6x14 Face of the Enemy

[7.8/10] Personal stakes. Political intrigue. Cultural Clashes. Legitimate mysteries. Character growth. Thorny sci-fi problems. These are the things great Star Trek episodes are made of. And “Face of the Enemy” has them all.

Counselor Troi has been made a double agent against her will. The Romulan underground reunification effort needs her to ferry some key defectors to the Federation. To do so, she has to pose as an operative of the Tal Shiar, the Romulan secret police. Her new guise puts her in conflict with Toreth, a Romulan military commander who resents the interference from a coequal agency. And through all of this, the Enterprise’s only insight comes from a Starfleet ensign who turned traitor and ran to the Romulans twenty years ago, having now recanted, for however much Picard and company can trust him.

That’s one hell of a premise! But we’ve seen great premises squandered on The Next Generation before. What makes “Face of the Enemy” sing is the way writers René Echevarria and Naren Shankar, and director Gabrielle Beaumont bring all these elements together. There’s a sense of urgency, tension, and mystery at every step along the way, which helps us to feel the concern of the characters and carries the energy of the hour from beginning to end.

It helps that there’s next to no exposition here. The episode begins with the shock of Troi waking up as a Romulan and meeting a handler who tells her there’s no time to explain. Likewise, when Ensign DeSeve, the Federation defector, arrives on the Enterprise, there’s no lieutenant reading his character sheet off of a padd. Instead, we learn enough about his tenuous position in everyone’s eyes from the reactions of those escorting him through the ship. The episode just throws the characters, and the audience, into the deep waters and expects them to swim. It keeps this one humming.

More to the point, it’s a weird thing to say, but it’s nice how much we don’t know here. There’s instant intrigue for why anyone would kidnap Troi and make her into a Romulan. Even when her escort mission is made clear, which takes a while, exactly how she’s supposed to achieve this feat is deliberately kept from her, supposedly for her own protection. The parameters of the mission, for Troi and her handler, or DeSeve and Captain Picard, are murky, which keeps the tension up as a tet-a-tet between the Romulans and the Federation seems imminent.

The same tension extends to the business aboard the Romulan ship. Double agent stories always involve the inherent pressure of whether our hero can keep up the act long enough to be convincing, or whether they’ll be found out. Troi’s empathic abilities help, but she’s not exactly a field officer. So the added difficulty of throwing a ship’s counselor into a tightly-wound spy mission makes the chances for success feel all the more tenuous.

What’s more, the dynamic aboard the Romulan vessel is especially interesting given the different dynamics at play. Troi is trying to play a role in a scheme whose full contours she isn’t shown, as a member of a culture she knows little about, while trying to hang onto her own safety and principles. Her kidnapper and accomplice, Subcommander N’Vek, is a trained operative, not afraid to get his hands dirty or strongarm people in the name of what he thinks is the greater good, namely establishing a safe route of escape for Romulan dissidents. And they both have to fool Commander Toreth, who not only blanches at having some stranger barge onto her ship and tell her what to do, but who has a longstanding grudge against the Tal Shiar after they killed her father.

In short, the Romulan vessel is a powderkeg, with multiple angles of mistrust, mystery, and chances for things to go terribly wrong to keep us on the edge of our seats. Toreth in particular is a treat, giving us the rare glimpse of how things work in the Romulan chain of command when there’s no humans to posture with, and revealing some of the internal disputes and resentments within the Empire that our Starfleet heroes typically aren’t privy to. One of the consistent bright spots of Star Trek are the chances when we get to see another culture up close, getting to observe how they see themselves, not just how the Federation sees them. And this episode more than delivers on that front.

So what holds it back from even greater heights? A few things. The first is, I’m sorry to say, Marina Sirtis. I don’t want to pile on here. Sirtis honestly does a pretty good job in an unfamiliar type of role for both her and her character. But the script asks a lot of her. There’s a ton of high volume acting, multi-layered reactions, and intimidation called for from Troi and, god bless her, Sirtis just isn’t fully up to it.

And yet, there’s ways in which that works here because, hey, Troi isn’t really up to this either. The emotional catharsis of the story comes when the counselor stops being a passive part of this mission and starts being an active player. Watching her turn the tables on N’Vek and start ordering him around after his plan goes sideways, or make a big gamble on taking command from Toreth and threatening the Romulan crew’s families if they don’t obey is big time coming-into-her-own stuff for Troi. Sirtis doesn’t always fully sell it, but it still plays like a dose of self-actualization for her character, falling firmly into “good enough” territory.

In the same way, “Face of the Enemy” paces out its reveals and plot twists brilliantly. We jump back and forth between Troi’s espionage routine aboard the Romulan vessel on the one hand and Picard’s dealings with a defector who claims to have a message from Spock on the other at just the right times. We see the way the two captains, and the operatives on their ship, are both stumbling around in the dark to some extent, and for once, the dramatic irony of what the audience knows but the characters don’t works in the story’s favor. And the turns in the narrative are plausible and exciting.

What’s the catch? Well, the ending is a little convenient and unsatisfying. Toreth kills N’Vek and exposes Troi, giving us the narrative catharsis of the ploy falling apart. But the Enterprise is still able to beam her back just in time to avoid any repercussions. And while she and her ally are able to sneak the high-ranking Romulan defectors onto the Enterprise, the closing comments make it seem like they’ve succeeded in finding a good method to spirit away others, when their main plan failed, and Toreth will no doubt advise her superiors about their back-up plan so the Empire can be on guard for it. It feels like a “won the battle, lost the war” moment rather than the pure triumph it’s framed as.

Also, not for nothing, it’s a little odd how much this one hinges on the Enterprise bridge crew seeing Troi her in Romulan guise and in command of a warbird, and taking it for granted that she’s still their trustworthy friend. We’ve seen Geordi brainwashed by the Romulans when he was kidnapped. We’ve seen a holographic Spock made to parrot the Romulan party line. And most notably, we’ve seen a Romulan lookalike for Tasha Yar pop up out of nowhere and turn out to be a malevolent true believer. Picard takes a lot on faith here, in ways that seem to ignore a long history of Romulan trickery.

Still, gripes aside, this is a stellar episode that’s exciting to watch from beginning to end. It not only mixes and matches some of the traditionally most thrilling and engrossing aspects of Star Trek, but it unites them under an exciting story and a worthwhile character journey for Counselor Troi, of all people. This is the sort of high stakes, personally fraught, diplomatic spy story the franchise almost always scores with, and it’s nice to see TNG give us another creative achievement as it brings all those great things together once more.