10 Times Star Trek: Voyager Went Woke
8. The Pressure To Conform
Many of us think of B'Elanna Torres as the firecracker down in Engineering; in fact, that spirit is what we love about her. But it's not so simple for B'Elanna, who equates her hot-headed nature with her struggle to balance her Human and Klingon heritage.
The episode Faces forces B'Elanna to come to terms with both sides. A horrible experiment splits her into two separate versions of herself, one fully human, the other Klingon. They argue and struggle to work together, blaming each other for the hardships they've endured. And it's only when they finally accept that neither can manage without the other that they start to make progress.
This isn't just a case of reading too deeply between the lines. In Captains' Logs Supplemental: The Unauthorized Guide To The New Trek Voyages, writer Kenneth Biller is quoted:
I have a younger adopted brother who's biracial, and it's very interesting to see how he has had to deal with his identity. So this story idea, thematically, is very interesting to me.
Voyager doesn't pretend that one misadventure can undo a lifetime of prejudice and misplaced internalised shame. On the contrary, it resurfaces in the Season 7 episode Lineage. When B'Elanna finds out she's pregnant, she considers erasing her unborn daughter's Klingon traits. Her own childhood anxiety becomes fear for her baby's fate, and she almost caves to the pressure of assimilation by making the girl less visibly 'other'.
The painful rejection B'Elanna experienced as a child wasn't just some quaint futuristic problem. It was very much part of the real world in the 1990s and still is for too many people.
In a poll taken in 1994 (the year before Faces aired), only about half of Americans approved of interracial marriages between black and white people. And be warned, just the language used around some of these polls tells a depressing story. Around the time Lineage aired, that had only risen to about 65 per cent.
That suddenly puts B'Elanna's worry for her part-Klingon, part-Human child into a whole new context. Her fear that her child might face a more difficult life just because of her mixed heritage was sadly all too relevant for the time the episode aired.