Face Of The Enemy

Worf's ponytail makes its debut here. Something he would keep for the remainder of this series and keep when he moved on to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993). Michael Dorn wanted the change because he was tired of "looking like a Klingon who's just been to the beauty salon!"

Troi goes undercover as a Romulan, presumably relying on the Universal Translator to make her language sound like theirs. It has been established that the Translator takes the voice of whoever is speaking and translates the words to the listener's language. Therefore, to the Romulans, Troi would look like a character in a poorly dubbed foreign movie, with the spoken words not matching the mouth movements, which would make the disguise impossible to keep up, but no one seems to notice. However, it is never specifically stated that Troi is using the Translator, so it could be the case that Troi speaks Romulan and is able to pass herself off as one. The Commander's suspicions about Troi's background could be based on her accent, which a non-native speaker would surely possess.

This, of course, would ignore all of the other instances across all of Star Trek in which the crew communicate readily with species never before encountered, but at least this occurrence has a plausible explanation.

Referenced in Star Trek: The Next Generation: Timescape (1993)