Just a few episodes after exchanging her old outfits for a standard Starfleet uniform, Counselor Troi is suddenly given an episode in which she plays an unprecedentedly serious and substantive role. Coincidence? I doubt it. This “throw Troi into the deep end and see how well she can swim” episode has always struck me as part of the same long-overdue effort to improve the handling of her character that began in “Chain of Command.” And the outcome of this experiment? An episode that, while it does strain credibility a bit for me, is nevertheless quite fun. Certainly it represents a welcome change of pace for its featured character—and, one imagines, for the actress as well. The degree to which Troi rises to the occasion here raises some questions, but color me impressed with respect to Marina Sirtis’s performance, which stands in pretty stark contrast to what most previous episodes of TNG have demanded of her. There is plenty to enjoy about “Face of the Enemy,” but the mere pleasure of watching an actress who has too often been poorly served by the show step up into the kind of meaty role that has usually been reserved (let’s face it) for the male actors, and pull it off with aplomb, is no small part of the episode’s appeal.
What makes assessing this episode somewhat tricky, though, is that a lot of things about it simultaneously feel like both strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, this is for sure the most fun Romulan episode that the show has given us since season 3, and it calls back in various ways to a number of previous episodes. For instance, the repentant defector whom the Enterprise picks up, who sends the ship on what briefly appears to be a wild goose chase, calls to mind season three’s “The Defector” (arguably the last really compelling Romulan episode before this one). Also, the casting of Carolyn Seymour as another Romulan commander feels like an answer to the missed opportunity that was the Romulan presence in season two’s deeply mediocre “Contagion.” Commander Toreth is a big part of what makes “Face of the Enemy” enjoyable; the character is both well-written and well-acted, and she comes across as more sympathetic and three-dimensional than a lot of Starfleet guest characters, while still being menacing when necessary and in general perfectly plausible as a Romulan military figure. I particularly enjoy the scene where we pick up in the middle of her recounting the story of a battle in which she distinguished herself, and she caps off the anecdote by pointedly mentioning (just after Troi-as-Tal-Shiar enters the room) that the intelligence officer who led her into the ambush wound up getting executed. (Seymour, who plays Toreth, was also the memorable Mirasta in season four’s “First Contact.” I’m notoriously oblivious to actors most of the time, but she is one who has always stood out to me as really breathing life into both characters.) But in terms of premise and plot, the previous TNG episode that this one most reminds me of is really “A Matter of Honor” from season two: a regular character occupies a key role on an “enemy” vessel that has a hostile encounter with the Enterprise, and has to act to protect the latter while maintaining credibility in their temporary role. In both cases, the featured character contrives a pretext to remove the “enemy” captain from command of the ship. Callbacks are good fun, but this is more a case of the story ending up feeling like a bit of a retread, and that detracts from my enjoyment of it. Also, the episode picks up on the Romulan dissidents story thread from “Unification” and name-checks Spock (and even calls back to the “cowboy diplomacy” line, which was one of my favorite bits from Spock’s appearance in that episode), but ultimately stops short of doing anything really meaty with it or elevating it to the level of an ongoing saga in the vein of earlier seasons’ Klingon saga (a prospect that I remember getting excited about at various moments when seeing this for the first time upon its original airing).
Then, too…the basic story hook of having one of the regular characters wake up and find herself abducted and transformed (outwardly) into a Romulan, and then have to play the part while trying to work out what’s going on, is pretty great, but the episode doesn’t really, in my view, succeed in justifying the scenario. Besides the obvious intrigue inherent in the setup, we get some nice world-building with the establishment of the Tal Shiar; plus, it was a brilliant writing choice to have our heroine cast in the role of a hatable intelligence operative, and to play her against an actual Romulan (Commander Toreth) who is much more sympathetic. But—the The Romulan dissidents have abducted a Starfleet officer to impersonate a Tal Shiar operative as part of their operation…why? The explanation given is that a Starfleet officer will be needed “in case” the primary plan goes awry (which, of course, it inevitably does). This, though, seems like a case of taking several very large and deeply dubious risks (abducting the officer, getting her to cooperate, hoping that she can pull off an impersonation that would be much easier for a genuine Romulan who actually knew something about the Tal Shiar, etc.), all as an “insurance policy” against an initial and frankly much smaller risk (that something might go wrong with the freighter hired to transport the “cargo”). Events conveniently play out in a way that, on the surface, justifies this strategy (the Corvallens prove treacherous, and Troi manages to salvage the situation), but that’s just a contrivance of the writers. So, I don’t actually buy into the dissidents’ having decided to abduct Troi…nor, unfortunately, do I entirely buy her pulling off what is asked of her in the way that she does. Part of my issue is that this is still Troi. Despite my appreciation for the writers trying to take her more seriously as a character, she should still seem like the same person, and here, thrust into the role of a feared Romulan intelligence officer with absolutely no preparation (or even warning!) and forced to improvise her way through life and death scenarios miles out of her depth, she seems to adapt rather too quickly and easily. But also, I feel like even if it were one of the other characters, I would want to see them struggling a bit more with the situation than what we actually do see. It would make the story more plausible, more relatable, and more interesting. Not that what we got isn’t interesting; I enjoy the episode, and I’ve given it four stars, after all. But I do think that Troi “steps up” rather too well, and that the episode would be better if it showed her making more mistakes, having more close calls, and only barely managing to pull it all off in the end (and even then, it’s a bit of a stretch for me that Troi manages it.)
So, overall, “Face of the Enemy” is an ambitious episode that doesn’t quite manage to fill its own shoes, but that is still pretty fun in spite of its shortcomings. I feel like there’s a truly great episode lurking in it, but the writers didn’t quite put in the time and effort necessary to find that episode, and so ended up giving us an imperfect version of it. But even so, it’s an episode that I generally look forward to watching and remember with fondness.