In the twelfth episode of the seventh season of Voyager, B’Elanna uses drastic measures to protect someone she loves. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For extensive talk of bullying, racism, and parental abuse.
In the end, I understand B’Elanna Torres completely.
It is a rough road to that point, and I admit that I spent most of “Lineage” cringing as I watched B’Elanna plunge deeper and deeper into this decision that she’d made. Star Trek has often used the fictional species of its canon to act as a reference to race and racism, and that implication is all over this episode. Thus, there was a part of my brain that couldn’t comprehend what I was watching. The writers were having a Latinx actress advocate for her character’s daughter to be born with most of the genetic material from her white husband. Sure, that’s stripping the metaphor of the context of the show’s canon, but then there’s that scene where B’Elanna imagines her daughter as blonde, and it felt so obvious to me. Was this supposed to all be a stand-in for a biracial person not wanting their child to be tainted by non-whiteness?
I still think that’s an undeniable element of this story, but I want to analyze through a different lens. The entire time, I needed to know why B’Elanna would go to such lengths to protect her daughter, which included altering the Doctor’s program so that he would agree with her. It’s a huge violation of his character, and I needed a comparable response and explanation of B’Elanna’s motivation. She was bullied for being half-Klingon… okay. That’s the start of something, but it felt so strange that all of her flashbacks were to a specific memory, not a collection of all the times she was bullied. Why was that so important?
“Lineage” saves that revelation until the climactic moment, and when B’Elanna tells Tom the story of how her father came to leave her, the entire episode falls into place. It’s that final piece of puzzle, and it’s important that we consider it a piece. It is not a singular answer. It is not The One Thing that explains everything, but rather the keystone in B’Elanna’s history, an event so traumatizing and horrific that it shaped a large part of her identity.
And I say that because I know what mine is.
It might be easy to process a life as a whole rather than to pick it apart and identify which pieces mattered the most. Indeed, I’m resisting the same impulse as I try to shuffle through the bits of the mess of “Lineage,” but I’ll start here: it is absolutely traumatizing to have a parent reject you because of who you are. I had the double luck of possessing two identities that my mother despised: I was Latinx, born of a father who escaped back to Mexico upon news of my existence, and I was very clearly, obviously gay. No matter how much I tried to hide the latter, my parents always knew the truth. They saw my flamboyance, my effeminate hand movements, my love of literature, my tendency to cry at the slightest provocation. There might as well have been a neon arrow flashing above my head the entire time.
This is also why I despise Rachel Dolezal just a tad bit more than the normal human: because I desperately need resources as a transracial adoptee. To have your parents reject you must be a horrifying experience for anyone. But knowing that your parents chose you at first, and then suddenly didn’t seem to want you… look, it’s complicated. Alienating. A lonely experience. And when I discovered that there was a term for people like myself, who had been taken from any ethnic or cultural connection and transplanted to something new and scary, I began the healing process. Of course, Dolezal ruined that for me and thousands upon thousands of others because she started using that term to describe herself, making it damn near impossible for me to sift through her nonsense to find things for myself.
It was my mother’s utter rejection of me and her request that I go live my own life – alone, I should add – that forms the memory that is most prescient for me. There’s so much more that sits behind that one moment, of course: the pervasive use of slurs throughout my upbringing; my mother trying to turn my brother and I into white boys; the consistent homophobia; the abuse. But that one memory relates so much to my fears of rejection, and I can’t deny how powerful it’s been on my psyche.
So I understand B’Elanna, even if I would not have made the same decisions. (I have much more spite in me, which has led me to being unapologetically brown and queer.) She overheard her father admit horrible things, and she experienced a kind of dismissal that’s gut-wrenching. PARENTS: DON’T TELL YOUR KIDS NOT TO BE SENSITIVE, I AM LIVING PROOF THAT IT DOES NOT WORK. First of all, it made me more sensitive for a long time because I was so confused and bewildered by having my parents seem to take my bullies’ side, and it tanked my self-esteem. And I know plenty of people who were told not to be so sensitive and instead, they chose to build armor around themselves that transformed into toxic behavioral patterns. THAT IS NOT A BETTER OPTION.
My point in opening up about all of this is that B’Elanna’s actions have an internal logic based on her own history, and even if she does behave poorly, I don’t question the motivation. I know why she did this. She had an opportunity to remove the aspect of her daughter’s body that were the same things she was bullied for. Tom’s promise that bullying won’t happen on Voyager is irrelevant to her because Earth wasn’t exactly the paradise the Federation makes it out to be. How can Tom make the same promise? Of course, there was a larger insecurity at work: B’Elanna believed that Tom would eventually leave her just like her father did.
That is real, y’all. B’Elanna was trying to protect herself as much as she thought she was protecting her daughter. When you’ve been through trauma, your mind can often come up with defense mechanisms for possible future traumas, and unfortunately, they can manifest as B’Elanna’s did here. The truth is that these two will have to actively work towards supporting their daughter, and hopefully, Tom won’t make the same mistake. It doesn’t sound like he would ever dream of doing so, but as I said: it’s still work, and he’s got to be conscious of that if he hopes to be a better father than B’Elanna’s.
The video for “Lineage” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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