Captain Marie Batel was a female Human who served as the commanding officer of the Federation starship USS Cayuga during the mid-23rd century. She was also a member of the Judge Advocate General's Office. In 2261, to save her life after she was infected with Gorn eggs, Batel underwent a procedure that incorporated the Gorn DNA into her genome.
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Starfleet career
In 2245, Captain Batel was assigned to command the Constitution-class USS Cayuga. (SNW: "Hegemony" display graphic)
Sometime prior to 2259, Admiral Robert April would tell Batel that every good captain needs a first officer who will tell when he or she is wrong. (SNW: "Ad Astra per Aspera")
In 2259, she was in a relationship with fellow officer, Christopher Pike. She was scheduled to ship out the day after Pike was recalled to active duty by Admiral April. (SNW: "Strange New Worlds")
Later that year, she, along with the Cayuga, were assigned to upgrade the Earth Outpost Stations, bordering the Romulan Neutral Zone. During that mission, she was ordered to go aboard the USS Enterprise to arrest Pike's first officer, Lieutenant Commander Una Chin-Riley, for having illegally misrepresented her own genetically engineered heritage. Despite acknowledging that she personally disliked those orders, Batel took Chin-Riley into custody. (SNW: "A Quality of Mercy")
A short time later, Batel reluctantly acted as the judge advocate prosecutor in Una's court martial, under Vice Admiral Pasalk. Batel worked hard to get Chin-Riley a favorable plea deal that included dishonorable discharge without prison time, but Chin-Riley rejected the deal. Ultimately, the defense attorney (Neera Ketoul) successfully argued that Una Chin-Riley had essentially sought political asylum from Starfleet; the defendant was acquitted and allowed to return to duty. (SNW: "Ad Astra per Aspera")
Although Batel was up for a possible promotion to commodore, she was passed over in favor of William Geary because of "concerns." Both Pike and Batel believed that it was retaliation by Pasalk for Batel losing Chin-Riley's trial. (SNW: "Among the Lotus Eaters")
Later that year, the Cayuga and the Enterprise were assigned to a joint mission charting a new binary system.
Several days later, after the events on Rigel VII, Pike transferred Yeoman Zac Nguyen to the Cayuga for transport to prison and made amends with Batel. (SNW: "Among the Lotus Eaters")
Later that year, the Cayuga was located in the Alpha Quadrant near Gorn space when the Enterprise discovered a subspace fissure. Captain Batel and the Cayuga rendezvoused with the Enterprise, where she informed Pike that they had been assigned a priority one mission. (SNW: "Subspace Rhapsody")
While the Cayuga was helping out with vaccinations on Parnassus Beta, a colony just outside of Federation space, the Gorn attacked, destroying the Cayuga. Having been on the planet's surface with most of her crew, Batel managed to send out a distress call that was picked up by the Enterprise with the situation being complicated by the Gorn drawing a demarcation line and Starfleet not wanting to risk war over a planet that was outside of their jurisdiction. Pike and a landing party found Batel, but she had already been infected with Gorn eggs the day before which, in Humans, only had an incubation rate of a day and a half. After Spock and Nurse Christine Chapel destroyed the Gorn tower by crashing the Cayuga's wrecked saucer section into it, Pike, Batel and Lieutenant junior grade Montgomery Scott were beamed aboard the Enterprise where Chapel attempted to treat Batel, sedating her and placing Batel in a stasis field. Over Pike's objections, Batel requested to be killed if there proved to be no way of saving her life. (SNW: "Hegemony")
However, Batel turned out to be allergic to the cryoserum, preventing them from putting her into stasis, leaving Batel with a day at most to live. Spock and Chapel were ultimately able to devise a treatment in which they satiated the Gorn hatchlings to keep them from coming out, dissolved the hatchlings once they were no longer in defensive mode and then used Una's Illyrian plasma to fight the multitude of infections that would result from their reabsorption into Batel's body. After the Gorn were sent into a long hibernation, Pike visited Batel who still had a long recovery ahead of her. (SNW: "Hegemony, Part II")
With her ship destroyed, Batel spent the next three months recovering on the Enterprise as it underwent repairs and she contemplated whether or not to take up a new command. Doctor Joseph M'Benga told Una that Batel had mostly recovered by Federation Day: the Gorn embryos were fully reabsorbed into her body and the medical staff were only managing some minor aftereffects now. M'Benga credited Una's blood for giving Batel's body the strength it needed to withstand the metabolization process. (SNW: "Wedding Bell Blues")
However, just a few days before Batel was to assume a new command, her Gorn infection returned. At the suggestion of M'Benga, the Enterprise embarked upon an unauthorized mission into a restricted area between Klingon and Federation Space to get a chimera blossom to help her. Pike later learned to his dismay that the actual plan to save Batel's life was to turn her into a Human-Gorn hybrid. (SNW: "Shuttle to Kenfori")
Batel remained on board the Enterprise on medical leave and continued her treatment under Dr. M'Benga. Batel required a two-day recovery period between her treatments and potentially would never fully recover. Batel also needed a strict meditation schedule to manage her excess energy. (SNW: "Through the Lens of Time", "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans")
While she appeared to be recovering well, a species memory related to the Gorn suddenly emerged when encountering the entity that had possessed Dana Gamble, resulting in her temporarily entering a near-feral state and attacking him; she seemed not to recognize Pike after, but after being sedated by M'Benga, she regained her senses, although she retained some memory of her Gorn-influenced motivation for attacking Gamble. (SNW: "Through the Lens of Time")
Although not ready to captain a ship yet, Batel sought to return to the Starfleet Judicial Department which was complicated by Pike's transformation into a Vulcan and the blunt honesty that came with it. Batel finally snapped at both Pike and Pasalk, expressing her frustrations at them. After becoming human again, a deeply embarrassed and remorseful Pike quickly went to make amends with Batel. To her surprise, rather than demanding her resignation, Pasalk offered Batel a promotion to his replacement as the head of the Starfleet Judicial Department following Pasalk's impending retirement at the end of the year. Pasalk revealed that Batel telling him off earlier that evening had impressed him with her blunt honesty and unwavering drive, something that the position required. (SNW: "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans")
Batel underwent an exhaustive evaluation and was cleared to return to active duty as the Judge Advocate General with the Enterprise transporting Batel to her new job. (SNW: "New Life and New Civilizations")
The Beholder
However, before Batel could assume her new position, the Vezda that had possessed Ensign Dana Gamble escaped and traveled to Skygowan to release its kind. Christine Chapel discovered that Batel's biosignature matched that of the Beholder statue in the prison on Vadia IX. Batel theorized that because she was hybridized with the Gorn, the chimera blossom and Una Chin-Riley's Illyrian blood, she had taken on all of the adaptive characteristics of the races that had faced evil such as the Gorn, Humans and Illyrians. If the Vezda were the evil that predated all known races, it was possible that all races held a genetic memory of how to combat them. Batel had all the parts of every race that knew how to fight the Vezda. By all of that coming together into one body, Batel was transforming into the Beholder, a being powerful enough to lock the Vezda away. Because they were dealing with interdimensional space, cause and effect could be reversed, meaning that the Vezda could be locked away by Batel in the present day and as the Beholder she could stand sentry over them for eons past. Batel believed that everything that had happened to her was always so that she could become the Beholder protecting life from the Vezda.
After the USS Enterprise and the USS Farragut opened the portal, Pike and Batel passed through to confront the Vezda in the prison on Vadia IX. The Vezda was able to harm Batel by blasting the Beholder statue and trapped the two in a vision where Pike and Batel got married, had a family and lived a life together with Pike never suffering the accident that trapped him in a wheelchair. Before dying of old age in the vision, Batel told Pike that once she was gone, all that he had to do was look up at the stars and he would know that she was waiting for him there. Outside the window, a streak of light passed through the sky, which Batel commented was "a little early." Batel explained that living their lives like this was a gift and it gave her everything that she needed and could've hoped for. Batel needed to have it before she did what she had to do as it would allow Batel to say goodbye and still remember them and what they had always been fighting for.
When Pike finally answered a knock at the door that he had kept hearing throughout the vision, he was transported back to Vadia IX as the Vezda destroyed the Beholder statue and released its kind. However, having attained her full power as the Beholder, Batel banished the Vezda back into their prison, declaring that she was both the Beholder and Marie Batel whose love was brighter than the Vezda's darkness. After trapping all of the Vezda, Batel transformed into the Beholder statue who would stand guard over the Vezda prison forever.
Before embarking upon a new mission, Pike saw the streak of light that Batel had shown him in the vision. (SNW: "New Life and New Civilizations")
Appendices
Appearances
Background information
Marie Batel is played by Melanie Scrofano.
A demo video prepared for the court clerk's screen in the episode "Ad Astra per Aspera" gives Marie as the first name of this character, but it wasn't confirmed on screen until "Subspace Rhapsody". As a judge advocate she also bears the professional title of esquire. [1]
External link
- Marie Batel at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works