By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As big fans of Star Trek: Voyager, we always love scoping out the production details of different episodes to learn how each of Captain Janeway’s adventures came together. Most of the time, these are loving stories about how a cool idea originated and became another memorable episode of 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 terrible idea from the start.
“Faces,” like most Star Trek episodes, started out very differently than what we eventually saw onscreen. This memorably split the half-Klingon engineer B’Elanna Torres into two halves (one fully human, one fully Klingon), and as executive producer Michael Piller said, the earliest story idea posited that this “could be the result of a hideous concentration camp kind of experiment.” This didn’t exactly thrill the production staff: executive story editor Kenneth Biller declared that “the original idea was very melodramatic and hokey,” and executive producer Jeri Taylor said “I was not even in favor of buying this idea originally” and that “it was a tired idea” which “was too on the nose for B’Elanna.”
“Faces” also didn’t impress famous Star Trek producer Brannon Braga, who admitted that “Usually, when a show does the evil twin, it’s on its last legs and they’re desperate.” Initially, he was down with the idea of getting this familiar television trope out of the way in season 1, later saying, “I always felt that splitting her was a mistake, like making Data human.” He questioned why the show felt the need to “resolve any of her feelings,” which is a fair question when you consider that the tension between these dueling halves of her personality would run throughout the course of the entire series.
Regarding “Faces,” Michael Piller said, “This was a story that a lot of people had trouble with, and it was almost abandoned at one point in time.” However, the writers and producers stayed the course because they thought that a new take on the classic Trek trope of splitting a character in two (a la Kirk in The Original Series) had some fun creative potential. The finished episode ended up being a success, and the credit for this seems to go entirely to Kenneth Biller.
As for the final “Faces” script, it incorporates the Vidiians, a tragic alien race that is always looking for a new way to cure the Phage that is constantly ravaging their bodies. A Vidiian scientist ends up splitting B’elanna Torres into two parts as a crazy method of trying to discover the cure. The alien egghead ends up falling in love with his captive, Beauty and the Beast style, and the two versions of Torres team up and escape captivity only to be reincorporated into one body on Voyager.
Biller is the only author of the “Faces” teleplay, and he had the unenviable task of taking the Star Trek script that nobody liked and turning it into something engaging. He incorporated the alien Vidiians as a way to make the body-splitting work, and Piller later gushed that “It wasn’t until Ken Biller got the rewrite that he solved every problem overnight.”
Meanwhile, fellow exec producer and story skeptic Jeri Taylor admitted that “Ultimately it turned out far better than we had any right to expect.” Continuing, she said, “Ken Biller came up with marrying that idea [of splitting B’Elanna] with the Phage aliens, and that’s what I think ultimately made it work and made it credible.
As you can tell, “Faces” is one of those Star Trek episodes that had a very troubled production, and it’s a small miracle that this story made it to air. It’s a good thing it did, though, as this episode’s themes of both horror and identity make it one of the most memorable episodes of Voyager’s early days. The fact that it focuses on Torres (arguably the show’s most interesting character) serves as the cherry on top of a replicated chocolate cake (we can only assume Deanna Troi would approve).
