic activity.
Chakotay, Tuvok, and Kim beam down and they soon realize that the many of the “caverns” are actually force fields, very much like those used by the Vidiians. However, they’ve modulated their fields since the last time Voyager encountered them in “Phage,” and phasers can no longer disrupt them. They’re then ambushed by two Vidiians, and Chakotay calls for a beam-out.
Buy the Book
Network Effect
Paris and Durst are slave labor for the Vidiians. A Talaxian tells them that the Vidiians are too physically weak to do it, so they kidnap others and work them until they drop, then harvest their organs when they die. Said Talaxian is the last person left from his ship, and he laughs derisively at Durst and Paris’s talk of trying to figure out the guards’ patterns so they can escape.
They assume that Torres was sent for organ harvesting, so they’re surprised when Torres is thrown into the cell with them—but without her ridges! Not only did Sulan extract a Klingon from her DNA, but he left her human.
The Vidiians take Durst away, ostensibly to contact Voyager. Paris tries to go in his place and gets punched for his trouble. When the conflict ensues, Torres is paralyzed by fear.
B’Elanna continually tugs at her bonds, hoping to weaken them enough to escape. She also tries to inveigle herself to Sulan, but she’s not very convincing. Sulan, in turn, tries to put her at ease by grafting Durst’s face onto his. This fails rather spectacularly, and eventually B’Elanna manages to break out of her bonds and escape.
Voyager detects minute weaknesses in the force fields. Not enough to walk through, but Kim and Tuvok think they can get a transporter beam through. Chakotay volunteers to be disguised as a Vidiian and be beamed in.
Torres collapses in the mine, and is brought back to her cell. When she’s alone, she tries to work the computer, but then is caught by the guards—who are then taken down by B’Elanna. Torres faints at the sight of her Klingon self.
B’Elanna carries Torres outside and kills a rodent and cooks it for them to eat. When Torres wakes up she says she’s not hungry, and the pair argue a lot. Torres says that she started to get into the computer system when the guards showed, and she thinks that, with time, she can lower the force field. B’Elanna takes them to Sulan’s lab—the last place they’ll look—and stands guard while Torres works the computer.
A disguised Chakotay arrives at the cell when Paris and the Talaxian are there and is able to get away with Paris, who is worried that Torres and Durst were both taken to organ harvesting and are probably dead. However, Chakotay has a tricorder and heads to Sulan’s lab. (Chakotay bluffs his way past the supervisor by saying he just got a new face.)
They arrive to find Sulan himself also arriving, holding a weapon on B’Elanna and Torres. Sulan won’t hurt B’Elanna—he still needs her to help cure the phage—but he threatens Torres. B’Elanna jumps in front of a blast meant for Torres, who has managed to lower the force field. Chakotay and Paris calls for a beam-out to Voyager, leaving a devastated Sulan behind.
B’Elanna dies in transporter room. The EMH reveals that Torres will die soon if he doesn’t reinfuse the Klingon DNA into her, which disappoints Torres, as she was finally at peace, and she won’t be again once she’s put back together, as it were. Chakotay finds himself unable to offer any words of wisdom, and just stares at her meaningfully before walking out.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Kim hits on the idea of using transponders to enhance their lifesigns through the cave system. The analogy he uses is leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, and when he overexplains it, Janeway interrupts and says, “Bread crumbs. Got it.”
Half and half. We get Torres’s backstory: raised on a colony on Kessik IV at a time when Federation-Klingon relations weren’t at their best. Her father walked out on her and her mother when she was five, and she assumed that he did so because she had forehead ridges, so she spent her childhood trying to hide them.
Forever an ensign. Kim gets to do all the technobabble this episode, from the breadcrumbs to the force fields to the transporter.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. When he surgically modifies Chakotay to look like a Vidiian, the EMH responds to compliments on his work by saying that you should see him lance a boil, which wins the non sequitur award for the week.
Everyone comes to Neelix’s. Neelix tries to make dishes from people’s homeworlds, but when he makes plomeek soup for Tuvok, he adds some spices to it, as he finds the original recipe rather bland. Tuvok patiently explains that it won’t remind anyone of home if he alters it. It’s also clear that Tuvok doesn’t think very highly of plomeek soup à la Neelix.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. At one point, B’Elanna tries to convince Sulan to let her out of her restraints by waxing rhapsodic about Klingon women’s sexual prowess. This doesn’t work, and probably at least partly leads to Durst’s death, since Sulan knows that B’Elanna finds him repulsive, but figures if he grafts a friend’s face onto his head, she’ll be more inclined toward him.
Do it.
“Listen to me. Listen to us. This is ridiculous! Do you realize that we’re each fighting with ourself?”
–Torres to B’Elanna summing up the episode’s theme.
Welcome aboard. Brian Markinson is back as Durst, and also plays Sulan. Markinson actually auditioned for the role of Sulan, and then they decided to also cast him as Durst and put him in another episode to add some pathos to the proceedings.
Rob LaBelle plays the Talaxian prisoner; he’ll return twice more, in “False Profits” as Kafar and as a different Talaxian in “Homestead.” Barton Tinapp plays the Vidiian guard.
Trivial matters: Torres mentions that she was a child at a time when relations between the Federation and Klingon Empire weren’t great. This tracks with what we saw in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” where relations were poor enough in the 2340s that a war broke out in an alternate timeline where the Enterprise-C didn’t sacrifice itself to save Klingon lives at Narendra III.
Klingons’ biological redundancies that make them resistant to disease and injury (and therefore attractive to the Vidiians) was established in TNG’s “Ethics.”
This is the only Trek credit for Jonathan Glassner, who’s probably best known as the co-developer of Stargate SG-1 and the 1990s version of The Outer Limits.
Plomeek soup was established as a Vulcan delicacy in “Amok Time” on the original series.
Durst is the first member of the Voyager crew to die since “Caretaker.” Despite that, his death is barely acknowledged.
Set a course for home. “Those Vidiian leeches can yank the beating heart out of you in a heartbeat!” This is almost an interesting redo of the original series episode “The Enemy Within,” but while the clichéd premise holds a certain promise, the execution fails on several levels.
For starters, for all that they tried not to redshirt Durst, they didn’t quite pull it off. At least having him be in “Cathexis” helps make him slightly more recognizable and it’s a bit more meaningful when he dies, but Sulan doesn’t use Durst’s face long enough for it to matter much to B’Elanna. And his actual death is barely acknowledged. When B’Elanna says to Torres that, if the latter can deactivate the force field, Voyager can beam them out, and also Paris, she doesn’t mention Durst. Now B’Elanna knows full well that Durst is dead—but Torres doesn’t, and Torres doesn’t even question why she left Durst out. At this point in the narrative, Paris is no more or less an important person to Torres than Durst is—hell, less so, given that their personal interactions to date have mostly been Torres calling Paris a pig in the holodeck-re-created Chez Sandrine. But Durst isn’t in the opening credits, so he doesn’t really matter that much.
This is an even bigger factor than it would be on another show because this is a ship that’s trapped far from home with no crew replacements. They already lost Seska, and now Durst. Nobody is coming to replace them, and that’s the sort of resource allocation issue that the show should have been dealing with much more aggressively.
Scripter Kenneth Biller fought to not have Torres restored to her halfbreed self in the episode itself. He said in an interview in Cinefantastique that he had to fight for that, because he knew she’d be all better by next episode, but there was no need for it in this one. And my first thought is, why is that a fait accompli? Why does she have to be restored? Why do they have to pull the same they’ll-die-without-being-reintegrated medical excuse that “The Enemy Within” pulled? Why not have Torres actually stay human and have to deal with the consequences of losing that part of herself?
In addition, the setup itself was so standard and predictable, and there was a real opportunity to do something fun with it. Why not have everyone be surprised that Torres’s temper comes from her human half and her intellectualism from her Klingon side? It wouldn’t have changed the overall plot dynamics, since it’s the Klingon physiology that Sulan’s interested in, and it would’ve been a nice twist on the notion.
Roxann Dawson puts in half a great performance here, as she plays Torres as much more subdued and anxiety-ridden, but still obviously the same person. Unfortunately, her B’Elanna is pretty terrible, mostly done in by overenunciating everything. It’s a common issue for actors who have to wear prosthetic teeth (see also Aron Eisenberg, Michael Dorn, Mary Chieffo), but Dawson takes it to an extreme that makes it impossible to take her character seriously.
And then we have the utter ineffectiveness of the Voyager crew. We start with Chakotay showing up to rescue Paris and leaving the Talaxian behind. Why the hell didn’t they take him with them? The guy helped the away team out, giving water to Torres and covering for her inability to work, and in gratitude they leave him behind to be slave labor and have his organs harvested. Nice. (If nothing else, he served on a ship, so maybe he could be useful, given that, again, Voyager is down two people.)
On top of that, Janeway is completely undermined by her own lack of action here. Her exact words in “Phage” were that “any aggressive actions against this ship or its crew will be met by the deadliest force.” Yet in this episode, the Vidiians take extremely aggressive action against the crew—kidnapping and enslaving three of them, maiming one, murdering another—and it is met with absolutely no force whatsoever. They just snatch the away team back and go on their merry way, leaving behind a planet full of kidnapped slaves.
Our theoretical heroes have failed on two levels here. They fail as people dedicated to upholding Federation ideals by not rescuing the Vidiians’ other victims, and they fail as a group of people defending themselves in hostile territory. To threaten deadly force if something happens and then not actually go through with the deadly force when it does happen makes you a toothless tiger, and there’s no reason for anyone to think of Voyager as anything but pushovers. The Vidiians literally get away with murder here.
Winrich Kolbe’s direction is as excellent as ever, and the episode’s look is appropriately dark and moody. But the script takes a hoary premise that nonetheless could have been used for good character development, and fails at it. “The Enemy Within” worked because Kirk came to a realization about himself, about how much he needs his baser instincts in order to function as a strong commander. But Torres doesn’t learn anything except that she’d be happier if she wasn’t half-Klingon, which is weaker sauce. The tragedy of her being at peace for the first time and having to lose it is something, at least, and Dawson plays that part well, but it feels like not enough.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges everyone to support the Bad Ass Moms Kickstarter. The next anthology from Crazy 8 Press. It’s a nifty anthology about, well, bad ass moms, and if it makes its first stretch goal, it’ll also include a story by Keith about a woman in New York City who is both a mother and a hunter of supernatural creatures. Other contributors include Mary Fan (who also edited the anthology), Star Trek fiction writers Derek Tyler Attico, Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Paul Kupperberg, and Aaron Rosenberg, as well as Danielle Ackley-McPhail, T. Erik Bakutis, Russ Colchamiro, Paige Daniels, Kathleen O. David, Heather Hutsell, Kris Katzen, Karissa Laurel, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, TJ Perkins, Jenifer Purcell Rosenberg, Joanna Schnurman, Hildy Silverman, and Denise Sutton. Click here and please consider supporting it!
Yeah, so in addition to forcibly harvesting organs from people, the Vidiians are slavers too. And people thought I was being extreme when I called this a hostis humani generis situation back in the “Phage” comments. Yes, yes, peaceful exploration is the ideal, but seriously, when your crew members are being used for someone’s Buffalo Bill cosplay, that’s about the time when you raise the black flag and start cutting throats. It’s even more astonishing given the presence of the Maquis crewmembers on Voyager; realistically, one would think they’d be far be willing to draw their phasers in defiance of this threat, being former insurgents, no matter what Starfleet regulations have to say on the issue.
And great take on the missed opportunities in splitting Torres, KRAD. In hindsight, a comparison to “The Enemy Within” seems obvious, and making the experience a learning opportunity to Torres would have been a great way to add some depth to one of the duller characters on the show.
Keeping the two Torres would have resolved the replacement issue for Drust and their relationship as not quite sisters could have been very interesting. But status quo is God.
krad – great point about the callousness with which Durst’s death is handled. I remembered him from the previous episode and kind of liked him. I was genuinely taken aback when his face appeared on the Vidian. I think I was more affected by his death than any of the crew. :) So of course, as I’m finding with this series so far, as soon as I start to be intrigued by one of the characters, they yank that character.
Also agree about Torres. I mean, the B’Elanna half has been dormant since the first couple of episodes anyway. I think the last we saw of her was throwing something against the wall in sickbay. Since she got appointed chief-engineer, she’s been pure vanilla. So as you said, why not leave Torres as human and explore her adjusting to that….? (Full disclosure: I’m quite certain my opinion is influenced as a homosapien heterosexual who finds Dawson to be a strikingly lovely woman and I prefer her without the ridges….)
All that said, even with the plot deficiencies as detailed – I’d give it a 5. Despite my disappointment with how Janeway and her crew dealt with these organ-harvesting slavers and those they oppress, I was entertained, and that counts for something. And I thought Dawson did a good job with her dual roles (albeit I agree she had some difficulty with the mouth prosthetic).
This whole thing brings to mind two of my biggest issues with Voyager. Spock was such an iconic character because of his constant struggle in living between two worlds. This was continued with Data and Odo in the next two series, but Voyager always felt like they were trying to just make it a ship full of Spocks. Between Torres, Seven, The Doctor, Maquis/Starfleet tension, Paris’s “redemption”, and anytime Tuvok was contrasted against the humans, it was like they were constantly grasping for that magic from TOS.
The series’ approach to women was indicative of a certain mindset.
“Let’s have a female captain.”
“Make her hot!”
“…Ok. How about this other female character who is an alien, and practically a child.”
“Make her hot, too!”
“… …Ok. So lets make the engineer a Klingon. We’ve never done a female Klingon in the main cast. That would be fun to explore.”
“Better make her hot.”
“How about these forehead ridges?”
“Ew. No. Hotter. Get rid of the ridges.”
“But she’s a Klingon. They have forehead ridges.”
“Better make her a half-Klingon, then. Don’t obscure the pretty face. keep her hot.”
“…I suppose that could lead to some interesting character moments. We have this wild idea. Since we’re in the Delta Quadrant, wouldn’t it be wild if we had a Borg join the crew. She could be separated from the collec-“
“She? Sounds good. Just make sure she’s hot.”
“But we can’t really make a Borg look hot.”
“Better make her a half-Borg then.”
“But there’s no such thing as a-“
“Catsuit!”
@3/fullyfunctional: I thought Torres actually looked better with the ridges. I think the higher hairline made the shape of her face more attractive.
My main thought about this one is that it’s implausible that the Klingon B’Elanna was so stereotypically Klingon-y in behavior. Why? The genes may have been Klingon, but the brain would’ve been the same one shaped by B’Elanna Torres’s life experience and memories, so she shouldn’t have had a different personality or worldview. At most, she might have more intense emotions, more aggression.
FYI: This episode and “Cathaxis” are both listed as Episode 12, Production Number 113.
My biggest issue with this episode, and others dealing with B’elanna’s duality is that its the same old song and dance as with almost any half and half character. Troi is the only character I can think of who is dual species who seems at peace with it. Even Worf and Odo had the same type of episodes, and they were only dealing with nature v. nurture, so to speak.
@6/Cloric: “Troi is the only character I can think of who is dual species who seems at peace with it.”
There’s Naomi Wildman later on in VGR. And Neelix will turn out to be 1/8 Mylean.
Aliens in Trek and other franchises sometimes end up uncomfortably like thinly-disguised racial stereotypes. Adventure fiction used to have very racist “exotic” characterization, and when they aren’t careful SF writers can use aliens as substitutes for that.
All this is to say that this episode makes Torres a “tragic mulatto.” All the mixed-“race” characters in Trek are in danger of falling into that cliche.
I actually liked this one because of the not-so-novel concept of Torres being split into her human and Klingon halves and enjoying her performances of both. But yes, in retrospect, there is a lot wrong with this episode as well as missed opportunities, from Durst not being appropriately mourned to the Vidiians not being punished nor the slaves freed, to not keeping the Klingon and human B’Elanna’s alive and/or separate. Although I do think it was a better decision to keep B’Elanna half and half rather than fully human because she is more interesting as a half-breed and she still gets to have that evolving growth with learning to accept that Klingon side of her. Get rid of that and she might not give it a second thought and become like a lot of the other bland human characters. And I like that at the end of the episode scene because it’s not all shiny and happy where B’Elanna has made peace with herself, but instead she he’s still got some more maturing ahead of her to do.
I never realized Brian Markinson played Sulan as well! So there was another duality to this episode in that regard too. The scene where Sulan wears Durst’s face was very disturbing, Silence of the Lambs shit! I guess that wasn’t gory enough to be prohibited from family-hour network TV.
“Our theoretical heroes have failed on two levels here. They fail as people dedicated to upholding Federation ideals by not rescuing the Vidiians’ other victims, and they fail as a group of people defending themselves in hostile territory. “
Really more than two.
If we want to do things the nice, Federation way: Not to be too cold, but they don’t have much use for a dead B’Elenna, whereas even her corpse might be quite valuable to the Vidiians. So haggle her body in exchange for the prisoners. If it ends up curing the phage, that’s good for everybody, and either way you’ve rescued the prisoners.
If we’re trying to be brute force survivalists, then geez, breach those forcefields, beam every Vidiian into space, raid the base for whatever resources it has, rescue the prisoners, and move on. Because, all things considered, it’s the worst possible result that now the Vidiians know that the cure to their phage might just be aboard Voyager and the prisoners were left to die. If a target is going to be painted on Voyager’s back anyway, then there’s no real harm in taking aggressive action. The Vidiians now consider Voyager a target no matter what, so there’s no point in playing nice.
@7 ChristopherLBennett. I can’t believe I forgot about Naomi Wildman. Although maybe we should hope the franchise has, lest they trot her out for “Picard.”
@11
I certainly hope Picard doesn’t trot out Naomi Wildman. I’d rather not see her as a depressed gambling addict playing phaser Russian roulette in a back alley with a group of homeless Klingons, or whatever on-brand misery that show would have for us.
@10: Well said. And the more I think about it, the more Voyager’s refusal to free the Vidiians’ slaves comes across not just as an abject moral failing, but a missed strategic opportunity as well. Freeing those slaves might have bought Voyager some precious goodwill from their respective species, enough to get some support for their journey and maybe start spreading a positive reputation around the quadrant in the process. Narratively speaking, it would also offer some good opportunities to meet new species, and show the impact the actions of the Voyager crew are having long-term.
@12: God, it’s a sign of how nauseatingly mean-spirited and poorly written Star Trek has become that such a scenario actually comes across as plausible, doesn’t it?
Count me among those who are glad to see both of B’Elanna Torres’ halves reunited at the end. As a Klingon she’s a bit of a caricature. As a human, she’s a bit of a wimp. The uneasy mating of the two makes her a far more interesting character. And the best part of this episode is the way she at least comes to respect her Klingon half.
I can’t say I much like the way the episode just handwaves reuniting her two halves the way it does. Everyone makes a point of saying just how Sulan has achieved the impossible, the inconceivable in separating out her two heritages. That’s allowable since Vidiian medical technology is already established as being beyond what Federation doctors can do. But then the Doctor just sticks the Klingon genes back into her and presto! She’s back to normal.
And this is the second time in a row that the Doctor has basically pulled a rabbit out of a hat to restore a character to the status quo. At least in Cathexis, he made reference to how difficult the procedure was. I can buy an AI doctor knowing all kinds of obscure procedures that other doctors have done before. I’m not sure I buy that same AI basically performing some pretty radical medical research in the last few minutes.
And Voyager did have access to that kind of expertise in the form of Sulan. All of the elements for a deal resolving the loose strings were in place: Janeway could have held Sulan and his research hostage and forced the release of the slaves and the restoration of B’Elanna. She could even have given him access to the Klingon genome in exchange (and presumably Voyager had more Klingon medical data to offer as well) if she wanted to leave on good terms, though I could also see her makingthat proposition and then withholding it upon discovering Durst’s fate.
Sophomore appearance for the Vidiians. They seem a lot more “evil” now than they were in their debut, going from only taking organs from living people in an emergency to having slave/organ harvesting camps full of captives. Solon just about manages to have three dimensions but things are considerably less nuanced now.
The main focus is the character study of Torres, showing her dual nature by giving her a literally dual nature. The human half of her has the technical skills while the Klingon half contains all her spirit. Perhaps they both learn a bit from each other by the end. I think they just about manage to make Torres’ “Klingon-ness” plausible by making it a gradual process: She starts out horrified at what’s been done to her, but soon becomes proud to be Klingon. Nature winning out over nurture, perhaps: Her Klingon instincts altering her hybrid brain.
This was the episode that had me first looking at Paris and Torres and going “Hmm.” Admittedly, most of it’s with the human Torres, but out of nowhere they’re suddenly on first name terms, and Paris shows a gentleness with her that’s previously been reserved for Harry or Kes. We also get to see a bit of him in command, which just leaves me perplexed at whatever behind the scenes decision led to him being demoted to lieutenant junior grade: He’s obviously meant to be fourth-in-command of the ship (made most clear in “Initiations” and “Unimatrix Zero”) yet he’s standing there claiming to be the senior officer while Durst’s standing next to him wearing full lieutenant pips.
I agree entirely with Keith about the ending, which leaves me both uncomfortable and frustrated. Maybe there’s a limit to what Voyager can achieve on their own, maybe the Vidiians have got them outgunned (although the on screen portrayal makes that hard to believe), but grabbing the people on the main titles and getting out of there, without a thought for the slaves they’re leaving to their fate including their Talaxian friend, feels distinctly unheroic. And then we have to get a pat reason to undo the episode’s events and have Torres be a human/Klingon hybrid again next episode.
For anyone that didn’t recognise him in “Heroes and Demons”, Ayala gets a definite namecheck here while working Ops. Janeway addresses Chakotay as “Mr Chakotay” at one point, something she hardly ever does. (It’s usually “Commander”.)
I raised this question on another forum, but since it’s opinion-based, they blocked it. So I’m interested the opinion’s of people here, regarding this episode:
Does it pass the Bechdel test?
The only female-female conversations are between the two Torres’s. They’re not about any man, and the character is obviously named, so it’s an unusual situation: the point of contention is whether we have two characters.
If we treat this as we would B’Elanna’s internal dialogue with different aspects of her character personalized, the answer is no. If we treat this as a complete duplication, then yes. This has features of both, so it’s arguable.
I’m leaning on the ‘no’ side, but I can’t say how the arguments for that are stronger.
@16: While I generally find the Bechdel Test to be as useful as trying to hammer nails down with a saw, I’d say it passes, and here’s my (admittedly very obscure and strange) reasoning. I actually work in closed-captioning, and in situations like this where you have multiple characters that are effectively the same person (clones, temporally displaced individuals, alternate universe versions, etc), you’d still treat them as two separate speakers for the purpose of clarity; in this instance, Human!Torres and Klingon!Torres would be IDed as distinct individuals.
All I could think about at the end was, what about all those people who were being used as slave labor? Voyager’s just going to leave them to be worked to death then have their organs harvested? It kind of ruins the episode for me.
And no mention of poor Pete Durst, who’s killed and harvested so Sulan would be more appealing to B’Elanna. Seeing Durst’s face on Sulan is horrifying every time I watch this episode. (Kudos to Brian Markinson, who really sells Sulan being totally oblivious to what B’Elanna’s likely reaction would be).
Once the forcefield was down, Voyager could see all the non-Viidian lifesigns, and Torres could mention quickly we can’t leave all these people here. For God’s sake, beam all those people up and take them back to their homeworlds! But no mention of them at all, and that poor Talaxian was abandoned like he wasn’t even there.
Finally, I think Roxann Dawson does her best, even if her B’Elanna is a somehow a stereotypical Klingon (which confused me even as a teenager watching this).
Meh. This episode could have been way more interesting…
@11,12: The more we dive into Picard, the less inclined I am to revisit the characters we know and love. I think the only bright spot is Hugh, and I don’t want to push my luck. But I’ll save these thoughts for a Picard thread.
I did find it interesting that the human Torres was rather ineffectual. It could be seen as a commentary on the changes in humanity from Kirk’s time to Janeway’s time, that humans are rather more docile than they used to be. There’s a lot less “Terra uber alles” and a lot more “Why can’t we be friends?” Even the Maquis on board, rebels and freedom fighters, seem … tame … by comparison. This whole crew seems to be much less dangerous than earlier crews.
As I recall, Janeway comments on that general idea in a later season when she sees Tuvok’s first tour of duty in Starfleet.
@20/James Mendur: I didn’t see the human B’Elanna being ineffectual as a commentary on Voyager-era humans being docile but rather to emphasize the confident, strong Klingon side of B’Elanna with the timid and weak human side of her. Both halves needed each other. I believe that’s all there was to it. But TNG-era Trek was notably more talky and diplomatic in contrast to TOS, when in particular, you compared the command styles of Kirk vs. Picard.
Wow, I never realised that Dawson played full-Klingon B’Elanna too! I thought it was a different actress. Also, human Torres looks so much like a friend of mine did when she was younger, I was reminded of her in every scene. Half-human Torres doesn’t remind me of her at all. Interesting how much a bit of prosthetic makeup changes a face.
I liked this episode when it was new, mostly because Torres was my favourite character, and this was a cool SFnal way to display her ongoing inner conflict. But it didn’t really hold my interest this time.
“Why not have Torres actually stay human and have to deal with the consequences of losing that part of herself?”
I remember that me and my friends feared that this would be the outcome when we first watched the episode. We were so relieved when the Doctor told her that she needed her Klingon DNA.
“They fail as people dedicated to upholding Federation ideals by not rescuing the Vidiians’ other victims […].”
Good point. They could even have rescued them without changing the status quo, by releasing them at the next spaceport.
@4/Perene: “Make her hot!”
To be fair, you could say the same thing about Chakotay, Paris, or Kim. Even Tuvok – why isn’t he older and more wrinkly? Because the resident Vulcan has to have good looks! But gender-swapping Kes and Neelix could have been interesting.
@15/cap-mjb: “Paris shows a gentleness with her that’s previously been reserved for Harry or Kes.”
Oh yes. I actually liked Paris in this episode. Very much. That was a pleasant surprise.
@20/James Mendur: “I did find it interesting that the human Torres was rather ineffectual.”
She wasn’t. She brought down the force field.
@21/GarretH: I’d say that it isn’t so much the command style that has changed as the galaxy. Kirk could be quite talky and diplomatic too, but he frequently got into situations where diplomacy didn’t work.
Has anybody read the story “Ni Var” by Claire Gabriel, published in Bantam’s first Star Trek story collection The New Voyages? It’s about Spock being split into his human and Vulcan halves. I wonder if the writers of “Faces” knew the story, or if both stories used Spock’s statement that “being split in two halves is no theory with me” from “The Enemy Within” as their starting point. Either way, it’s nice to see the same motive reappear after all this time.
“Plomeek soup was established as a Vulcan delicacy”
I thought it was more the Vulcan version of chicken soup. And while chicken soup can be really really good, it’s hardly a delicacy.
wiredog: I disagree strongly with your assessment of chicken soup. And it’s my rewatch. So there, nyah nyah.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who makes amazing chicken soup
Perene: that everyone-must-be-attractive mindset is pervasive throughout all of Hollywood for all genders, it’s not even a tiny bit remotely limited to this one TV show from 25 years ago.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
And it’s not as if Kirk, Picard, Riker, Sisco and Bashire weren’t easy on the eyes.
@15/cap-mjb: “They seem a lot more “evil” now than they were in their debut, going from only taking organs from living people in an emergency to having slave/organ harvesting camps full of captives.”
That could be a consequence of Voyager‘s movement through the quadrant. Maybe they’ve moved into the territory of a more belligerent faction/subculture of the Vidiians.
I think this episode fails in two major ways: the Redshirt phenomenon as Krad first pointed out, and consistency.
I fully commiserate with Moore in his frustration over the lack of any consequences over lost shuttlecraft, torpedoes, and crew. Durst getting offed like a redshirt was an opportunity lost to do things differently than the other series.
And seriously, when you promise dire consequences one episode and don’t follow through a month later, that’s bad continuity.
I like it mainly for the opportunity to see Dawson playing against herself. I don’t mind her Klingon side so much, even if it’s mostly stereotypical characterization. Her scenes make this episode watchable enough. And it’s well directed, as usual per Kolbe’s standards.
But otherwise, Faces is forgettable and barely holds together (ironically, this originally aired pretty close to DS9’s Facets, a much better episode with a similar title).
This is Kenneth Biller’s writing debut on Trek. And I can’t help but notice his output is not only inconsistent, but his episodes are usually ones I’d qualify as below average (barring an exception here or there). Too archetypal, with not nearly enough effort put into those scripts to become truly memorable episodes.
The only reason I can ascertain he became head writer during that final season is because no one else was available for the job. Braga was developing Enterprise and Menosky was on his way out. Fuller would have been the closest option, but he was nowhere near experienced enough for it at that point. That final season isn’t terrible, but it suffers from the same issues as TNG season 7. Warmed over ideas that never cohere into great shows.
Cloric: Thank you for catching that mistake. It’s fixed. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, slave to the edit function
B’Elanna’s enunciation unfortunately foreshadows Discovery’s Klingons (The Battle of Binary Stars is a daily on Star Trek online and T’Kuvma’s Klingon accent sounds ridiculous).
Yet more bemoaning that Voyager wasn’t from a more recent era of television but even a few episodes of B’Elanna and Torres would have elevated the trope nicely. It occurs to me that one way of explaining why Torres was so timid was she’s not used to the human fight or flight or freeze response. Though I wish we had a scene of B’Elanna causing trouble because she’s used to a watered-down version of the Klingon response.
Wow, I remembered this episode, but not Sulan grafting Durst’s face onto his… krad, I like your idea about having the “racial traits” switched around. That would have been neat.
@15 – cap-mjb: Paris is a senior officer because he’s the chief helmsman, same as Ensign Kim is one because he’s the Operations Manager. Position trumps rank.
@32/MaGnUs: Yes, true enough, Voyager does have some very low-ranking senior staff. I’m just confused why someone suddenly decided Paris needed to be a junior lieutenant and not a full one despite how far up he is in the ship’s command structure.
Be grateful that he even has a rank.
@22/JanaJansen Yes, I remember “Ni Var” very well; in fact this episode reminded me of “Ni Var” more than it did The Enemy Within. I thought “Ni Var” was a good story for the most part, but the “reassembly” of Spock was anticlimactic, much as the “reintegration” of the Klingon DNA back into Torres was anticlimactic. The Doctor just said “we have to do it”, it happened, and back to normal in the next episode.
The difference with The Enemy Within was that there was a real risk to Kirk’s reassembly, both in doing it (he animal died when it was reassembled) and in waiting to play it safe (Sulu and the others would die on the planet surface).
@RM #8:
I don’t see Torres depicted as a “tragic mulatto” in this episode. I think the writers did a good job of showing her and the audience that she is a unique person because of her mixture of different species. The separation of the two sides of her genetic makeup makes her understand by the end of the episode that neither character is the real Torres; she is a blend of the qualities of both characters and this is what makes her who she is. She accepts that she needs both aspects to make her whole.
If anything, it is a positive, not tragic portrayal of race. She doesn’t feel ashamed of her Klingon or Human heritage by the end and values both aspects of her background.
I have to disagree on Dawson’s portrayal of her Klingon self being terrible. Certainly her human portrayal was the better of the two, but I thought she was just fine as a full Klingon.
Durst’s death was definitely ludicrously neglected by the episode, especially considering how grusome it played out. Even though Durst was almost certain to die, it struck a nerve in me that Sulan would have the audacity to steal his face and think it would please B’elanna.
22: You’re not the only one who failed to realise that was Dawson pulling double-duty. Her own mother had no idea the Klingon Torres was her own daughter until after she saw the episode and told Dawson she needed to take some acting lessons from her.
I just rewatched this episode and I have to say this is the poorest ending to any Trek show I can remember.
1. In the penultimate scene, as Chakotay, Paris and Torres prepare to leave the concentration camp, not one other inmate (even the Talaxian they befriended) makes any kind of “take me with you” plea. They all just stand mute as they are left to die, though it would take practically no effort to take them too.
2. Once again, we’re told the Doctor can fix everything back to how it was in the last minutes of the show without the slightest difficulty. In the prior episode he’d transformed Chakotay from an energy-being to human again like a magician.
3. Voyager flies off without even lip-service to explain their abandonment of the prisoners or the ‘retribution’ they’d earlier promised against acts of aggression. Why not (at the very least) have Kim declare the whole Viidean fleet was en route?
Sloppy writing/production.
I agree with most of this review. One that sticks out for me though with a lot of the reviews of this era of trek is the criticism of the treatment of red shirts. Back then it was very much the norm and part of the show. I agree that doesn’t make it right but to me that’s more a criticism of the show and it what it was at the time rather a fault of individual episodes (and indeed when an episode is praised for trying to avoid red shirt syndrome that highlights it even more that by trying to avoid the red shirt cliche, the episode was raising it above the in house show style of the time)
Belated reply to Justin’s #40: I don’t care if it was the norm. I don’t ever care if it was ever the norm. It’s despicable, it’s awful, and I will always call it out.
And on this show in particular, there should have been no redshirts because no one is expendable. They can’t replace Durst at their next port of call. On this show, every single death should have had meaning because they had a finite number of crew.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
For the record, The Doctor doesn’t say lancing a boil; he says “If you think this is remarkable, you should see me remove a bunion.”
Which is funnier. And actually, I get it. He has distaste for this messy awful operation; he’d much rather do a persnickety procedure that yields a perfect clean result, and actually helps someone walk. Plus, it’s a very Borscht-y midcentury doctor thing to say, which suits him, including his reading of it as if he were almost mocking the sentiment. :) As usual, Robert Picardo the galactic treasure.
This episode reminded me of what I’ve seen of classic Dr Who, and not in a good way. Oh well.
I agree with the commenter who suggested having both B’Elanna and Torres from this point forward would have been good. Expensive, I assume, but good. I also would have loved the additional Talaxian! He was kind of the better qualities of Neelix and didn’t seem as annoying. They could have been the cutest buddies.
(They also did this in Buffy, with the advantage of having identical twin actors. It was not my favorite, but better than this.)