"Face of the Enemy" is a bit like the Stanford prison experiments starring Deanna Troi. Except, instead of putting her in a prison officer uniform, they dressed her up like a major in the Tal Shiar and waited to see how long before she threatened to blow her only ally on the Romulan ship out the airlock. The answer was not long at all.When Troi wakes up looking like a Romulan, and is given instructions by N'Vek to play the part and redirect the ship to the Kaleb Sector, she only complies because she believes that going along with it is the only way she can make it out of the situation alive. However, after N'Vek destroys the mercenary freighter that meets them to offload their secret cargo, based on a hunch by Troi, she begins to realize that N'Vek may not have the resources to get her out of there anyway. Rather than reevaluating her situation and considering other alliances or options, she doubles down on the Tal Shiar gimmick and threatens N'Vek. It's a bone-chilling scene where you realize that she is drunk on the power that having everyone on the ship frightened of her has given her. It's almost like she's forgotten that N'Vek is the one person on the ship that knows she is an imposter.
Another great scene is when Toreth, the commander of the ship, asks Troi/Rakal what gives her the right, and she points at her rank and shouts "This gives me the right!" You get the feeling that it's not just a rouse for Troi anymore, that she is buying her own bullshit and is genuinely peeved at Toreth for questioning her. It's some great acting, really. By the way, I think Toreth conducts herself honorably throughout the show. We get a touch of her backstory, which is that her father was called a traitor and dragged off by the Tal Shiar, and so she holds a particular disdain for them. Now a Tal Shiar major is on her ship, bossing her around. Not only that, but they are hauling cargo that is probably dangerous but that Toreth is not authorized to know the contents of. Then the Rakal apparently gives the order to destroy a defenseless freighter, and then cloak and attempt to enter Federation space! Naturally Toreth is against all of this, and with good reason. Furthermore she appears to handle situations in a reasonable manner, which leads me to believe that Troi could have found another way out of her situation if she had to. Instead, Troi brazenly removes Toreth from command, and threatens to shoot her if she doesn't comply.
So what exactly was Troi set up to help with anyway? Well, there is a resistance movement on Romulus, guided by Spock, that is questioning the Romulan stance and paving a way forward for unification. This mission is a test to see if they can set up sort of an underground railroad for persecuted dissidents to safely escape to asylum. That cargo? It's sympathetic Romulan officials trying to make it to Federation space. Which is why N'Vek chose a Federation officer for the plan, because she would have the access codes to get into Federation space undetected if something went wrong with the freighter, which it did. But would she? Her job is to listen to Barclay whine and keep him chill, would she really have access codes that would allow a cloaked Romulan Warbird to come through their fence? I doubt it man...
Plus I question the entire plan. How was it supposed to end? It seems that any outcome would expose Troi, and therefore the plan, and therefore would not be any good for future use as a pipeline for dissidents. Also, why are they leaving? How will they lead a movement by defecting? When Spock wanted to get involved in the movement, he went TO Romulus. And why were these three people so important that N'Vek was willing to risk as many lives as necessary to save them, including his own Again a credit to Toreth, when the whole thing is over, she just leaves. Reasonable enough."Face of the Enemy" is a Good episode of Trek. It has action, mystery, and suspense. It's fun to see Troi in a completely different scenario than she's used to, and it's chilling to see her dark side come right out. This is also an important episode, because we get to check in on Spock (sort of), and catch up on how the resistance is coming along. Not a lot of science fiction stuff going on here, but in terms of the universe of Trek and the story of the Romulans, there is a lot of progression.
Published December 23, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment