1x14 Faces

[5.5/10] B’Elanna should be one of Voyager’s most interesting characters. The half-human half-alien combination goes all the way back to Spock. The first officer of Kirk’s Enterprise is the peak of the approach, having to constantly reconcile the human and Vulcan parts of himself, to great dramatic effect. Trying the same thing with someone half-Klingon, who bailed on Starfleet and joined the Maquis no less, could be an exercise in resolving two different cultures, two different callings, two different parts of oneself. There’s no reason why Lt. Torres couldn't soar just as high.

But spoiler alert, she isn’t really, and the reason is dumb episodes like “Faces”. I was pretty cold on the Vidians, the organ-harvesting ghouls we met back in “Phage”, when Janeway first encountered them. Nonetheless, their body-hacking and genetic chicanery makes sense as a means to use biology to explore the different sides of B’Elanna and her heritage. That's where the cleverness stops though.

Someway, somehow, the Vidians have not only managed to isolate B’Elanna’s Klingon side from her human side, but they’ve also managed to split her into two separate beings. I’m not a stickler for technological/physical plausibility on Star Trek. Science-as-magic has long been the rule of the day. But there’s not even a brief mention of how this duplication and isolation was accomplished. We’re just supposed to take it for granted that there’s two Lt. Torreses now, and that's that.

Worse yet, both halves are turned into total caricatures. Klingon Torres now speaks with a halting cadence and is as devoted to honor as anyone who grew up within the empire. Human Torres is a weepy, simpering coward who seems like she’ll leap out of her skin from a glimpse of an angry-looking butterfly. You can maybe handwave away why the genetic translates to the psychological so readily, but it’s cheap and strains credulity to have them take on the most extreme characteristics at the drop of a hat.

If you want to explore the duality of someone who has a foot in two worlds, you have to make the two sides of them seem real and lived in. The fully Klingon and fully human avatars of B’Elanna are so cartoony that the broader point of the episode -- the need for both sides to make Torres who she is -- falls flat amid the exaggeratedness of the whole deal that makes you wonder if she needs either.

“Faces” is also hamstrung by the fact that we’re barely a dozen episodes into Voyager, and we’ve been told about B’Elanna’s struggles between the two sides of her psyche than we’ve actually seen it. It’s gotta start somewhere, I suppose, but dividing the Chief Engineer into her two constituent parts would have more impact if that aspect of the character had been better defined to this point.

It also doesn’t help that Roxann Dawson isn’t up to what is, to her credit, a challenging task for any performer. Her Klingon self is cheesy. Her human self is as timid as a kitten. And even after she’s had her epiphany about needing both aspects of her personality, she comes off as overwrought and unconvincing. In general, I remember Dawson’s performances fondly on the show, so I assume it’s simply not being able to overcome a tall task and a bad script. But performance is the one element that could conceivably save this dirt clump of a plotline, and if anything, it ends up making things worse.

The rest of the episode is no great shakes either. The rescue mission crafted by the rest of the crew is standard stuff. The presence of a mysterious force field that even Harry Kim can’t technobabble his way through is a big yawner. Chakotay having to appear like a Vidian and infiltrate their society could be interesting, but it’s tossed off so casually and without incident that it barely has an impact. Easy plastic surgery has been a thing on Star Trek since “The Trouble with Tribbles”, so it’d be churlish to complain about it now, but it does lower the stakes when someone like Chakotay can just flip into an alien form and flip back without issue.

The same goes for the business with Paris being kidnapped and having to work in the Vidians’ mines. Him running into a Talaxian other than Neelix, who himself has somewhat of an impish personality, helps make the world feel a little more connected since we’re encountering other Gamma Quadrant species on a repeat basis. But he’s mainly an exposition machine and Voyager makes no effort to free the other prisoners, which is a little unpleasant as a dangling thread.

So what’s good in this episode? Well, the effects of having Dawson play opposite herself in the same scene are done nigh-seamlessly. Again, Trek has been pulling this trick since Kirk found himself split into constituent parts after a transporter accident, but it’s still nice to see it done well. Likewise, I appreciate that the same actor plays poor Lt. Hurst and the mad Vidian scientist who operates on and eventually takes a shine to B’Elanna.

I admire the choice to introduce Hurst in the last episode, so we recognize and care about him at least a little here when the Vidians turn him into fodder for their ghoulish grafts. (Frankly, I thought he might have had something to do with the mystery in “Cathexis” since he was a non-main character who had a speaking role.) That makes it feel plausible and that much more disturbing when the mad doctor puts on Hurst’s face to try to please Torres. Frankly, more of the episode should have involved the Misery-esque situation of B’Elanna surreptitiously fighting back against her admiring captor, since it was more compelling and creepy than anything else in the episode.

But no, we have to come to the cliche, unearned conclusion after a stock argument -- Torres needs both parts of her former self to feel whole. That's made all the easier when her Klingon self conveniently dies, but not before imparting some words of wisdom, in yet another plot development that smacks of an unearned narrative shortcut.

The frustrating thing about this one is that there’s an idea worth exploring here. The script would need to be better. The sci-fi element would need to be better thought-out. And the whole episode would need improved execution. But it’s worth establishing and elevating the character of B’Elanna in a manner beyond her opening character sheet. “Faces” is, unfortunately, an ill-fated attempt at it, which leaves the character of Torres almost as mishandled and mangled as her captors.