Faces
A dame of two halves.
Face/Off
(Yes OF COURSE I used that as a subheading I have no shame shut up.)
Not hard to see how this episode got its name, is it? Not when one character has their face split into two, another has their face surgically altered, and a third has their face forcibly removed so it can stapled over the face of a fourth.
But an episode simply concerned with faces merely as faces would quite literally be only skin-deep. “Faces” encourages us to delve a little further. Good job that’s precisely what IDFC is all about, then!
Clearly, the primary focus for this episode’s consideration of faces is the two B’Elannas. I actually want to come back to her later, though. Let’s start with the Vidiians.
There’s no originality in pointing out that on a societal level, faces are a fundamental part of human identity. This is true to the point where damage to the fact can result in a wide array of psychological issues. I don’t intend to linger on any of these, not because I don’t consider them important, but because a) I’m not qualified to discuss them, and b) trying to map the problems of the fictional Vidiians onto those of real people with facial damage seems rather tasteless.
Besides, there’s only so far considerations an individual’s struggle cosmetic damage can take us here. The psychological effects of being unable to recognise oneself in the mirror must take on different dimensions when everybody you know has the exact same problem. What are the implications of an entire civilisation finding themselves repeatedly forced to change their faces?
For most people (though most certainly not all), the face is the fastest, easiest to recognise someone else. It’s also a major part of how most of us process other people’s emotions. The link between the two is so strong that when we invented real-time methods of conversation devoid of visual or aural emotional clues, we started attaching ludicrously simplistic approximations of the human face to them, so as to inform the reader of the sender’s state of mind. This is one of the little details about modern life that I’m utterly amazed by; specifically, how it’s something no-one else seems utterly amazed by. Just roll the concept around your cannister for a second. There are enough people in the world so completely bound up in the use of faces for communication that a colon followed by a closed bracket is intuitively recognisable as indicating happiness. Somehow : ) is a smiley face, even though : ) is a cat walking on your keyboard.
For the Vidiians, though, every conversation is now absent any facial cues. The phage has all but removed the ability to move their features at all, denying them the ability to send the myriad of facial clues so many of us take for granted. An entire civilisation has suddenly found itself unable to communicate fully with each other – no wonder they seem to have broken up into small bands with no obvious connections to each other. At this point, they can’t even recognise each other, as Chakotay proves this when he bluffs one of the Vidiian guards. Voices must now be as unreliable as faces, too, there’s no suggestion the larynx is somehow immune to the phage. The Vidiians have been cursed to live their lives unable to even identify their friends or loved ones without accompanying paperwork.
In theory, none of this would be an issue in the long-term. Plenty of people in our world are able to function without being able to identify people from their faces. But the Vidiians aren’t ready to come to terms with what has happened to them. Chakotay proves this as well – it takes all of five seconds pondering to realise that a secure facility in which the guards can’t be recognised on sight would need some kind of ID system. Hell, we use ID systems for our own secure facilities, the comparative difficulty involved in altering our own faces notwithstanding. The Vidiian refusal to install something similar is part self-disgust – who would choose to look like phage victims like us? – and part refusal to accept the reality of their situation.
That’s hardly surprising when that reality requires you to vivisect passing travellers to keep yourself alive. But this approach is doomed to failure. They can’t keep evading the truth indefinitely. The same condition that has robbed them of their own faces forces them to seek out those who, generally speaking, still possess their own (essentially) fixed visual identities. The same captives who serve as unwilling organ donors also serve as a constant reminder to the Vidiians of what they’ve lost. Of what they once looked like, and through that, what they once were. Or saw themselves as, at any rate.
It’s this combination of impossible denial and inescapable self-loathing that explains why it makes sense to spend so much time doing Chakotay up as a Vidiian, rather than dressing him as a prisoner. It’s not like he’d have security codes or similar either way. But the perversity of the Vidiian condition is that posing of one of the captors makes him invisible. Pose as a prisoner, and every Vidiian that sees him will start eyeing him up for upgrades [1]. This is also what leads to arguably the most disturbing scene in Trek history – Sulan trying to woo B’Elanna by stapling the skinned face of her dead crewmate over his own features. While obviously horrifying enough on its own terms, there’s also the implications of Sulan’s face-lifting to consider. It’s not just the unpleasantness of someone – and a doctor no less – having somebody killed for the sake of a make-over. It’s not even the realisation that at some point Sulan sat down and decided which of B’Elanna’s co-workers would need to be partially peeled (note that the guards don’t cart Paris off when he puts himself between them and Durst; they have their orders on whose mug needs to be stretched out and covered with Pritt Stick). Instead, it’s the tension between what we recognise in Sulan – his vanity, his awareness of the role physical appearance generally plays in seduction – and what repels us – seeing faces as functionally indistinguishable from a tuxedo or a sharp shirt, and thereby considering people as equivalent to shop-window dummies – that gives the horror its bite.
(It doesn’t hurt that the make-up job here is so disturbing. Full credit to Michael Westmore and his team on this one. Making someone’s actual face look like it’s being worn over the face of somebody else? Inverting the actual layers of what’s really going on? I’m not an expert, so I don’t know how complicated that is to pull off, but it certainly sounds immensely tricky, and the results are as impressive as they are unsettling.)
Ultimately, the Vidiians are a race of people who understand the utility of our bodies, but not their meaning; who genuinely can no longer differentiate the context of a smiling face from that of a smiley-face. An entire civilisation of Frankensteins, each of whom is also their own monster. A race that crave and hate life, who dehumanise us in order to obsess over us. What’s not to find fascinating there?
With the Vidiians and the Kazon now at two appearances each, it’s clear which species is the more interesting and effective antagonists. Perhaps somewhere, in one of the alternative universes Trek loves so much, Voyager has a much more interesting first season in which “Faces” airs before the halfway point, and “State Of Flux” involved Seska not selling replicators to the Kazon, but instead offering a Klingon-based cure for the phage to the Vidiians.
And speaking of things Klingon-based: let’s move on to B’Elanna herself.
Two-Face
(YES I KNOW THIS ONE IS WORSE.)
So then. A human B’Elanna and a Klingon B’Elanna: not together at last.
There’s a lot of interesting ideas and implications to this idea of splitting B’Elanna down the metaphysical middle. Before we can touch on any of that, though, we need to address the Algorian mammoth in the room. “Faces” gets itself far too deep into the weeds of biological determinism, arguing as it does that there’s no difference between the attitudes and drives of a Klingon born on Q’onoS, and one created in a lab five minutes earlier from the genes of someone with mixed Klingon and human heritage, and who grew up on a Federation colony. It’s pretty uncomfortable watching “Faces” argue that the Klingon obsession with honour – and in particular the need for a “fitting” death – is something coded into their DNA, as oppose to the cultural trait it so clearly is.
This is a terrible approach, with parallels to all sorts of horrible ideas in our own world. It lets people pretend alterable cultural factors are instead immutable biological traits, thereby (rather conveniently) saving them the effort of making obviously necessary changes to society. This is how you get academics arguing with a straight face that women are just less interested in science, or employers saying white people are simply smarter and harder working, which is the only reason they own the tapeworm-riddled lion’s share of wealth, property and power. In fact, given the human B’Elanna explicitly tells her Klingon opposite that she is the reason B’Elanna couldn’t make it into Starfleet as she’d wanted, the episode gets uncomfortably close to siding explicitly with people who think certain ethnicities are less suited to higher education than others.
If I believed this was truly where the episode’s heart was, it’d be enough to warrant throwing the whole thing into the bin, body-horror delights and all. Really, though, I think “Faces” just makes the same mistake “The Storyteller” did – to come up with a fairly strong idea for a plot, and not think much about the implications generated by the way that plot gets set up [2]. It’s clearly problematic to imply Klingon culture is genetically coded, but the obvious intent here was to literalise the struggle of being a mixed-race person raised in the culture of an absent parent. This is about how what B'Elanna learned from her mother clashes with what she learned from Federation society. The Klingon and human halves of B’Elanna need to evince the cultures those races hail from in order for the metaphor to actually work [3].
So does it work? There’s certainly not all that much time offered for it to try. The decision to hold back B’Elanna’s human half until the end of act one results in an effective reveal, but that’s only of interest on a first watch. With repeat viewings, it’s noticeable that you have until act two to start exploring the split’s implications, and act five before allowing B’Elanna’s two halves to hold a conversation. All of which rather cuts into the opportunities available to pay off the episode’s strong set-up.
Perhaps the separation is part of the point, though. Or at least, the circumstances of that separation is part of the point. There’s a clear asymmetry in B’Elanna’s biracial experience. She grew up as the child of a Klingon single mother on a Federation border colony, during a period when relationships with Q’onoS were somewhat strained. From the human B’Elanna’s comments, this resulted in a kind of pariah status. One quietly expressed, no doubt – the Federation has long since left behind such primitive ideas as overt racism – but it was clearly still there.
And that same isolation is repeated here. Human B’Elanna gets to keep her Starfleet uniform and hang out with Durst and Paris. She’s the one that gets to expound upon the difficulties she faced as a child of two cultures living wholly within one of them. Klingon B’Elanna never gets the chance to talk about how growing up Federation affected her. Instead, she’s tied to a table in a dark room, separated from everyone and everything she might find familiar. There’s no Klingon equivalent to Paris for her to explain the difficulties inherent in being half-human.
This is both subtle and smart. It’s certainly subtler and smarter than the actual conversation the B’Elanna’s have, which plays out along precisely the most obvious vectors possible. Their conflab is well-edited, in fairness, but that just makes it easier to believe that there really are two B’Elanna’s really bitching pointlessly about the character traits the other supposedly inherited from their corresponding parent. This isn’t helped by the fact Dawson is clearly struggling to make a fully-Klingon B’Elanna work (though as she noted at the time, she was still early into the process of figuring out the “standard” model of B’Elanna; having her create two more this early was a hell of an ask). Add it all up and the total proves rather underwhelming.
“Faces” has still one more card to play, though: its ending. This doesn’t start off promisingly either, with the rather cynical gunning down of the Klingon B’Elanna. It was one thing to keep her isolated throughout most of the episode, but killing her off is quite another. This interacts rather unpleasantly with the coding here. The metaphor being deployed is thar of a mixed-race person with one white parent. This is perhaps not literally true in-universe – the surname “Torres” implies B’Elanna’s father was Latinx (though various sources quote Dawson herself as having one black and one white parent). The specific heritage of B’Elanna herself (which of course doesn’t exist in the real world) matters rather less than how her two halves are presented here, though. I’ve already mentioned how B’Elanna’s human side is constantly given the space to discuss her biracial experience, whilst the Klingon side is essentially completely ignored. Combine this with this being an episode of television coming from a predominantly white culture and written by two white people, and it seems inescapable that B’Elanna’s human and Klingon halves are being labelled here as “default” and “other”, respectively. I’m not claiming this is a phenomenon exclusively connected with mixed race people with a white parent. I’m just saying that given the show’s provenance, that clearly seems to be the intended message here, deliberate or otherwise.
And this is where things get interesting. As I say, the coding means B’Elanna essentially gets split into someone who is white, and someone who isn’t, which makes the fact it’s the latter who is killed rather distasteful. On the other hand, though, it’s this death that sets up the final scene. The key question, then, is this: is that final scene good enough to justify the ugly way it’s set up?
Well, much as this will seem like a dodge, that’s not really for me to answer. I’m not mixed-race, and googling failed to dig up any commentators on this episode who is. Absent any relevant context, all I feel comfortable saying is this: that last seen scene is complicated and chewy and morally ambiguous and incredibly affecting. It’s everything the double Dawson dialogue wasn’t.
The pat ending here would have been for B’Elanna to desire the reintegration of her Klingon elements, having learned through their jailbreak that the two sides of her co-operating is a combination as formidable as it is inescapable. What we get instead is far more daring. While she later admits she grew to admire a lot about her Klingon half, the human B’Elanna’s reaction to learning she is to be returned to her initial state is one of astonished dismay. Her new-found sense of inner peace is so great that the idea of it coming to an end scares her. It takes the Doctor telling her she’ll die otherwise for her to accept she can’t go on as she is.
And note how B’Elanna speaks about the consequences of her Klingon side being woven back into her. When she talks about the actual Klingon she just met, it make sense to describe as separate to herself. But note how B’Elanna continues to do this even when talking about her former and upcoming integrated self. She’s talking about one half of her own identity as though it were an external intruder, struggling to gain control.
Then comes the final twist of the knife: B’Elanna start to weep as she caresses the smooth forehead Sulan has given her. Not because the change strikes her as wrong, as it did when Sulan stole Durst’s face, or when Chakotay was surgically altered to look Vidiian [4]. B’Elanna is crying precisely because her face finally feels right to her, and she knows it won’t stay that way for long.
This is powerful, emotional stuff – I’ve already said it’s not my place to argue this ending justifies the route taken to get to it, but I certainly can see how one could argue it is. It’s also a brave resolution, in the sense that arguing a mixed-race person might be alienated from one side of their heritage to the point they wish it gone could easily be misconstrued as bigotry – a form of the “tragic mulatto” trope discussed here. As always, my white identity severely limits the degree to which my opinions on this sort of thing matter, but for what very little it’s worth, I don’t think that’s what is happening here. I think the fact B’Elanna is open about the fact her identity issues stem from the attitudes of the colonists she grew up around makes it clear that this is fundamentally an episode opposed to the idea of racism, not racial mixing. If nothing else, it’s worth noting that if B’Elanna did want her Klingon side removed (and that’s actually subtly different to what she suggests she wants here, which is to not have it returned to her after it was removed without her consent), that tallies with the lived experience of some mixed race people, at least during their youth.
This, by the way, is why Chakotay is so quiet in response to B’Elanna’s confession. Apparently, his failure to comfort his crewmate and friend drew a lot of criticism when the episode first aired. This is understandable, but I think misguided. First of all, it seems both entirely in character and not any kind of failure of empathy for Chakotay to not be a hugger. More to the point, though, what precisely can we expect Chakotay to say here? It’s not for him to offer comment on the complicated tangle of issues and experiences that have led B’Elanna to resent the Klingon half of her identity. As a person of colour, and given the history of his people (whomever they were actually supposed to be), it’s entirely possible he understands the tribulations involved in living among a culture that can’t be reconciled with one’s own (this is why it’s important B’Elanna opens up to Chakotay about this, and not Paris). At the same time, though, he’s not (so far as we know) mixed race himself, which requires he stay in his lane. He can’t offer B’Elanna his advice or opinion. All he can do – all he should do – is what he does: listen to her describe her experience.
Well, that and be empathetic while he’s doing it. Which he is. He clearly is. He may not hug her, or offer her well-meant but ultimately unsatisfactory words of comfort. But we know how much he cares for his friend, and how much he wishes she didn’t have to go through life fighting a war inside herself.
And how do we know that? Because it’s written all over his face.
Ordering
3. Faces
4. Angel One
[1] Note that in the Enterprise episode “Detained”, the script goes the other way, having the infiltrating Reed pose as a Suliban prisoner rather than a Tandaran guard, despite the latter being far more human-looking. This too is the right decision under the circumstances, because the Tandarans share neither the self-loathing of the Vidiians, or the same sick obsession with their prisoners.
[2] The clearest indication that nobody really paid any attention to the genetic implications of the story is the rather obvious fact that, were B’Elanna to actually be split according to her human and Klingon DNA, the results would be closer to being copies of her parents than two variants of herself
[3] This argument can’t save the way human B’Elanna behaves according to some pretty objectionable gender stereotypes, though – always being scared, fainting when surprised and so on. The implication that this is how the average human woman behaves is more than a little offensive.
[4] A process, we should note, which requires the removal of the facial tattoo which symbolises Chakotay’s heritage. This is why it needs to be Chakotay who launches the rescue mission, rather than, say, Kim, or alternatively why it needs to be Paris who’s captured rather than Chakotay himself. Having Chakotay on the planet to support B’Elanna would have add its advantages – it would have given Beltran more to do after his almost total disappearance last episode, and given B’Elanna someone she knew better to interact with on the planet. In the episode as filmed, though, altering Chakotay’s appearance underlines the links between identity, culture and faces that are being played with throughout.