Did B'Elanna die forever in Faces?

[Guy Gardener]

Transporter spilt into two.

Deadish.

The Klingon half dies in a brawl?

The human half is going to die, but they shoot her up with Klingon corpse juice via the transporter, and the Engineer seems to be back to normal.

Even though the book keeping accounts this woman to be a completely different new transporter clone.

She's a transporter clone of half a transporter clone of the original.

The final product seems to be the half dead granddaughter of the original B'Elanna by some regards, or just her sister too arrogant to accept that she's not who every memory and fibre insists that she verily is.

Tom Riker.

Tuvix.

Kirk in "The Enemy within".

Her eyebrows got a lot smaller after this episode did you notice? Was she plucking, or was there significantly less active Klingon in her makeup after the recombination?

"If Groucho Marx and Brooke Shields had a baby, she would have your eyebrows."

(The Princess Diaries.)

 

[Gov Kodos]

She got better, but, maybe, she is a witch? That should be a poll option. Does anyone have a duck handy?

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

People will be getting Philosophy doctorates in the future writing theses on self and the transporter.

What if they could duplicate the duplicating accidents? I'm sure there are rogue labs practicing this techno voodoo on animals and unwanted humanoids they buy from Orion slavers. They're dividing people into parts, blending the parts, making new people.. after about a ten thousand tons of TMP style screaming mush disasters someone is going to figure it out. How to blend, how to separate. How to make a profit from this technique. Quicker than cloning.

 

[Guy Gardener]

B'Elanna didn't have enough mass to make two people.

They probably included Ninety pounds of generic stem cells into the mix, harvested from dozens of babies from disparate species to paste the cracks together.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Dividing people would only bring in profit if you were selling them to humanoid eaters. In which case you might as well divide cows, less illegal. You won't get any great super soldiers because one divided person is always a weakling and the other a psycho with an expiry date.

The real beauty would be in the blending. You blend a Klingon and a Nausicaan and you stick it in stasis, only waking it up when you were ready to point it in the direction of who did this terrible thing to it.. or so you say.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Along the same lines you can philosophically argue that every time a transporter is used one person is killed and another identical person is born.

I think the implication in that particular episode is that the human half was the real B'elana and the klingon DNA was somehow extracted and manifested as a new person.

 

[Guy Gardener]

They both had the same electrochemical memories and drives for the first few seconds, until radically and violently different chemicals in their disparate alien bodies started to attack the default setting on the B'Elanna personality.

 

[marksound]

Along the same lines you can philosophically argue that every time a transporter is used one person is killed and another identical person is born.

Wasn't Christian Bale in a flick with that premise?

 

[Guy Gardener]

That wasn't a movie.

That's how he dates.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Also, isn't it a little weird that the Vidian phage was cured in a throwaway line in Think Tank?

Have any of the novels taken place in the DQ after Voyager left? That could probably make a good novel. Vidians rebuilding their society, trying to make amends with the galaxy by offering medical technology while everybody wants to kill them out of revenge. A generation of younger Vidians trying to dissociate themselves from their parents' crimes. A conflict between Vidian nationalists who justify their crimes by necessity and Vidians who want to rejoin the galaxy and start a new DQ Federation.

I think there's at least a miniseries worth of material there.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

And then you'd have the goth Vidiian cultists who missed the old days so traded body parts with each other.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

That's it, we start a Kickstarter project and pay Ron Moore to write it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It always comes back to Shattered.

Chakotay is talking about how that "Angry young woman" is going to grow up to be a trusted and valued member of Kathryn's crew... After she is murdered and replaced with a slapdash clone.

 

[Kadratis]

I agree that she "died," but I think the ordeal changed B'Elanna for the better.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

She is not the same woman in that she learned much about herself, which changed her.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Also, isn't it a little weird that the Vidian phage was cured in a throwaway line in Think Tank?

KURROS: The mind of mathematician and the soul of an artist. I'm afraid he'd much rather be modelling a fractal sculpture than analysing the data of our latest astronomical scan. And now you have met us all. A small group of minds, but we have helped hundreds of clients. We turned the tide in the war between the Bara Plenum and the Motali Empire. Re-ignited the red giants of the Zai Cluster. Just recently, we found a cure for the Vidiian phage.
JANEWAY: The Vidiians?
KURROS: You would hardly recognise them now. Just last month we helped retrieve a Lyridian child's runaway pet. A subspace mesomorph, I might add. We had to invent a whole new scanning technology just to find it.
JANEWAY: And what did you ask for as compensation?

I always took that line "you would hardly recognize them now" as very sinister.

Maybe they cured the phage, but at what cost and with what consequences?

If cured wasn't an outright euphemism for genocide, they could now be semi sentient goo, or had their brains digitized and now they all live as holograms and robots.

And who says that the Vidians asked for a cure for the plhage and not the dozens of worlds that had been being pillaged by their organ-harvesting privateers? If so, then certainly the success criteria for te assignment didn't have to favour well for the Vidiians perception of a fine quality of life after the fact.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

If you cure the Vidiians you're only curing the establishment ones. You would still be dealing with the body modification cult that many Vidiians would have embraced as their identity. VOY didn't show us those ones, they are poor and an alternative subculture so look even more hideous than the ones we saw.

 

[jpch]

Omg!!! ''Faces'' one hell of an amazing episode in season 1.
Physically she is the same.
Psychologically seeing your other half split from you is traumatizing but she seems to have greatly evolved and has a new understanding about herself.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I was not too impressed with it.

But I was jaded by many previous transporter accidents.

 

[Guy Gardener]

But this wasn't an accident.

A mad scientist cut her in half, then wore her good friends face as a hat so that the sexy half of her would fuck him.