By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t every fan’s cup of tea, especially if you preferred the darker, more serialized misadventures over on Deep Space Nine. However, Voyager did one thing arguably better than any Trek before or since: demonstrating just how weird exploring the galaxy can get. This is especially true in “Persistence of Vision,” an episode where the crew is forced to have increasingly bizarre hallucinations that cause some characters to reflect on the past. This includes Captain Janeway, who sees a vision of the husband that she left back in the Alpha Quadrant. Other characters hallucinate in different ways, including Chief Engineer B’elana Torres.
Normally, this hotheaded half-Klingon is all business, especially during an emergency. However, she ends up hallucinating a sexual fantasy involving Commander Chakotay, which many fans thought meant that she secretly had feelings for him. Incidentally, Chakotay actor Robert Beltran thought the same thing, and he imagined this episode might be setting up a relationship between their characters in later episodes. However, Torres actor Roxann Dawson pushed back against these claims, arguing there was simply no way that her character would fall in love with the ship’s first officer.
Breaching Her Warp Core
The premise of “Persistence of Vision” begins like many Star Trek: Voyager episodes: with the ship getting ready to make contact with an exotic race of aliens. The Botha are standoffish at first, but are willing to negotiate with Captain Janeway about safe passage through their little corner of the Delta Quadrant. Soon, crew members start seeing wild hallucinations and have no idea why this is happening. Eventually, it is revealed that these hallucinations are being caused by a telepathic Bothan. While everyone sees different things, B’elanna Torres gets an especially spicy fantasy involving Commander Chakotay.
Somewhat disappointingly, we find out that the Bothan caused all these chaotic hallucinations simply because he could. Janeway speculates that the alien might have done everyone a favor by forcing them to confront buried emotions. Because of this, Chakotay actor Robert Beltran believed that Torres must be secretly holding a candle for his own character. In an interview with The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine, he said, “That was very interesting to me because it revealed in Torres how she might be feeling about Chakotay. This entity reveals all of our fantasies, and we got to see how she feels about him.”
Carrying A Torch Through The Delta Quadrant
In that same interview, Beltran speculated that his character might harbor secret feelings for Torres. “Maybe he’ll feel the same for her,” he said. “That’s not quite confirmed, but it’s possible, and it sets the stage for some further development of their relationship.” It’s a provocative idea, one that is even explored in Pathways, a Star Trek: Voyager book written by “Persistence of Vision” screenwriter Jeri Taylor. However, one person who has been fighting this interpretation from the very beginning is B’elanna Torres actor Roxann Dawson.
In an interview with Cinefantastique, Dawson said, “the strength of that alien, the way he could get to us as Humans, was that he understands the deep need…we all have to love and to be loved.” She believes that her character’s “trance” was not “a reflection of a direct attraction to Chakotay” but instead “a desire to give in to a side that she does not give into easily…I don’t think that necessarily means that he is always on her mind…it was more of a reflection of her need to please, to fulfill, all of these things are very real, very human.”
Red (Hot) Alert
In other words, since Torres is half-human, half-Klingon, the telepathic trance temporarily brought out human aspects (like being a lonely people pleaser) that she often tries to repress. In another interview with Star Trek Monthly, she opened up about how weird it would be for her character to love Chakotay, someone who is basically a surrogate father to her. “I see Chakotay as a combination of mentor and father figure for B’Elanna. She might have some romantic feelings towards him in a kind of Freudian sense, but I don’t see them getting together on any other level than as a mentor and pupil.”
This is one argument that Roxann Dawson ultimately won. There weren’t many sparks between B’elanna Torres and Commander Chakotay after this, and her character eventually ended up with Robert Duncan McNeil’s Tom Paris. Chakotay remained relatively unlucky in love, never hooking up with Captain Janeway despite lots of heavy-handed flirting. He finally hooked up with Seven of Nine in the last four episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, but they are apparently broken up by the time of Star Trek: Picard. That’s okay, though: Chakotay likely would have been just as checked out of any romantic relationship as Robert Beltran was checked out of his performance!
