to prove his intelligence to the whole crew. In 2371, B'Elanna Torres joined the Voyager crew with the rest of the Maquis from the Val Jean, as Captain Kathryn Janeway offers them the opportunity. 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; Captain Janeway promoted Torres to chief engineer based on Voyagers first officer Chakotay's recommendation. Initially, Torres was very outspoken in her disapproval of Captain Janeway's decision to destroy the Caretaker's array, which had the ability to send the Voyager back home from the Delta Quadrant, and carried a small grudge against the captain. Over the first few months, Torres began respecting the captain and her decisions based on Janeway's strong leadership and their shared interest in science. Shortly after becoming chief engineer, Torres disobeys the captain's orders when Voyager encounters a race known as the Sikarians. The Sikarians have advanced transporter technology that could drastically shorten their 70-year journey, but Sikarian law prohibits the Voyager crew from obtaining it legitimately. Torres becomes involved with a small group of officers who obtain the technology on the Sikarian black market and perpetrate a failed attempt to integrate it into Voyager'''s systems. Torres, along with Tom Paris, was later kidnapped by the Vidiians. A Vidiian scientist extracts the Klingon DNA from Torres, splicing her into two separate people: one human, one Klingon. He believed the Klingon DNA had a specific biochemical property that could lead to a cure for the Phage, a disease affecting his people. The human Torres is portrayed fraught with fear but having strong technical expertise, while the Klingon Torres is shown as aggressive and impatient. After her escape from the Vidiians the Klingon Torres suffered a fatal wound from the Vidiian energy weapon and died, but the Doctor used her DNA to restore the human Torres to her original half-human/half-Klingon state, as her cellular structure needs the Klingon DNA to survive. In the episode "Persistence of Vision," it is revealed that Torres at the time had a romantic interest in Chakotay. In 2373, Torres was the target of telepathically inspired dreams from a member of a race called the Enarans. The dreams were actually 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