Star Trek has always been fascinated with the idea of characters pulled between two worlds. Spock’s exploration of his human heritage, Worf’s status on TNG as an early example of post-peace Klingon integration with the Federation, even Sisko’s position as a Starfleet officer thrust into the simultaneous roles of guiding diplomat, military leader, and spiritual emissary—time and time again the series has been drawn to this character archetype across ideas of race and status.
Early Star Trek Voyager was no exception with its interest in B’Elanna Torres, one of the show’s early breakout characters. The Maquis rebel turned chief engineer who embodied this trope not just through her own journey as an ex-guerrilla, but also as a half-Klingon woman—and the show’s first real attempt to explore that latter, 30 years ago today in “Faces,” had to tread fertile, yet highly contentious ground.
“Faces” was the 14th episode of Voyager‘s debut season, and saw the return of the Vidiians, a race of aliens forced to harvest organs and body parts from other species to try and avoid being ravaged by a horrifying plague. Having captured a handful of Voyager crew while they were on an away mission, B’Elanna included, a Vidiian scientist eager to explore the potential impact of regenerative elements in Klingon DNA in battling that plague uses his people’s advanced medical technology to reach an unorthodox conclusion: split B’Elanna into two people. Completely separated down to the genetic level into separate human and Klingon individuals (both played by Torres actress Roxann Dawson, with the help of photo double Joy Kilpatrick), both B’Elannas ultimately have to overcome their differences to find a way to escape the Vidiians alongside their fellow captured crewmates.
The idea makes literal Star Trek‘s aforementioned fascination with characters who struggle to reconcile being from two very different backgrounds, but by making B’Elanna’s first real exploration of her biracial identity on the show so literal, “Faces” has to skirt some pretty wild lines that it can never really quite interrogate. Much of the conflict between the human B’Elanna and the Klingon B’Elanna is derived from what is ultimately presented by the episode as genetically derived traits. Human B’Elanna is physically and emotionally weaker, repeatedly incapacitated by fear as she struggles to adapt to being held prisoner by the Vidiians. Klingon B’Elanna, meanwhile, plays up the established Klingon caricature of violence and anger issues, an underlying arrogance that sees her seek conflict before anything else.
It’s made especially fraught given the post-TNG re-imagining of the Klingons away from their original (and similarly racially fraught!) depictions and toward a race of almost exclusively dark-skinned humanoids, alongside other Afro-inspired traits like textured hair. The image of a slight light-skinned human B’Elanna (for what it’s worth, Dawson is of Puerto Rican descent) cowering in the presence of her aggressively framed, dark-skinned Klingon self is brought up time and time again in “Faces,” as the two argue with each other over being “cursed” with the negative traits of the other, human B’Elanna lamenting her Klingon temper as being the reason she ultimately left Starfleet Academy. Even though by the end of “Faces” the two come to an understanding, and the Klingon B’Elanna is allowed to sacrifice herself to protect the human B’Elanna she had admonished as her lesser, it’s still presented in more of a way of the noble savage trope than it is a particularly enlightened re-imagining of their bond.
But while “Faces” ultimately concludes that the two B’Elannas work better together, it doesn’t exactly interrogate the racialized element at play between them in presenting her internal conflict over her biracial identity as an external one. Even the climax of the episode, when B’Elanna has reached that aforementioned understanding with her Klingon self, handles it in a compromised manner—her re-embrace of her Klingon side is done as much out of any kind of acceptance as it is the fact that she’s told that she has to re-integrate with her Klingon DNA, without which she won’t survive. The episode’s final moments are intriguingly framed: the still-human-appearing B’Elanna tells Chakotay as she sits in Voyager‘s sickbay waiting to undergo surgery that while she now appreciates and admires aspects of her Klingon self, she is also reckoning with the fact that she will fight that version of herself for the rest of her life, before stroking her smooth forehead in solitude for one last time before the physical reminder of her internal struggle returns.
For much of the rest of Voyager, the series’ exploration of B’Elanna’s racial identity will be explored through her damaged relationship with her Klingon mother, rather than her own internal attitudes to being part-Klingon. That is, with one significant, equally wild exception: the season seven episode “Lineage,” which sees a newly pregnant B’Elanna attempt to genetically alter her child in-utero to ensure they are born fully human.
It’s fascinating that much of the show’s exploration of her identity is bookended with these episodes that are broadly in conversation with each other, and not necessarily in the best of ways. “Lineage,” while providing a level of understanding for B’Elanna’s choices, is at least much more definitive in its view that her apprehensive view of being part-Klingon is misguided, and her actions in the episode are equivocally in the wrong. Perhaps then, “Faces” walked so it could run—and provide a chance to do a bit more right by a character Voyager had been deeply interested in from its earliest beginnings.
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