By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As big fans of Star Trek: Voyagerwe always like to examine the production details of different episodes to find out how each of Captain Janeway’s adventures unfolded. Most of the time, they’re love stories about how an interesting idea was born and became another memorable installment in Gene Roddenberry’s sprawling sci-fi franchise. But “Faces” is the rare case of a Star Trek episode where even the producers thought it was a really bad idea from the start.
“Faces,” like most Star Trek episodes, began very differently from what we ultimately saw on screen. This memorably split half-Klingon engineer B’Elanna Torres into two halves (one fully human, one fully Klingon), and as executive producer Michael Piller said, the first idea for the story posited that it “could be the result of a hideous concentration camp.” kind of experience. This didn’t exactly excite the production team: story editor Kenneth Biller said “the original idea was very melodramatic and cheesy”, and executive producer Jeri Taylor said: ” “I wasn’t even in favor of buying that idea originally” and that “it was a tired idea” that “was too interesting for B’Elanna.”
The ‘faces’ didn’t impress the celebrities either Star Trek Producer Brannon Braga admitted that “Usually when a show introduces the evil twin, it’s on its last legs and they’re desperate. » He initially agreed with the idea of removing this familiar TV trope in season 1, later stating, “I always thought splitting her up was a mistake, like making Data human.” He wondered why the show felt the need to “resolve any of his feelings”, which is a good question considering that the tension between these dueling halves of his personality would continue throughout the series.
Of “Faces,” Michael Piller said, “It was a story that a lot of people struggled with, and it was almost abandoned at one point. ” However, the writers and producers stayed the course because they believed that a new take on the classic Trek trope of splitting a character in two (a la Kirk in The original series) had fun creative potential. The completed episode ended up being a success, and the credit seems to go entirely to Kenneth Biller.
As for the final scenario of “Faces”, it includes the Vidiians, a tragic character. stranger race that is always looking for a new way to cure the Phage that is constantly ravaging their bodies. A Vidian scientist ends up splitting B’elanna Torres into two parts, a crazy method of trying to discover the cure. The alien intellect ends up falling in love with its captive, Beauty and the Beast style, and the two versions of Torres team up and escape captivity only to be reincorporated into a single body on Voyager.
Biller is the sole writer on the “Faces” teleplay, and he had the unenviable task of taking the Star Trek storyline that no one liked and turning it into something engaging. It incorporated the alien Vidiians as a way to make the body split work, and Piller later said that “it wasn’t until Ken Biller got the rewrite that it solved all the problems overnight.”
Meanwhile, Jeri Taylor, executive producer and skeptic of the story, admitted that “In the end, it turned out a lot better than we had any right to expect.” Continuing, she said: “Ken Biller had the idea to marry this idea [of splitting B’Elanna] with the Phage aliensand that’s what I think ultimately made it work and made it believable.
As you can see, “Faces” is one of those Star Trek episodes that was very difficult to produce, and it’s a small miracle that this story made it to air. That’s a good thing, though, because this episode’s themes of both horror and identity make it one of the most memorable episodes of TravelerThese are the first days. The fact that it focuses on Torres (arguably the most interesting character in the series) is the cherry on top of a replicated chocolate cake (we can only assume Deanna Troi would approve).
