“Lineage”
Written by James Kahn
Directed by Peter Lauritson
Season 7, Episode 12
Production episode 258
Original air date: January 24, 2001
Stardate: 54452.6
Captain’s log. Torres is in an uncharacteristically good mood as she reports for duty in engineering, actually being nice to her staff and all chirpy and stuff—until she finds Icheb there, working with Seven. She gets extremely upset about that, and then collapses. Icheb examines her to discover that she’s pregnant.
The EMH assures Torres (and Paris) that the baby is fine. The fainting spell was due to the “clash” between the fetus’ Klingon and human genes. They ask the EMH to keep the pregnancy secret for now, but Icheb went ahead and told many many people, and the pair of them are showered with congratulations. While Paris appreciates the thoughts, Torres is getting frustrated by all the advice. Then the EMH informs them that the fetus has a deviated spine. Paris is shocked, but Torres isn’t: she had the same thing when she was an infant, as did her mother. It’s common among Klingon mothers. They give the EMH permission to perform genetic modifications on the fetus to get rid of it.
After the EMH accidentally reveals the child’s gender, Paris and Torres ask to see a holographic representation of their daughter as an infant. Torres is surprised to see that she’ll have forehead ridges, even though she’ll only be a quarter Klingon.
This prompts flashbacks to a camping trip Torres took with her father, uncle, and cousins when she was a girl. Torres refused to go on a hike with her cousins, thinking they didn’t like her. Later, as if to prove that point, one cousin later puts a live worm in her sandwich, joking that he thought Klingons liked live food.
Once the genetic treatment is done, Torres goes to the holodeck and does a bunch of simulations of genetic alterations that would remove her daughter’s forehead ridges. Once she finds the right sequence, she goes to the doctor—who absolutely refuses to do it. She insists that he look at her research; he insists that she get her husband’s consent. They both agree.
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Paris absolutely refuses. He cottons pretty quickly to the fact that Torres doesn’t want their daughter to be treated poorly due to her Klingon heritage the way she was. Paris points out that that wouldn’t happen on Voyager—the ship has Bajorans, Vulcans, Bolians, Talaxians, etc., not to mention (literally, Paris doesn’t mention this) the fact that the other kid born on board was half human and half alien. Torres retorts that the ship is mostly human, and she did not have good experiences with human kids.
They take their argument to Janeway, who declines to get in the middle of a marital dispute, nor will she order the EMH to do as Torres says. Said marital dispute continues to the point where Torres kicks Paris out of their quarters, and he has to sleep on Kim’s couch.
Torres has more flashbacks to the camping trip. She ran away after the worm sandwich incident, not returning until later, worrying her father John sick. Later, Torres overhears John and his brother Carl talking about fishing and family. John mentions that their parents didn’t want him to marry Miral because he couldn’t handle living with a Klingon, much less living with two. Torres’ moodiness is worrying him.
In the present, Chakotay contrives to get Paris and Torres to talk to each other and they reconcile just in time to be summoned to sickbay. The EMH has reviewed the data, and it turns out that the genetic modifications are necessary. Paris is skeptical, so he takes a look at the data—which he can’t make heads nor tails of. (Gee, what happened to all that medical training that’s allegedly enough for him to be able to take over sickbay when the EMH is gone???) So he brings it to Icheb—who immediately pokes holes in the report, saying it was done by someone who doesn’t understand genetics. Since the EMH shouldn’t make mistakes, Seven checks his program—and it turns out to have been tampered with.
Paris contacts his wife, who doesn’t answer her combadge, but who is in sickbay. Paris calls for a security alert, and Tuvok has to force the door to sickbay open, only to find Torres being operated on by the EMH. Kim shuts power to sickbay and Tuvok asks the EMH to deactivate himself until they can determine how much his program has been altered.
Torres admits to doing this for reasons that become clear when we finish the flashback: she argued with her father and said that if he can’t stand living with two Klingons, he should just leave. Twelve days later, he left.
Paris assures her that he will never leave her and that he doesn’t want to live with two Klingons, he wants to live with three or four Klingons. He wants to have a big family with her.
Torres undoes the damage she did to the EMH, apologizes to him, and asks him to be the baby’s godfather. He happily accepts. She then is shocked to feel the baby kick…
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway gets dragged into the middle of a marital spat by Paris and Torres. She then drags herself right back out again, not wanting any piece of that and not willing to insert herself into a private medical decision. We’ll just pretend “Tuvix” and “Nothing Human” never happened…
Mr. Vulcan. Paris goes to Tuvok for advice, as the only father he knows. (Which is not actually true, as both Carey and Ayala, at the very least, are fathers, plus I can’t imagine that there aren’t any other fathers on board this ship with a three-figure complement.) Tuvok’s advice is quite sage.
Half and half. Having met Torres’ mother in “Barge of the Dead,” we meet her father in this one. We knew already that her father walked out on them, but now we have an idea as to why in this episode’s flashbacks.
Forever an ensign. Okay, Voyager has had a net loss of about twenty to thirty crewmembers. There’s gotta be some empty crew quarters. Heck, Paris and Torres now live together, which means one of them gave up their cabin at some point recently. For that matter, they probably have guest quarters. So why does Paris have to sleep on Kim’s couch, exactly, beyond slavish devotion to the cliché that henpecked husbands sleep on their best friend’s couch when their wives kick them out for being assholes?
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. In a very refreshing change over the course of the series, Tuvok asks the EMH to deactivate himself. This was also true back in “Flesh and Blood,” when Janeway asked to the EMH to do the same because the Hirogen was having a nutty. I like that they give him the freedom rather than just randomly turning him off without his consent.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix offers to be the child’s godfather, as he’s already Naomi’s godfather, and therefore knows how to do it. He also offers a Talaxian aphorism by way of congratulating them on the pregnancy: “Good news has no clothes.” Okay, then.
Resistance is futile. Seven is the one who has to tell Icheb that the fetus Torres is carrying isn’t a parasite.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris and Torres are apparently having sex without protection…
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Torres tests her genetic manipulation on the holodeck, which is a good use of the place…
Do it.
“I’m detecting another lifesign.”
“Where?”
“Inside Lieutenant Torres. It could be a parasite!”
–Icheb failing his saving roll versus pregnancy detection while talking to Seven after Torres collapsed.
Welcome aboard. Juan Garcia makes the first of two appearances as John; he’ll return in the role in “Author, Author.” Jessica Gaona plays young Torres, while the other members of their family on the camping trip are played by Javier Grajeda, Paul Robert Langdon, Nicole Sarah Fellows, and Gilbert R. Leal.
Plus Manu Intiraymi is back as Icheb.
Trivial matters: While DS9’s “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” made it clear that the Federation has banned genetic engineering, there was there established an exception for birth defects, which the deviated spine qualifies for. Having said that, the subject of that ban never actually comes up…
Torres’ pregnancy will progress throughout the season, with her daughter being born in the series finale, “Endgame.”
Set a course for home. “If you can’t stand living with us, then why don’t you leave?” As insight into the character of B’Elanna Torres, this is a very good episode. But as a Voyager story, it falls down on two different levels.
First of all, in this episode written and directed by men in a season in which the show-runner is a man, it’s a really bad look that the entire episode is about men telling a woman what she can’t do with her own body during a pregnancy. This is especially hilarious on a show with a female lead as the captain—said captain is notably absent for most of the episode, showing up briefly to congratulate the happy couple and again to decline the invitation to get involved. What a waste.
Second of all, Torres does a truly horrible thing here, and no one seems to think it’s that big a deal. She alters the EMH’s program, which is the equivalent of giving him a lobotomy. There are no consequences for this rather horrid action she takes. And yes, it’s something you can chalk up to the changeable moods of a pregnant woman who was already moody before the pregnancy hormones got churned up, but come on.
We’ve got two different aspects of the cliché of the hysterical woman who has to be saved by the rational men around her, and I’ve just got no patience for it.
The flashbacks are, at least, enlightening. We’ve only gotten bits and pieces of Torres’ childhood, and this fleshes that out nicely. On the one hand, it’s a pretty typical story involving children who’ve been raised by parents who separate, with the kid blaming themselves for the parents splitting up when it’s always more complicated than that. The added bonus of Klingon-human tension makes it that much more interesting. I especially like how Juan Garcia plays him, as the deadbeat Dad who abandons his family could easily be a clichéd ass (I’m looking at you, Kyle Riker), but he’s permitted to be more complex than that.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the many guests at Dragon Con 2021 in Atlanta this coming weekend. He’s doing a mess of panels, autographings, readings, and workshops. His incredibly busy schedule can be found here.
Hmm, well I didn’t like this one at all and for various reasons.
I didn’t just find it abhorrent that Torres alters the EMH’s program without his knowledge (and she suffers no consequences), but also the separate matter of genetically modifying another living being (her offspring) just because she was upset at how it would look like and not because it was a birth defect or it was life threatening to the child or the mother. If it were me and I found out my parent(s) had modified my genes in such a way to eliminate the appearance of my ethnic heritage then I would be deeply disturbed and incensed. I also didn’t like how Torres has no faith in her husband that he won’t be just like her father nor that the Voyager crew, essentially her adopted family, won’t also treat her child with the utmost care and respect just like they’ve been doing with Naomi Wildman and each other for the last 6+ years.
I tend to not like episodes about B’Elanna where she has a lot of angst about her Klingon heritage because I always find it should be a source of strength and pride for her, not something to be ashamed of or to deride. These stories seem to devolve into a lot of melodrama and I find this story no different or pleasant to watch.
Having now met B’Elanna’s father after previously meeting her mother, I just can’t see how those two people were ever believably in a relationship much less a marriage.
B’Elanna has always been my favorite VOY character after the Doctor, so this episode is one of my favorites of Season 7 (the narrative flaws aside).
It’s also a personal episode for me because my parents were estranged (and ultimately separated for good) at the time it aired. So it really resonated with me at the time.
B’Elanna is a favorite of mine, and I liked the fact that, despite her character growth, she was always going to be a little less emotionally restrained than most Starfleet officers. You see why she didn’t make it through the Academy, but you also see why she was able to fit in so well on Voyager when given the chance. While I fervently disagree with her desire to genetically modify the fetus for purely aesthetic reasons, I don’t think it is an unrealistic desire considering what we know about her. Like Kira on DS9, she has a tendency to go whole-hog when she thinks something is the right thing to do, and it takes a lot to change her mind. I wish we had gotten to see more of what happened when they got home, because B’Elanna is the one I’d be most interested in following up on (and Roxann Dawson is amazing at playing her).
Yea, I can’t help but thinking they went in an odd direction here. I had always imagined B’Elanna’s father as something of a Han Solo type- someone roguish and charming who could realistically have swept Miral up into a whirlwind romance, but who was always going to have a hard time with the following through part. Juan Garcia does a fine job with the character as written, but I remember finding the character itself a bit of a let down.
I caught this one in early reruns back in the day and never forgot it. The backstory is so compelling.
I did not see this episode for the first time until very recently. In fact, there are still a few season seven episodes that I have never seen (“Friendship One,” “Homestead,” and “Prophecy”). I was pleasantly surprised by how good I thought this one was! The issue of genetic engineering is a very relevant one today; I don’t know how relevant it was in 2000? Surely somebody is more informed about the science of genetic engineering than I am. Still, I found the treatment of Torres to be very poignant. It makes perfect sense that she might (even if just subconsciously) be afraid that Tom would leave her just like her father left her mother. Seeing this episodes made me appreciate the conversation between Torres and her father in “Author, Author” more, because previously, I had seen that conversation without knowing the backstory provided by this episode. Torres’ manipulation of the Doctor’s program is appalling, but she even admits at the end of the episode that it was appalling and genuinely apologizes to him for it, so I appreciate that the writers didn’t try to sweep it under the rug like they usual did when a character behaved badly. All in all, a nice step up from a long string of mostly so-so, mediocre episodes.
I admit I never thought about the gendered aspects you point out, at least not that I recall. I think I appreciated the insight into B’Elanna’s past, but felt that the shipboard plot went a little overboard in generating conflict.
The Torres backstory here ignores Jeri Taylor’s Pathways, but “Barge of the Dead” already did that by naming B’Elanna’s mother Miral instead of Prabsa.
Damn. Obviously they don’t plan ahead or have much continuity, but this would have been way better to put before Flesh & Blood, then in that episode have the Doctor be peeved about having just been reprogrammed, only to have his concerns dismissed or trivialized by Chakotay. Then he would have a much more legitimate grievance instead of contriving something about not being able to go to a medical conference. That episode even has a ton of Torres/Doctor and their dynamic would be way more interesting after this episode.
@1/garreth: Having now met B’Elanna’s father after previously meeting her mother, I just can’t see how those two people were ever believably in a relationship much less a marriage.
Yeah, what is up with these two? My guess: It started as a one night relationship and they failed their birth control saving throw. She decided to keep it, he decided to try to make it work, and in the long run it didn’t. Tale as old as time, accounts for many of the odd couples you see in real life.
I felt John’s attempts to relate to B’Elanna’s treatment by other kids was pretty accurate in how misguided it was. John saw it as simple bullying while B’Elanna recognized it as discrimination because of her Klingon heritage. Even when her cousin plays a trick on her to mock her for it John just sees it as B’Elanna overreacting rather than a sign of a larger problem.
I can’t say I agree with the low rating. This episode is so powerful on so many levels. They don’t bog it down with any stupid B-plots, instead devoting the whole runtime to the main story, and it’s very strong for it. I’m in tears every time I watch it.
They do engage in a bit of “must be hormones” but they slap it down both times, B’elanna refuses to have her stance invalidated on that basis, both when it benefits her and when its working against her. So really the episode cuts that sort of thing down. The point was always that it’s not hormones making her act this way, and if people thought it was, it wasn’t to dismiss her either but to be sensitive to what she’s going through.
The procedure they were debating was one focused completely on the child, rather than something both the mother and child would have been impacted by, or something B’elanna would have had to make sacrifices with her body or overall life to accommodate for the sake of others. Its possible to recognize Paris’s parental rights too without undermining “my body my choice”. Its hard to do, but I think they managed it with this scenario.
The flashbacks are portrayed in a way that you can really see both why B’elanna would feel and react the way she does, and why others around her could see it as overreacting. They didn’t cop out by making it black and white. Their attempts to empathize don’t really hit the mark, they aren’t malicious but they don’t fully understand what its like to be her.
It is odd that Torres’ actions were serious enough that they need to involve security, and then nothing really happens. But Picardo does an amazing nuanced performance to show that an apology doesn’t cut it, he accepts the apology as he “should” I guess but is also clearly betrayed and it isn’t just going to be ok with a sorry. Its not until B’elanna shows him just how much she truly respects him as a person by asking to be the baby’s godfather, that things between them are repaired.
The only thing bringing the episode down for me is how NOT CUTE that CGI baby is.
Torres’ baby was still more realistic than the Twilight baby.
No one’s brought it up, but I always get the feeling that “genetic alteration” was a proxy here for “reproductive rights” or more baldly, abortion.
Substitute ‘abort’ and suddenly the whole discussion changes. What is the difference if she wants to abort the fetus rather than genetically alter it? Through that lens everyone else is wrong – the EMH, Paris, Janeway – EVERYONE. Reproductive rights lie with Torres, not anyone else.
From a RELATIONSHIP standpoint, yes it’s best if Torres and Paris come to a consensus, but ultimately it’s not his – or anyone else’s decision. In this light, by altering the EMH, Torres was fighting for her rights that were being denied her by all these other people that know what’s best for her.
In this light, by altering the EMH, Torres was fighting for her rights that were being denied her by all these other people that know what’s best for her.
@11, if you want to play that game, the EMH is a free person and doesn’t have to treat anybody if he doesn’t feel like it, with possible exceptions carved out by his programming or Starfleet regulations. In the real world, someone may have the right to abort depending on where they live, but they can’t compel any particular medical professional to perform an abortion, they have to find one willing to perform an abortion. Similarly, assuming arguendo that Torres has the absolute right to genetically modify her fetus, she doesn’t have the right to force the Doctor to do the procedure, she’s going to have to go find someone else. I hear Seven’s good with nanoprobes.
@12 Yes, you are correct. So then we get into the argument whose rights matter most? The EMH’s or the mother’s?
That holographic baby is nightmare fuel.
@11: I didn’t think the issue of the story was analogous to abortion at all but what it plainly on the nose was about: genetic manipulation for simply cosmetic reasons which is a real-life thing. Trying to erase the ethnic identity of her child is pure selfishness and vanity on Torres’ part no different if a parent wants to manipulate their baby’s genes to make sure it has blonde hair and blue eyes. This isn’t about abortion at all. No one is telling B’Elanna she can or can’t have the baby. But no one has to be cajoled or forced by her into manipulating her child’s genes when it’s health and life, nor that of its mother’s, isn’t in any medical risk.
@15 I think its no coincidence that B’elanna’s alterations also made the kid blond. The story is a metaphor about being a minority. She could have just made the forehead ridges disappear, and yeah Tom is of the blond persuasion so you could say that’s why she came out blond. But there’s been so much history of idealizing specifically northern European traits in media, to the detriment of the self esteem of anyone who doesn’t look like that and doesn’t feel represented. I feel that’s the point they were making, is the destructive influence that has on people’s preferences and why she thinks her kid would have an easier time if she looked that way. Props to the producers for not shying away and making such a visual tie-in to a 21st century issue. (20th?)
I don’t think the episode was going for any kind of reproductive-rights or medical-ethics commentary, just an examination of B’Elanna’s discomfort with her Klingon half and her screwed-up family history. The stuff about genetic engineering was just a means to that end.
Which makes it an example of the kind of problem Keith’s commented on before, the tendency to keep resetting the characters and having them confront the same kind of personal issue over and over again without ever growing beyond it — Tuvok losing his emotional control, Harry learning a lesson about command, B’Elanna hating her Klingon half, Seven learning to be more human, etc.
So i want to start of by saying that i 100 percent believe you have good intentions when you critique the show im sure it’s in good faith but sometimes you interpret the events in the most uncharitable way possible ‘men telling a woman what she can’t do with her own body during a pregnancy’ come on you know dam well that’s not what they intended.
@18 Intended or not it’s not the point. That is what they did. I’m sure no one INTENDS to make a bad show and yet we still have ‘Profit and Lace’ right? This was clumsily handled and her childhood trauma could have been explored any of a number of other ways that didn’t rob her of her agency or involve anything that would directly challenge her reproductive rights in this episode ( and yes, despite saying ‘ they weren’t going for reproductive rights commentary, that is *exactly* what they did. Sorry if it makes y’all uncomfortable. It should) Yet that’s what they did.
Sigh. I hate no edit function. Pretend I didn’t write the last sentence again :-)
@19: Just because it’s your interpretation of what this episode is about does not mean that it is what it’s actually about any more than I would proclaim my interpretation of the story must be what the writer was trying to say. To think otherwise without really knowing the intentions of the writer is pretty arrogant. And I personally have no problem debating reproductive rights or abortion if that was what my interpretation of the story was.
I can’t imagine that the Federation doesn’t have laws regarding this sort of thing. Assuming the decision to abort is the mother’s:
Is genetically modifying a fetus for cosmetic reasons legal? If it’s not, there’s no discussion. The EMH cannot perform the procedure. Torres can then decide whether to continue the pregnancy.
If it is legal, can the mother decide unilaterally, or is consent required of other parents (plural, because things like surrogacy can mean more than two people are involved in the conception and gestation). If she can, Torres has the right to do so, and the doctor must perform the procedure, even against Paris’s wishes.
If Paris’s consent is needed, then they have to hash it out themselves, and again, Torres can decide whether to continue the pregnancy. The EMH and ship’s captain have no part of that discussion.
However, even if Torres has the right to make the decision without Paris’s consent, it could come at the cost of their relationship. He could decide that her insistence on genetically engineering their child’s race is morally repugnant, and ask for a divorce (as long as he keeps up his parental responsibilities).
Also, why can’t a society that has teleportation, faster than light travel, and universal translators develop a reliable birth control method?
Is it written in stone somewhere that a main cast member on a Star Trek show must have Daddy issues?
John: of course it’s not what they intended. God, if they’d intended that, it would’ve been a billion times worse. It’s the thoughtlessness in doing that that’s the issue….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I got the impression from other episodes in which B’elanna’s mother is discussed, that maybe she used to be more chilled out in her younger days but as the years wore on she seemed to grow into a more “fundamentalist” Klingon of sorts, so much so that B’elanna couldn’t deal with her anymore either. Happens to a lot of people, you’re one person when you’re young, and especially in a long term relationship, you either grow together, or you become wildly different people and sometimes it doesn’t even make sense you were together. The idea of still being with my college boyfriend today is preposterous. I was maybe more agnostic/didn’t care, have since gone full atheist, meanwhile he was kinda agnostic and has since become a full on born-again. Among other differences. I can’t even describe how ridiculous the image of us as a couple would seem today, 15 years later. Maybe John and Miral got together at a time when their differences were cool and fun and bridgeable still, but each grew in very different directions.
It’s probably not too much of a stretch to figure that Paris might need to file a request for new quarters before he can just waltz into an empty room; I know they were probably wishy washy with the power consumption thing, but it might be reasonable to assume all the power to unused quarters would be offline. In any case, maybe it was just easier to crash with Harry then for him to go to the Captain with all of that and put in all the paperwork.
As someone with mixed heritage who has been bullied at various times in my life for that, I can totally understand Torres point of view. It’s NOT for cosmetic reasons she wants to alter the child’s appearance, it’s pragmatic. She wants to save her child from the trauma and stress she has suffered. She knows what it might be like. Gosh look at the world around us now – we know how people are condemned for how they look. I’m cutting her some slack.
A lot of drama could have been prevented if Tom Paris and Malcolm Reed had been able to swap dads.
ra_bailey: Sure seems that way, doesn’t it? I recently realized that all the main characters on TNG had fathers who were either absent, problematic, or both.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
Interesting episode. I was a little surprised that at no point the Eugenics Wars and the Federation ban on genetic engineering were mentioned. Surely something could be said of scientists once upon a time manipulating genes in order to “improve” the human race and getting carried away with it. DS9 had already done that episode, of course, and done it well, but still, a nod towards it would’ve been nice.
Haven’t seen it in a while, but I remember this as a good episode with a great episode buried just underneath. As #27 says, Torres believes she’s doing the right thing – the episode just needed to drive her own trauma home to the audience a little more effectively to get it across.
If the child really would face discrimination and intolerable suffering for its heritage, there’s a purely pragmatic argument to be made from B’Elanna’s perspective, based on her own experience, that the child’s life will be objectively better if she’s allowed to carry out the procedure. Paris is the one making the moral argument that is the most immediately appealing one, but he doesn’t have the lived experience to understand B’Elanna’s reasoning, and he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about when it comes to the topic of the racism that B’Elanna faced and which she fears the baby will face. B’Elanna attempts a horrific solution to a problem that should never exist in the first place, but given everything we know, she’s right in that it’ll objectively give the baby a better life.
The problems with the episode as I remember it are that it doesn’t quite develop this debate as strongly as it could have. I definitely didn’t pick up on any abortion allegory. It’s another episode that does what Voyager has a track record of being good at – inventing interesting, nuanced dilemmas that, currently, only exist in the world of fiction (Tuvix being the obvious example).
@22 “Also, why can’t a society that has teleportation, faster than light travel, and universal translators develop a reliable birth control method?”
Who says they haven’t? I can’t off the top of my head think of any unwanted babies in TNG/DS9/VOY era ST that weren’t the result of alien-of-the-week/warp-ten-weirdness-of-the-week shenanigans. B’Elanna’s pregnancy was surprising because she and Tom thought it was going to be more difficult for her to get pregnant than it turned out to be; she explicitly told the Doctor when he asked that they wanted a family. The implication I got was that if they had been using birth control in the past they had stopped by this point, but weren’t so much “trying to get pregnant” (thinking it would probably take medical intervention) as “not trying not to get pregnant”.
@23 Is it written in stone somewhere that a main cast member on a Star Trek show must have Daddy issues?
At least DS9 has nice dads aplenty :)
“about men telling a woman what she can’t do with her own body during a pregnancy”
I do not agree with this analogy, because it’s not her own body: the genetic manipulation will not have any effect on her or the way she experiences the pregnancy. She will be doing this to the body of the child she already decided on having, and the child will have to live with her choices all their life.
What I liked most in this episode were the flashbacks and the way they played on my expectations. Usually in kids and YA movies where a child thinks one of the parents wants to leave because they don’t love them at the end we see that the parent actually loves them and either does not leave, or at least reassures the child it’s not their fault. So I was kind of expecting it here, but B’Elanna’s father just left. It was a dash of realism and I think it did well to explain B’Elannas issues in the episode.
Speaking as a doctor, if we, as a society, did not consider fetal genetic manipulation for cosmetic or theoretical advantages to be repugnant, the incidence in China of using CRISPER techniques to modify a pair of twins at embryonic stage to be (maybe) immune to HIV would not have raised such a stink. Most of the medical community was appalled by the act due to ethical (not religious) reasons. The doctor involved has lost his license to practice for violating Chinese regulations regarding use of experimental methods outside of a controlled clinical trial. He is likely to face jail time. The ethics of using genetic manipulation for “Designer Babies” is a very murky field, though fortunately we still don’t have the technology to make it a real problem. The same conundrum applies to B’Ellana’s actions.
The other point is that it is in no way conscionable to manipulate or compel anyone to do a professional misdeed that they are totally against, whatever your reasons and rights. Her reprogramming of the EMH is akin to holding a gun to a doctor’s head and insisting they give you an organ from a non-willing donor.
But as far as consequences are concerned, this show pretends that B’Ellana and Seven are the only people capable of handling engineering. So of course, no punishment is possible.
@27/Antipodeanaut: I was badly bullied in childhood, but the last thing I would ever do is try to change my child to conform to the bullies’ petty expectations. That would be a surrender. It would be saying the bullies were right, and that’s a horrible attitude to raise your child with. I’d want my child to defy the bullies and take pride in being themselves, and I’d try to give them more support and encouragement in doing so than I was given by the adults in my life. It should be the bullies who need to change, not their victims. Putting the onus on the victims to conform is becoming part of the bullying.
@@@@@ 33:
Well I think Garak and Bashir might take issue with that “nice Dads aplenty” there, lol
I’m honestly surprised how far Torres goes on this (or at least the writers lack of understanding of genetics goes) that she just goes roughshot on removing genes and who’s to say the child would actually be born the way the computer is predicting and not as some mass of cells from a Cronenberg film? I know, I know, it’s fiction but just creepy when you think about it.
To be more specific, it’s the parents of the bullies who need to make their children change, and probably change themselves. That would be an easy fix for Paris and Torres, who would have a confab with the other parents and everything would be wrapped up in a televised hour. Not so easy in real life. I personally witnessed bullied kids forced to relocate to other schools because the situation did not improve, and a big part of that was due to apathetic parents and teachers.
@12 Yes, you are correct. So then we get into the argument whose rights matter most? The EMH’s or the mother’s?
They both win. Just like any other Doctor, the EMH doesn’t have to do an elective procedure if he doesn’t want to. Torres can edit her fetus’s DNA to her heart’s content or abort it or whatever she likes, but she’s not entitled to assistance from anybody in particular in her attempt to do so. There’s nothing unique or special about pregnancy in this regard, if someone comes in and wants a mole removed or whatever, the EMH is within his rights not to perform such a procedure if in his judgment it’s not justified. Like Torres, our hypothetical crewman will have to get his mole removed somewhere else, and the Doctor isn’t violating his rights by not removing the mole.
“Janeway gets dragged into the middle of a marital spat by Paris and Torres. She then drags herself right back out again, not wanting any piece of that and not willing to insert herself into a private medical decision. We’ll just pretend “Tuvix” and “Nothing Human” never happened…”
I don’t think this comparison is fair. There were no lives at risk in this episode, nothing that affected the safety of the ship or its crew. Say what you want about the ethics in those other episodes, you can’t deny the stakes were a lot higher and warranted some kind of command decision. This one didn’t. Apples and oranges.
@22 True, this should have cropped up in the Federation before, with legal precedents which would make this a legal decision for Janeway, not a moral one. I suppose that is not a story the writers wanted to write.
It occurs to me that Torres wants something she expects to make her daughter better off, and that no one expects to make her worse off. So from a utilitarian point of view, there is not much of a moral dilemma here. Do the thing that might make someone better off and won’t make her worse off.
As a little girl I had a bug put down my back, and was chased several times by little boys holding a bug. I strongly suspect the worm incident was more about little boy teasing girl than racism against Klingons. That said the little boy in question should definitely have gotten a scolding as the little boys bothering me did. How else are they going to learn there are better ways to get a girl’s attention?
Lineage suffers from very soap opera-ish execution at times. It’s very much how @krad put it: the old cliché of the hysterical woman who needs saving. And it feels very out of character for Torres. Why they didn’t assign this script to the one female writer on staff (Phyllis Strong) is an exercise left for the viewer – it doesn’t paint Kenneth Biller in a good light either.
Of course, I haven’t been a parent myself, let alone one who has the means necessary to possibly cure any imperfection their child could possibly have, so I’m not in a position to judge Torres’s actions here (aside from tampering with the EMH). It’s a thorny area, and at least the episode commits to its premise without backing away.
Despite its shortcomings, I do appreciate the episode for how it handles Paris. Season 7 is very much a Paris/Torres season, in terms of at least trying any long term arc. I wholeheartedly adore Paris’s speech about wanting to live three or four Klingons. It’s a credit to his own evolution, becoming a better person – and it echoes the best humanist Roddenberry philosophy that’s always been an essential part of Trek.
“I am not your father and you are not your mother. And our daughter is going to be perfect just the way she is.”
As ever with this show, you kind of have to overlook the fact that this is at least the fourth episode dealing with B’Elanna’s discomfort over her Klingon heritage. (Something I’ve been pointing out repeatedly in the last few seasons: Apologies to Keith if you’ve been doing the same and I haven’t noticed, as CLB says!) But once you do, this is a great character piece. The first half could be transplanted into a modern-day show without much rewrite. It’s slightly amusing to see a hormonal Torres being uncharacteristically nice to everyone, and then the whole crew want to give their opinion on the pregnancy. This does come close to crossing the line when we get the “man sleeps on best mate’s couch because of row with wife” cliché transplanted to a starship, but I guess it’s a useful short hand for telling us what sort of story this is.
Despite the lack of science fiction trappings, this does what Star Trek does best, using its genre to shine a light on the present day. People have expressed doubts about the realism of the Federation not using genetic engineering, but that’s probably because it’s a subject that us turn of the millennium types aren’t comfortable with. No-one objects to using gene therapy to correct birth defects in the same way surgery would have been used previous. But the idea of parents being able to choose their children’s appearance raises the question of why does it matter? I definitely don’t see it as an abortion metaphor (it’s not about B’Elanna’s right to choose whether to have a child, it’s about whether she has the right to decide what that child will look like), and I’m extremely worried that anyone thinks “whitening” a child to protect them from racism is the right choice.
Of course, ultimately it’s not about B’Elanna only being able to love a child who looks a certain way, it’s about her own insecurities. From what we see of her childhood, her human family seem basically decent if occasionally insensitive, and she’s the one removing herself from the family group rather than them shunning her, but she was an insecure girl who was handled wrongly, so grew up still insecure and needing to be in control. They’ve been solid for so long that it’s easy to forget it took Torres about a year to admit her feelings for Paris, and there’s a subtle touch to the way she controls the Doctor in the same way she’s trying to control her daughter. But ultimately she underestimates Paris. I know he’s not everyone’s favourite, and he’ll never be the most mature of characters, but his love and commitment to his family is so unswavering that he genuinely made me cry at the end.
There’s some good character moments mixed in, such as Paris awkwardly asking Tuvok for advice, Icheb not quite understanding pregnancy and Seven being remarkably cool about the whole thing. Torres asking the Doctor to be the baby’s godfather shows how far the crew have come in their treatment towards him: You could imagine Kes making the offer back in the first season, but no-one else. (Poor Harry doesn’t get considered though?) We’re back to Voyager having been in the Delta Quadrant for six years again, I guess everyone on board is doing a lot of rounding up and down! Chell is mentioned but not seen.
It may have played as a cliche, but I thought the main purpose of booting Paris out of their quarters overnight was to gave B’elanna a chance to sneak out and modify the Doctor’s program without being spotted. If Paris had been home he might have at least wondered what she was out and up to. Considering when the Doctor pages them, that’s when she must have done it. There was a plot purpose beyond “henpecked husband” cliche.
@41- Chalk up another case for our theoretical Emergency Legal Hologram!
In America the husband traditionally sleeps on his own couch rather than going elsewhere. I suppose because most of the married people In our sitcoms live in houses not apartments.
B’Elanna’s feeling of persecution seem to come mostly from within. She can’t accept her Klingon self so she projects those feelings onto the full humans around her. John shouldn’t have left but I can see how he felt rejected by both wife and daughter.
karey: My issue wasn’t with Paris being kicked out of his and Torres’s cabin, my issue was with him having to sleep on Kim’s couch when there just have to be spare cabins available for him to use….
Also, just a general houskeeping note, we — as usual — skipped Labor Day, and we’ll be back Thursday with “Repentance.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@ KRAD I wonder if maybe Paris went to Kim’s because he wanted to be near a friend? This is an emotional time for him, too, and it is possible that he would rather be able to talk to his best friend than sit in a spare room with nothing but his own thoughts.
The fact this is done pre-birth muddles the message. I think it should have been saved after the baby’s birth and have Tores say she wants the baby’s ridges removed so he looks more human. That would fit with RL parents who want their children to be more white or “non-ethnic.”
@52/CT Phipps: Not at all — the question of whether genetic engineering would be used to eradicate racial or sexual diversity or minority traits has been part of the ethical debate over its use for decades, and is certainly worth exploring in a science fiction story. It doesn’t muddle the message at all, because it’s a real future possibility, and because it helps shine a light on modern issues if you ask people to consider what they would do if they did have access to some futuristic or paranormal means of turning their wishes or beliefs into reality. Science fiction and fantasy can be powerful tools for allegory precisely because they explore possibilities beyond everyday life and thus give us new angles for considering modern concerns and values in ways that we can’t with just a literal translation of present-day possibilities.
I don’t mind the odd episode that features primary on a personal story about the crew rather than shoe horning in a second storyline, this works well I think and deserves better than a five out of ten.
First time around I was convinced that B’Elanna was going to lose the baby here, especially knowing Voyagers antipathy to running story threads over multiple episodes, I am glad they didn’t do that . B’Elanna’s flash back to her time with her father are well done in particular Jessica Gaona is very good and convincing as the young B’Elanna,
CLB: “the last thing I would ever do is try to change my child to conform to the bullies’ petty expectations. That would be a surrender. It would be saying the bullies were right, and that’s a horrible attitude to raise your child with. I’d want my child to defy the bullies and take pride in being themselves, and I’d try to give them more support and encouragement in doing so than I was given by the adults in my life. It should be the bullies who need to change, not their victims. Putting the onus on the victims to conform is becoming part of the bullying.”
THIS is what I expected Paris to come up with, and the fact that he didn’t really spoiled it for me. I also didn’t think the flashbacks gave enough support to Belanna’s claim of racism. To me the incident was clearly just typical preadolescent boy behavior. Once she confessed to feeling like she had driven her dad away, I saw the point of how they had done the scene, but it just didn’t have enough kick for me and I couldn’t feel sorry for her. If the real issue was her fear of Tom’s leaving like her father did, I would rather have seen some of the husband-wife arguments that were only hinted at here.
I finished watching this episode with a feeling of “why didn’t I like that better,” and that’s one of the reasons. Another major reason was the overwhelming amount of cliched remarks in the first third of the show, which I couldn’t help thinking had aged very poorly. Especially Harry’s tease that “it’s all over for you now.” That was outdated even when the show was written. The other problrem I had with it was that I really can’t believe genetic engineering like that would be legal.
The girl who played Young Belanna was very good, and I liked Tuvok’s advice to Paris about preparing for paradoxes. Not to mention the big laugh about the parasite from Icheb.
I really liked this episode. It’s meaty and has a lot of nuance and nothing is cut and dry.
Well, nothing except modifying the Doctor. What makes it most annoying, to me, is that they could have had her engineering smarts come into play some other way to the same end. She could have modified the medical equipment, or spun a yarn based in real things about some obscure illness that she would be passing on to the kid, or tried to do the procedure herself by deceiving the doctor.
That said though, offering the Doctor to be the kid’s godfather was a moving scene and went a long way toward making it okay. It still isn’t, but I was moved. I’m glad the Doctor is used to Torres making modifications on him all the time; that also makes it more okay, though it still isn’t.
I totally get (a) that the people on the campout were much more empathetic and kind than she took them for and (b) why she would have a hangup about klingonness – there’s a lot of legit reason for such a hangup, between being mistreated and dealing with her violent moody streak, which of course may be from trauma/broken trust as much as anything else, maybe, and that’s life. I completely empathize with her not wanting her kid to have a big ridgy forehead. The blonde hair is something else, something creepier, and I appreciate that it was part of it.
I want to go on record (such as it is) saying here that I think any writer can write any legit good story about any subject. The lyrics to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” were written by Gerry Goffin. Plenty more like it. “You aren’t allowed to write a story that touches on a woman’s issue until you stop this being-a-man nonsense” is such a sad position to take. I’m happy not to wait for reincarnation to write various things. But I guess I would say this stuff, being enby.
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/16xf6or/what_are_some_movies_with_interesting_complex/
/soapbox :)
Love following along in my first-watch with this re-watch, as always, ty, ty, dgmw! :)
This episode made me feel icky for the precise reasons KRad put down. Resorting the trope of the “hysterical” woman is weak. And the lack of consequences (not to mention safeguards that would have prevented the incident) are alarming.
But I also don’t think the episode has nearly enough life to sustain itself for the allotted time. The flashbacks were painfully dull and clichéd. I don’t mind a good character episode, but this just isn’t one of them for me.