I remember a long time ago at a Star Trek convention, someone asked one of the actors if The Next Generation reused any of the scripts, or at least story ideas, from the original series. The response was that it did to varying degrees. The same proved true of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, also to varying degrees. One of Voyager’s more blatant attempts was Faces, in which Lt. Torres, the half-Klingon half-human officer, is split into two people, one fully Klingon and the other fully human.

Torres is on an away mission with Lt. Paris and Lt. Durst. All three are captured by the Vidiians, an enemy that’s afflicted with a degenerative disease that compels them to harvest body parts from others. A Vidiian scientist splits Torres because he feels that the Klingon DNA will prove resistant to the disease they have. (If you’re wondering who Durst is, he’s the throwaway character that gets killed halfway through the episode to show just how far the Vidiians will go to harvest parts.)

Those that saw The Enemy Within from the original series will probably see where the episode is going. The Klingon Torres is more aggressive and willing to fight whereas the human version is timid and scared. Both have the same memories and are essentially the same person, just with different DNA and personality traits. Neither part can survive without the other.

One interesting aspect is that you get to see Roxanne Dawson without her semi-Klingon makeup. The bad news is that you get to see Dawson portray two stereotypes. As I said, the human half is intelligent, but very scared. The Klingon half is good for little more than brute force. It would be nice to see the human Torres be a little more aggressive and the Klingon Torres a little more intelligent.

As with The Enemy Within, it’s an attempt to pit ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, this time in the form of Klingon versus human. The Doctor is able to put Torres back together again, but she has to confront what her Klingon side means to her. All her life, she had to be the only person with Klingon blood in a human colony. Here, she gets to see what it is to be fully human and to be fully Klingon.

It’s too bad that the episode is never referenced again, especially considering that there would be so many opportunities over the course of the subsequent six seasons. There were even cases where Torres was still at odds with her heritage, despite seeming to be almost at peace with it here. As I may have said before, this was one of my biggest complaints about the series. I tend to like continuity. That’s why I can only give the episode three stars.



Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older