Cheap Star Trek - Voyager, Episode 14: Faces (Video) (Roxann Dawson, Tim Russ, Gabrielle Beaumont, Kenneth Biller, Cliff Bole, John Bruno, LeVar Burton, James L. Conway, Allan Eastman, Jonathan Frakes) Price

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Customer Reviews of Star Trek - Voyager, Episode 14: Faces

Not only do we have two Torreses for the price of one, it seems that Sulan is attracked to the Klingon version. So much so that he finds a rather gruesome way of having Durst help the Vidiian scientist more attractive. Since several seasons later Torres will marry Tom Paris and have a baby in the final episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" this thing between Sulan and the ship's Chief Engineer is not going to work out. Aside from watching actress Roxann Biggs-Dawson play her split personalities (one with considerably more makeup and the other with virtually none) the resolution is rather easy to anticipate and the lesson in "Faces" has not changed since Captain Kirk went through the same thing (It does make you wonder what what would have happened if they had tried this with Mr. Spock). The result is rather entertaining and allows the Torres character to get some needed depth, but is not a great episode. However, Torres will address being half-Klingon and have-human again, most notably during her pregnancy ("Lineage").

some missed opportunities
B'Elanna Torres, Voyager's Klingon-hybrid Chief Engineer, has resented and resisted her warrior heritage all her life. In this, the best Klingon episode of the series, she has an opportunity to reconcile with her two "faces". Torres and some of her crewmates are captured by the villainous Vidian, an alien species which has suffered for generations from a loathsome flesh-eating plague called the Phage. In their efforts to combat the disease, the Vidian have developed medical technology far in advance of the Federation's. But whatever morality they might have once possessed has been long abandoned, as they raid the Delta Quadrant "harvesting" other inhabitants' tissues and organs as replacements for their own. To the Vidian's delight, the Klingon physiology, with its exceptional hardiness and unique redundancies, promises new breakthroughs in finding a cure. So they separate Torres' Klingon half from her less valuable Human half. For a while there coexist two distinctly different B'Elannas, who must join forces to rescue their crewmates and escape their captors. The Klingon doppelganger is brawny and brave, but brash. The Human entity is brainy, but wimpy and annoyingly whiny. Unlike the Vidians, B'Elanna's comrades, (including her boytoy-to-be, Tom Paris) prefer the timid Torres over her volitile counterpart. Personally, I believe the writers missed their golden opportunity to dump the hybrid character altogether and keep the more impressive full-Klingon version. What they did not miss was the opportunity for some leering innuendo about Klingon females' indiscriminate sexual mores, which have provided a sophomoric source of titillation for the Franchise. And of course, the fate of the formidable warrioress was totally predictable -- Klingon women have replaced the unfortunate "red-shirts" in token Trek expendability. Ultimately, Klingon B'Elanna had little impact on the character, the series, or the Star Trek mythos. But for her sole episode, she was pretty terrific, and so popular with the fandom, that she even got her own collectable action-figure.

B'Elanna Torres explored
Certainly, this episode is one of the most important to the character development of B'Elanna Torres. In this episode, B'Elanna discovers how important her Klingon half is...and comes to peace with the part of herself that she's always struggled with most.

I also feel that this episode is the real beginning of the friendship between the characters of B'Elanna Torres and Tom Paris...very important to the future storyline of the show.

Personally, I feel that it is a "must see" from Voyager season one.