This September and October, we’re taking a look at the jam-packed 1994 to 1995 season of Star Trek, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Check back daily for the latest review.
One of the more interesting aspects of the first season of Star Trek: Voyager is just how much of a throwback the show seems to be. In many ways, the show seems anchored in a very fifties mindset. While Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has embraced multiculturalism and the wake of the Cold War, the first season of Star Trek: Voyager seems to be dealing with anxieties carried over from the end of the Second World War.
Caretaker reconnected with the “Wild West in outer space” mentality of the classic Star Trek. Episodes like Time and Again and Jetrel are concerned with the splitting of the atom. Cathexis played out a decidedly Cold War paranoia thriller. Good old-fashioned technological espionage – like the leaking of nuclear secrets – was at the heart of State of Flux. There’s a sense that Voyager may have been a piece of fifties Americana that had the misfortune to arrive forty years too late.
Faces is perhaps the most obvious example of this. Splitting a bi-racial character into two halves as part of a science experiment, evoking classic monster movies, and even the decision to define the Vidiians as stand-ins for the Nazis, all give the episode a delightfully pulpy feel. This is Voyager doing a cheesy fifties b-movie. And doing it quite well at that.
He has you now, his pretty!
Okay, let’s be honest about this. Faces is a bit of a mess. The basic premise is… somewhat questionable as a starting point. Racial and cultural identity doesn’t quite work the way that it’s depicted on screen. It’s a little unsettling that Faces suggests you can neatly separate a character’s personality by tugging their genetic origins apart. It’s a perfectly logical extrapolation of the type of essentialism that Star Trek takes for granted, but it also feels a little simplistic.
After all, one would imagine that both Klingon!B’Elanna and human!B’Elanna were the product of decades of shared experiences, and so there would be a lot more common ground between them. Reducing a character with conflicts over her mixed race heritage into a generic “two halves of the same person at war” feels very generic. Then again, if the conflicts aren’t obvious and clear, then Faces wouldn’t really work as a story.
Double trouble…
There’s also the fact that Faces does not do any of this subtly. Both Torres’ human and Klingon sides are portrayed as cliché, their attitudes and responses ridiculously exaggerated. When the Vidiians arrive to take Durst and attack Paris, human!B’Elanna doesn’t respond like a character with years of military experience. She cowers. But she doesn’t just cower. She whimpers and curls herself up into a ball on her bunk, just in case the audience doesn’t get that she is just a puny human now.
“I think that when they extracted my Klingon DNA, they turned me into some kind of a coward,” she later confesses to Paris. It seems a bit redundant to point out that DNA doesn’t work like that – particularly in an episode where a person with a mixed race heritage can be convenient split into two halves – but it’s a particularly absurd plot point, and one that feels particularly ham-fisted.
Paris gets the point…
This is a little bit disappointing, particularly given – as Robin A. Roberts notes in Science, Race, and Gender in Star Trek: Voyager – Torres’ conflicts over her racial identity are among the more interesting aspects of her character:
With her dark hair swept severely back and her large bushy eyebrows, B’Elanna’s racial mix is physically emphasised. Playing the character with bravado and high energy, Biggs-Dawson emphasises the torrid and energetic aspects of the character. Frequent angry outbursts toward the captain and her own lover, crew member Tom Paris, exemplify B’Elanna’s impetuous nature. These aspects type her as both Klingon and Latina.
Yet there is more to this character than stereotype. Rather than reproducing a simplistic identity politics, the show reflects a new sensibility in American society, shown in part by increased interest and awareness of multiracialism (represented by the call for a multiracial box on the next census, for example).
Indeed, there’s something quite clever about the way that Torres’ character plays with the far-too-common “hot-headed Latin character” stereotype that is frequently found in pop culture.
Durst, we hardly knew ye…
Torres’ surname and the ethnicity of actress Roxanne Dawson type her as Latina. The character is quick to anger and prone to impulsiveness; Parallax had her striking a fellow officer during a routine disagreement. However, while these attributes would typically be used to define her as Latina, the show roots them in the character’s Klingon heritage; her Latina side is actually more restrained and buttoned down, a clever twist that allows the show to play with stereotypes and subvert them somewhat.
So Faces does feel a bit clumsy and on the nose. It’s navigating rather complex waters in a manner that feels somewhat haphazard. The issue of racial identity is always going to be complex, so choosing to tackle it as part of a classic Star Trek plot device (Faces is very much a spiritual successor of The Enemy Within; even if it is a bit less simplistic) feels like it’s not doing the concept justice. Indeed, it feels rather ham-fisted for a show airing in the mid-nineties, when writers really should be more sensitive to such things. It marks Faces as a bit of a throwback.
Soup kitchen…
However, if one is willing to accept Faces as a glorious cheesy forty-five-minute science-fiction b-movie, the episode works very well. It’s goofy and crazy and illogical and nonsensical – but that’s all part of the charm. It is, in many ways an update of The Enemy Within, substituting that episode’s problematic gender issues for some less obvious racial issues. (Sulan even describes the split in terms that evoke the transporter.) This is grotesque sci-fi horror, played as heightened opera.
This is Voyager going gloriously over the top without worrying about coming down to Earth. It is a monster movie, with Sulan playing the role of the monster. It revels in all the tacky old clichés associated with the genre. There’s unrequited sexual attraction with an uncomfortable subtext. There’s a grotesque monster in love with a beautiful woman, who happens to spend most of the episode chained up. There are amoral scientific experiments. There’s an attempt by the monster to win the heart of the object of his affection that is spectacularly misjudged.
“I’m going to take his face… off…”
These are all classic monster movie tropes, and they all come with a lot of baggage. Faces doesn’t try to redeem or reconstruct these old-fashioned narrative elements, as Emanations did when the crew stumbled across “an Ancient Indian Burial Ground… in space!” Instead, it plays all of these tropes straight. It doesn’t seem like Faces is playing with or teasing out any of the problems associated with these monster movies, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. Faces wholeheartedly embraces the monster movie aesthetic.
And it works. Director Winrich Kolbe has great fun with this. The teaser – a short thirty second scene of Klingon!B’Elanna waking up while chained and bathed in green light, observed by a sinister figure in the background – manages to suggest everything that needs to be said about Faces in the shortest introduction of the broadcast first season. Similarly, the reveal of what Sulan has done with Durst’s face is handled masterfully, particularly with Sulan moving through the background of the shot out of focus before we get to see the face.
A ridge too far?
Even the more ridiculous elements – like human!B’Elanna’s overreaction to the Vidiian assault on Durst and Paris – feel like an attempt to heighten the episode’s melodrama. Kolbe even shoots the episode like a late-night horror film; the shots of the away team searching the two-storey cave set are quite moody, as is the quick cut to the Vidiians crouched in the shadows watching our heroes and waiting to strike. Virtually everything about Faces is gloriously overblown, feeling like a hybrid of gothic horror and fifties sci-fi. That’s the charm of the episode.
The Vidiians remain the most interesting aliens to appear in Voyager. Their make-up is fantastic, their back story is almost sympathetic and they lend themselves to the pulpy vibe towards which Voyager seems to aspire. They are much more a much more convincing adversary than the Kazon, and it’s a shame that the show felt the need to push the Kazon ahead of the Vidiians. (Then again, there are arguably only so many “organ-harvesting space zombie” stories you can tell.)
As an aside, it’s a nice touch – if entirely coincidental that “nameless Talaxian prisoner” would be revealed to have almost a perfect double towards the end of the seventh season.
That said, it is a little weird that Faces is built around a Klingon immunity to the Phage, the disease ravaging the Vidiian people. “For generations my people have been searching the quadrant for a species immune to our disease in the hope that it would lead us to a cure,” Sulan explains. “I believe your genetic structure has phage-resistant nucleotide sequences, yes. But I needed a pure specimen to be certain. My people do not know it yet, but you are their greatest hope.”
The fact that Sulan feels the need to separate human!B’Elanna from Klingon!B’Elanna suggests that human!B’Elanna does not have the immunity that he is looking for. (Indeed, if human!B’Elanna were also immune, you’d imagine that Durst and Paris would also be receiving scrutiny.) This would seem to imply that humanity is not immune to the Phage, which raises all sorts of questions.
Facing up to it…
Is it possible for the Phage to leap to other species? (The fact that organs harvested from other species can be infected suggests that it can.) Does exposure to the Vidiians carry long-term risks for the crew of Voyager? It might have been interesting to use the Vidiians as window to explore the health scares that were so frequent in the nineties – from paranoia over the spread of the hantavirus through to the hysteria around Mad Cow disease.
The show never quite addresses these questions. Instead, the crew of Voyager often feel like spectators observing Vidiian culture (such as it exists) through the window of a passing space ship. The Vidiians are an absolutely fascinating creation – quite possibly among the most compelling aliens ever to appear on Star Trek – and it feels like Voyager never quite manages to capitalise on these organ thieves.
The ugly truth…
That said, they work very well in the context of Faces. The decision to reimagine the Vidiians as Nazis works very well in the context of the episode’s retro vibe. Far from independent organ thieves, it turns out that Vidiian society does exist in some form; that they are more than just wandering and disorganised scavengers. Whereas the Vidiians in Phage appeared to be individuals operating for their own well-being, the mining operation here appears to be a government-run installation.
Sulan introduces himself as “Chief Surgeon of the Vidiian Sodality”, and we have little reason to doubt his credibility. The grey uniforms worn by the guards suggest this is an official operation, rather than a private enterprise. In particular, the set up is designed to evoke Nazi Concentration Camps. Explaining why Paris and Durst have been left alive, a Talaxian inmate notes, “They need somebody to dig their tunnels. That’s us.”
She’s alive!
The grey uniforms of the guards seem designed to evoke Nazi outfits. The idea of using these prisoners for medical experimentation also evokes horror stories about the Concentration Camps. (Particularly the idea that slaves would be worked until they could no longer stand and would only then be executed.) One of the guards’ sarcastic promise of “a shower and a hot meal” of human!B’Elanna evokes the infamous showers used for mass executions in German Concentration camps.
In a way, once you get past the HIV/AIDs subtext associated with the Vidiians, they work quite well as an analogy for Nazi Germany. According to Motura in Phage, the Vidiians had a rich cultural history in the Delta Quadrant. “Before the phage began, we were known as educators and explorers, a people whose greatest achievements were artistic,” he boasts, explaining that he was formerly a sculptor. This mirror’s Germany’s historical status as a cultural hub in Europe.
What’s cooking?
However, circumstances inevitably changed. Ravaged by disease, the Vidiians found themselves desperate and powerless, at the mercy of external forces. In their desperation, they made horrible choices in the name of survival. It doesn’t seem too far from the history of Germany leading up to the Second World War – a once thriving culture pushed to the bring of poverty and starvation due to reparations, turning to the Nazi party out of anger and desperation; forsaking a legacy of art and culture for hatred and brutality.
Even Sulan himself seems designed to mirror Josef Mengele, the infamous “angel of death” who conducted unethical experiments at Auschwitz. Sulan’s official position, his status as a doctor in name only and even the way that his questionable work revolves around doubles (as opposed to Mengele’s fixation on twins) all suggest the infamous Nazi war criminal. It’s a very effective approach to the story, defining the Vidiians quickly and effectively through televisual shorthand.
The Doctor’s laser tattoo removal technique needs some work…
This shift in focus works in the context of Faces. It feels like an allegorical attempt to address issues about guilt and desperation of the German people leading up to the Second World War, observing how external forces can help transform even sophisticated cultures into grotesque societies. Of course, this all seems a little weird in the context of Voyager, a show airing almost fifty years after the end of the Second World War, but it does play into the sense that Voyager has been built as something of a throwback to an earlier style of science-fiction.
Faces is a somewhat troubled episode, one that feels very out of place on television in the mid-nineties. It has some rather troublesome observations to make about racial identity and cultural heritage. At the same time, it also captures the spirit of classic cult science-fiction very well, feeling like a trashy b-movie shot with modern techniques and top-notch production values. The result is mess, but it’s an intriguing mess – a collection of classic tropes and storytelling techniques that hark back nostalgically to another era.
She won’t take this lying down… or maybe she will…
More and more this first season, it doesn’t so much feel like Voyager has been thrown across the galaxy so much as it has been thrown back in time.
You might be interested in our other reviews from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager:
- Caretaker
- Parallax
- Time and Again
- Phage
- The Cloud
- Eye of the Needle
- Ex Post Facto
- Emanations
- Prime Factors
- State of Flux
- Heroes and Demons
- Cathexis
- Faces
Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: AIDS, b'elanna torres, concentration camp, face/off, faces, HIV, i'm going to take his face off, illness, mining, Nazi Germany, review, sickness, star trek: voyager, sulan, torres, transporter accident, vidiians, voyager |
the m0vie blog 
I never quite grasped why every Klingon on VOY had to SPIT!…OUT!….THEIR LINES!…THROUGH CLENCHED TEETH!! Didn’t this run pretty much parallel to DS9’s timeline? That show still featured soft-spoken Klingon aristocrats, politicians, and litigators. Heck, we even get to catch up with the three K’s, Kang, Koloth and Kor, and they’re just as gentlemanly and shrewd as they were in Kirk’s day.
What a strange relationship VOY has with the rest of the franchise. It’s like the writers know less about the series mythology than even a casual viewer would. Case in point, Q was made up to look like a post-atomic horror Judge with pallid skin in “Farpoint.” On this show, James Conway (an otherwise capable director) is under the assumption that every Q wears concealer and purple lipstick and black robes. My goodness, that is terrible. I mean, just look at the merchandising to figure out where you went wrong with that one. Surely Paramount spend ample time examining the action figures!
Anyway, these are the snafus you just come to expect from VOY. It’s so commonplace that i just tune it out. However, it does slightly undermine Klingon!Torres’ presentation as a wily and capable (not to mention sexually desirable) aspect of B’Ellanna that can be tapped into when needed.
With B’Elanna’s deliver in Faces, I assume that’s down to Dawson wrapping her tongue around the teeth. It would have been her first time wearing prosthetic teeth, and they can be a pain to get right. I suspect that’s part of the reason the show would recycle actors so frequently as Klingons and Ferengi – articulating through those teeth is a very specific skill, and not everybody has it, and the show doesn’t have the time for you to get good at it.
(I think this is obvious in one of the third season episodes of The Next Generation with the Ferengi – I think it’s The Price. It’s quite clear that the lead Ferengi actor can’t quite speak through his prosthetic, and so the whole show suffers. In contrast, performers like Ethan Phillips, Jeffrey Combs and Armin Shimerman are very good at it, so they get asked back time and again.)
As for the other Klingons… I have no idea. Maybe Faces was the episode given to later guest stars as an example of how Klingons are supposed to act.
I have looked a few times to find any article that articulates the horrific racism within the concept of the B’Ellana character, never to find. But you just pointed out something I hadn’t noticed about how they portrayed other Klingons in contrast to Next Gen and DS9.
I’m about to go find out what station voyager was on, I didn’t know it was con-current with DS9!!!
Neat review.
Voyager’s ‘quaintness’ makes me think very much of the revived ‘Outer Limits’ that ran during the same time, which was an even more deliberate throwback (sc-fi anthologies have very much fallen out of fashion these days.) It also made me think we are just around the corner from the television Fantasy boom of the late 90s where the likes of Buffy, Xena and Charmed captured a lot of attention away from TV sci-fi.
So I wonder if Voyager’s seeming tameness were actually early signs of fatigue in the broader popularity of TV space opera?
That’s a pretty good point. I think the scheduling certainly suggests that. As you note, television was on the cusp of a revolution in the mid-to-late nineties, and Voyager was still producing television according to the late eighties model. And would continue to do so, throughout its run. (The Next Generation benefited hugely for being perfectly in tune with the late eighties mood of television, and I think that Deep Space Nine kept pace reasonably well.)
I think this becomes a huge problem for the first season of Enterprise, which is more serialised than anything Voyager ever did, but is still well behind a television landscape that is producing stuff like Buffy, Angel, The Sopranos, 24. The tragedy is that I think Enterprise did make a good (if clumsy) effort to catch up in its final two years, but it was too little too late. (And, arguably, the idea that Star Trek could be a monolithic pop cultural artifact was arguably outdated by that stage – Battlestar Galactica was a successful space opera, but also a show that understood the realities of the market place a lot better, with a smaller budget and audience, and more emphasis on prestige than mass appeal.)
When I read your review of Phage Darren, it made me think of the works of David Cronenberg, and Faces further reinforces to me that the Voyager writers must have had some Cronenbergian themes in mind when doing the Vidiian episodes, with a bit of Frankenstein, Beauty and the Beast and Phantom of the Opera thrown in for good measure here (Faces also made me think of Cronenberg’s masterpiece Dead Ringers about twin brothers).
I also thought Josh Gad (Quark’s cousin Gaila) was another actor who had trouble getting his mouth around Ferengi teeth.
And it’s nice to know there are some Voyager episodes you like Darren.
Ha!
I like plenty of Voyager episodes! I really hope I don’t come across as a curmudgeon in these reviews! Good spot on the Dead Ringers comparison, actually.
At least you’re reviewing them Darren. Keith DeCandido refuses to do the same at Tor.com because he’s not much of a Voyager fan. And it’s Josh Pais as Gaila. Josh Gad was Olaf in Frozen.
Ha! I like Voyager more than it seems, I promise. I just like it less than the other Star Trek shows. (Yes, even Enterprise!)
Didn’t DeCandido opt to do TOS again instead of doing Voyager for the first time?
No, I think this was the first time he reviewed TOS; the others were written by other bloggers, but he did review The Trouble With Tribbles (as well as Flashback) because he wanted to examine the shows put out during Star Trek’s 30th anniversary.
I think you might be right. I think it was David Mack and Dayton Ward who did the first round of reviews.
I am a DIE HARD Next Gen fan, absolutely LOVE Deep Space and Voyager….however….
I love Voyager despite knowing how horrendously racist the conception of the B’ellana character is. This article and complete silence on this (what to me is a “so in your face”) fact just boggles my mind. The one time I did have a chat about the subject, the responses I got just confirmed how very racist it is and how no one has seemed to notice.
In this article, it uses the term bi-racial all the time to refer to B’ellana. So we are equating race with species quite openly- good! we are starting off admitting it.
We are talking very clearly about assigning behavior characteristics based entirely on race- yup, sounds racist to me.
At the end of the Faces episode B’ellana, her exaggeratedly soft and meek side is reunited with the hot-tempered but tenacious side reunite- The “want to be human” true self admires her Klingon side but says she will be fighting an inner battle within herself forever.
Is this the message being sent to bi-racial children and people? Well quite clearly, yes.
And is this a horrendously heinously, as the writer said subversive, racist message? Hell, yes.
Shame on everyone who has never noticed this before. How could you not??? That’s all B’ellana was about- blaming her angry, hostile, violent behavior on the colored side of her blood. They solidified the whole concept in the 7th episode of the first season. It wasn’t “generic” it was straight racist. That’s why it fits so well with the 1950’s feel.
Is you want a comparison- go right to Next Gen. Worf, his mate, their son brought the concept of “cultural” internal struggle not freaking DNA!!!
👏👏👏
The stereotypes with the two Torres are so racist and tired!: a fragile, scared, mentally superior white woman; and an angry, passionate, over-sexualized woman of color. The noble and the savage trope.
And the savage dies in the end to save the woman. See “kill the Indian, save the man”, a colonizer theory that Indigenous culture can be extracted to reveal a pure culture, the white culture. When you mix the two, there is chaos. This could almost be seen as white supremacist propaganda. Especially in the context of the current Fox News anti-immigrant rhetoric of White America’s purity.
And that scene where Paris tries to console Torres by comparing his embarrassment about his bad haircuts, to her experiences with shame of her Klingon side, Indigenous side, while learning to maneuver in white (dominant) culture as a child. So ridiculous! It’s like the writers are letting us know “yes, we’re White! and therefore have no comprehension of culture and ethnicity. We never had to learn!”
Love your analysis on the “throwback” post-WWII social consciousness that underlies Voyager. Maybe it’s a backlash somewhat to TNG’s more progressive views on gender? I mean the fact they didn’t get rid of the Kirk/Riker/Paris womanizing hyper-masculine guy is revealing enough! Riker was supposed to be the phase out of that.
Thanks for info on the census id changes of the time and possible backlash. Thanks for your blog, I just started watching Voyager and it’s fun to read your analysis.
Thanks Molly! Funny you should comment on this piece. The next review I’m working on is Lineage and… oh, boy.
Sulan’s genotron apparature seems to circumvent the typical genetic alteration problems that many of such ST episodes suffer from. But why in the world are the Vidians unable to cure this Phage with such sophisticated technology? What is this Phage? A subspace virus?
And how could the human B’Elanna say it were okay to be brought back to the barracks so she could establish contact with the ship – in front of Vidian guards? And I never understood why everyone can so easily work computers and their operating systems in foreign languages and symbols..
Nice that Durban reappears, if only to suffer a terrible end. Together with the Talaxian (not tens of thousands of lightyears away as in Season 7…) and the Vidians it gave this episode some sort of continuity feeling.
Despite finding the show pretty okay, I must agree partly with my forecommentators.. It is not a tendency only in Voyager, but also in other parts of Star Trek, where character traits seem closely linked with cultural aspects which in turn seem to be racially normalized/linked. Vulcans must act logical – everything else is an almost genetical aberration. We see the same tendency in some way in Star Trek Discovery with Burnham – but maybe I overlook sth here.
Still, I want to try to defend this “racism” on the grounds of the story sin dispute. There are clearly “hormonal” thus genetic differences between a Klingon and a human female. And maybe this strict seperation of character traits is due to this artifical physical seperation. B’Elanna’s linking of her inner struggles with her Klingon half are quite racist, but from her point of view it is an understandable, though short-circuited behavior. Of course, from a progressive/24th century point of view this might be a rather antiquainted position, but we still have to remember that Torres is not a Starfleet character and she grew up on a remote colony in a tense political situation with the empire. The story’s racism is rooted in her troubled childhood and her inability to deal with her surroundings as a child. And frankly, I do think the message in the end is not that the white-hispanic Torres is in any way better than the savage one – it is more that the mix itself is a troubled, but by far the best version of her, even when this is a clear parallel to orientalist/eurcoentric or even ideological, romantic themes of combining rationality with emotion, heart with sould and so forth. To ignore how closely identity and behavior is linked to your body and your genes (at least statistically and especially with two most likely very different genomes at work here), is to ignore reality beyond dumb racism. I guess some things can be overanalyzed while underanalyzed at the same time… All in all I found the ending rather endearing if (when this is possible, which I would argue) to ignore its baggage and take “klingon part” as a stand-in for our uncontrollable and undesired tendencies.
To be fair, Discovery actually makes a long-overdue attempt to explore this. In The Vulcan Hello, Burnham makes a long overdue distinction between race and culture in her conversations with the Admiral, and the idea of a human being raised as a Vulcan at least explores this idea in an interesting way. (It’s alluded to with Spock, particularly in The Voyage Home and Star Trek 2009, but never clearly articulated.) It doesn’t quite get there – there’s some suggestion that Burnham’s issues are in part down to being a human raised as a Vulcan, which implies some biological essentialism – but it’s an interesting enough idea that I forgive it. (Indeed, episodes like Lethe suggest that it might be Vulcan culture itself that is fundamentally flawed.)
It might of course be true, that Vulcan brain physiology allows for greater self-control or whatever… On the other hand the apparent lack thereof in ancient Vulcan culture and the obious physical similarities seem to contradict that possibility.
My understanding was the phage was a genome specific disease to that race, so it couldn’t be passed to none viidians – but Klingon DNA actually killed the disease???