B'Elanna Torres
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| B'Elanna Torres | |
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| Species: | Half Klingon (through mother) Half human (through father) |
| Gender: | Female |
| Eye color: | Brown |
| Home planet: | Kessik IV |
| Affiliation: | Maquis Starfleet |
| Posting: | USS Voyager chief engineer |
| Rank: | Lieutenant junior grade (provisional) |
| Portrayed by: | Roxann Dawson |
B'Elanna Torres, played by Roxann Dawson in Star Trek: Voyager, is a character in the fictional Star Trek universe. She is the Chief Engineer of the USS Voyager.
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[edit] Childhood
Born in 2349 on the Federation colony Kessik IV, Torres had a troubled childhood. Her human father and Klingon mother often fought, and her father ultimately left the household when B'Elanna was ten or eleven years old. He returned to Earth, leaving B'Elanna to be raised by her mother.
A mixture of Klingon and human genes, Torres was prone to aggressive outbursts. For example, she once attacked schoolmate Daniel Byrd after he repeatedly taunted her, calling her "Miss Turtlehead" (because of her cranial ridges). Torres retained this aggressive behavior throughout her life, but with help of several mentors, she learned to eventually control it.
[edit] Starfleet Academy and Maquis
After Torres dropped out of Starfleet Academy in 2368 at age 19, she became a member of the Maquis renegade group, where she developed a profound hatred of the Cardassians. Torres became associated with Maquis captain Chakotay, and was serving as chief engineer on his ship, the Val Jean, when they were brought to the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker.
During her time with the Maquis, Torres reprogrammed a Cardassian missile known as "Dreadnought". The missile, built with artificial intelligence, was originally targeted at Maquis installations. Torres reprogrammed it on a course for a Cardassian installation, but Dreadnought was swept into the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker.
[edit] Voyager
In 2371, Torres joined the Voyager crew with the rest of the Maquis from the Val Jean. She was placed in the engineering department, which had no clear department head because the original chief engineer was killed during the trip to the Delta Quadrant. As a result, Torres often came into conflict with one of the department's most senior officers, Lieutenant Carey. Captain Janeway eventually promoted Torres to chief engineer over Carey, choosing her based on Chakotay's recommendation. After that, Janeway and Torres shared a crisis with a black hole. ("Parallax")
Shortly after becoming chief engineer, however, Torres betrayed the captain's trust when Voyager encountered a race known as the Sikarians. The Sikarians had advanced transporter technology that could send Voyager home or at least drastically shorten their 70-year journey, but Sikarian law prohibited them from obtaining it legitimately. Torres was involved with a small group of officers that obtained the technology on the Sikarian black market, and perpetrated a failed attempt to integrate it into Voyager's systems.
Torres, along with Tom Paris, was kidnapped by the Vidiians. A Vidiian scientist extracted the Klingon DNA from Torres, splicing her into two separate people: one human, one Klingon — because he believed that Klingon DNA could lead to a cure for the Phage, a disease affecting his people. The human Torres was fraught with human weaknesses, such as fear and timidity, while the Klingon Torres was uncompromisingly aggressive. When they escaped from the Vidiians and returned to Voyager, the Klingon Torres suffered a fatal phaser wound and died, but the Doctor used her DNA to restore the human Torres to her half-human, half-Klingon state, stating that they both lacked critical proteins needed to survive.
In 2373, Torres was the target of telepathic dreams from a member of a race called the Enarans. The dreams were in fact memories of a great massacre that took place on the Enaran homeworld, and were the elder Enaran's method of making sure that the memory of this massacre lives on, even if it was in the mind of an alien.
Later that year, Vulcan engineer Vorik accidentally triggered Torres's mating instincts when he initiated a telepathic bond with her while he was experiencing the pon farr. Torres and Tom Paris were trapped on a planet together during an away mission, and Torres attempted to get Paris to mate with her, but he resisted. Eventually, Vorik and Torres (on behalf of Paris) engaged in ritual battle and purged the blood fever.
[edit] Love and honor
In the first two seasons of the show, Torres was shown as having a suppressed attraction to Chakotay, with Torres having fantasized about making love to Chakotay in the episode, "Persistence of Vision".
Torres confessed her love of Tom Paris to him when they were trapped in environmental suits, floating in space with almost no hope of rescue ("Day of Honor"). Although Voyager did rescue them, she realized that her courage in admitting her love brought her one step closer to true honor. Their relationship first flourished on-screen during "Scientific Method". However, the couple did not get married until 2377. Torres and Paris had their honeymoon aboard the Delta Flyer.
The relationship was not an easy one; Torres and Paris often got into heated disagreements, particularly over Klingon culture, as well as Paris' questionable choice of holodeck entertainment. For example, when Torres conceived in mid-2377, she learned from The Doctor that the child would have Klingon cranial ridges as well as other Klingon traits. Torres, remembering events from her own childhood, advocated that the Doctor should perform gene therapy to reduce the overt traits, and even went so far as to reprogram him to do so. Her husband and Captain Janeway both disagreed, and managed to prevent the Doctor from performing the genetic modifications.
Torres's unborn child was later deemed the Klingon savior by a cult of Klingons that had journeyed deep into the Delta Quadrant on a generational voyage in search of a messiah to bring peace to the empire. This despite the fact that the child was only 1/4 Klingon. The Klingons eventually settled on an uninhabited world, but during their time on Voyager, they reawakened Torres's interest in her Klingon heritage.
Prior to that incident, Torres' feelings about her Klingon heritage had been mixed. She once engaged in a dangerous ritual and journeyed to Gre'Thor, the Klingon Hell, because her dishonor had condemned her mother to that afterlife rather than the more desirable Sto-vo-kor. Torres saved both her mother and herself by agreeing to live with the discipline and honour befitting a Klingon.
Torres' child was born in early 2378, during Voyager's trip through a Borg transwarp conduit back toward the Alpha Quadrant. In an alternate timeline where Voyager made it home through a different means, the child is named Miral Paris after Torres's mother, and is a Starfleet ensign. It is unsure if this occurred in the revised timeline.
[edit] External links
- B'Elanna Torres article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki.
- StarTrek.com Bio
| Regular characters on Star Trek | |||
| The Original Series | Kirk | Spock | McCoy | Scott | Uhura | Sulu | Chekov | Chapel | Rand | ||
| Animated Series | Arex | M'Ress | ||
| The Next Generation | Picard | Riker | Data | La Forge | Worf | B. Crusher | Troi | W. Crusher | Yar | Pulaski | ||
| Deep Space Nine | B. Sisko | Kira | J. Dax | Odo | Bashir | O'Brien | Worf | J. Sisko | Quark | Rom | Nog | E. Dax | Garak | Martok | Damar | Dukat | Weyoun | Winn | ||
| Voyager | Janeway | Chakotay | Tuvok | Paris | Torres | Kim | Doctor | Neelix | Seven | Kes | ||
| Enterprise | Archer | T'Pol | Tucker | Reed | Phlox | Sato | Mayweather | ||
