30 Years on, Voyager’s B’Elanna Break up Episode Stays Fascinatingly Fraught

Star Trek has all the time been fascinated with the thought of characters pulled between two worlds. Spock’s exploration of his human heritage, Worf’s standing on TNG as an early instance of post-peace Klingon integration with the Federation, even Sisko’s place as a Starfleet officer thrust into the simultaneous roles of guiding diplomat, navy chief, and spiritual emissary—time and time once more the sequence has been drawn to this character archetype throughout concepts of race and standing.

Early Star Trek Voyager was no exception with its curiosity in B’Elanna Torres, one of many present’s early breakout characters. The Maquis insurgent turned chief engineer who embodied this trope not simply by way of her personal journey as an ex-guerrilla, but additionally as a half-Klingon girl—and the present’s first actual try and discover that latter, 30 years in the past right this moment in “Faces,” needed to tread fertile, but extremely contentious floor.

“Faces” was the 14th episode of Voyager‘s debut season, and noticed the return of the Vidiians, a race of aliens compelled to reap organs and physique components from different species to try to keep away from being ravaged by a horrifying plague. Having captured a handful of Voyager crew whereas they had been on an away mission, B’Elanna included, a Vidiian scientist wanting to discover the potential affect of regenerative components in Klingon DNA in battling that plague makes use of his folks’s superior medical expertise to achieve an unorthodox conclusion: cut up B’Elanna into two folks. Utterly separated all the way down to the genetic stage into separate human and Klingon people (each performed by Torres actress Roxann Dawson, with the assistance of photograph double Pleasure Kilpatrick), each B’Elannas in the end have to beat their variations to discover a option to escape the Vidiians alongside their fellow captured crewmates.

The concept makes literal Star Trek‘s aforementioned fascination with characters who battle to reconcile being from two very completely different backgrounds, however by making B’Elanna’s first actual exploration of her biracial id on the present so literal, “Faces” has to skirt some fairly wild strains that it could by no means actually fairly interrogate. A lot of the battle between the human B’Elanna and the Klingon B’Elanna is derived from what’s in the end introduced by the episode as genetically derived traits. Human B’Elanna is bodily and emotionally weaker, repeatedly incapacitated by worry as she struggles to adapt to being held prisoner by the Vidiians. Klingon B’Elanna, in the meantime, performs up the established Klingon caricature of violence and anger points, an underlying vanity that sees her search battle earlier than the rest.

It’s made particularly fraught given the post-TNG re-imagining of the Klingons away from their authentic (and similarly racially fraught!) depictions and towards a race of just about completely dark-skinned humanoids, alongside different Afro-inspired traits like textured hair. The picture of a slight light-skinned human B’Elanna (for what it’s value, Dawson is of Puerto Rican descent) cowering within the presence of her aggressively framed, dark-skinned Klingon self is introduced up time and time once more in “Faces,” as the 2 argue with one another over being “cursed” with the destructive traits of the opposite, human B’Elanna lamenting her Klingon mood as being the rationale she in the end left Starfleet Academy. Though by the top of “Faces” the 2 come to an understanding, and the Klingon B’Elanna is allowed to sacrifice herself to guard the human B’Elanna she had admonished as her lesser, it’s nonetheless introduced in additional of a method of the noble savage trope than it’s a significantly enlightened re-imagining of their bond.

However whereas “Faces” in the end concludes that the 2 B’Elannas work higher collectively, it doesn’t precisely interrogate the racialized factor at play between them in presenting her inner battle over her biracial id as an exterior one. Even the climax of the episode, when B’Elanna has reached that aforementioned understanding together with her Klingon self, handles it in a compromised method—her re-embrace of her Klingon facet is finished as a lot out of any type of acceptance as it’s the truth that she’s instructed that she has to re-integrate together with her Klingon DNA, with out which she received’t survive. The episode’s last moments are intriguingly framed: the still-human-appearing B’Elanna tells Chakotay as she sits in Voyager‘s sickbay ready to bear surgical procedure that whereas she now appreciates and admires facets of her Klingon self, she can be reckoning with the truth that she is going to battle that model of herself for the remainder of her life, earlier than stroking her easy brow in solitude for one final time earlier than the bodily reminder of her inner battle returns.

For a lot of the remainder of Voyager, the sequence’ exploration of B’Elanna’s racial id will likely be explored by way of her broken relationship together with her Klingon mom, fairly than her personal inner attitudes to being part-Klingon. That’s, with one important, equally wild exception: the season seven episode “Lineage,” which sees a newly pregnant B’Elanna try and genetically alter her baby in-utero to make sure they’re born totally human.

It’s fascinating that a lot of the present’s exploration of her id is bookended with these episodes which are broadly in dialog with one another, and never essentially in the perfect of the way. “Lineage,” whereas offering a stage of understanding for B’Elanna’s decisions, is not less than rather more definitive in its view that her apprehensive view of being part-Klingon is misguided, and her actions within the episode are equivocally within the fallacious. Maybe then, “Faces” walked so it may run—and provide an opportunity to do a bit extra proper by a personality Voyager had been deeply interested by from its earliest beginnings.

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