By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Disney is probably the last thing on your mind while watching Star Trek. After all, what do whimsical fairy tales and talking animals have to do with The Final Frontier (please don’t say Worf was a talking animal, he finds those comments hurtful) ? However, one of the franchise’s grossest and most gruesome episodes was secretly inspired by a fairy tale made even more famous by Disney. The writer of Star Trek: Traveler The episode “Faces” ended up basing the story of a captor falling in love with his captive on Beauty and the Beast.
Beauty and the Beast
“Faces” was written by Ken Biller, and thanks to its insane plot, most fans would never connect it to a fairy tale (Disney or otherwise). This is the torrid story of a stranger which uses bizarre technology to split Voyager’s half-Klingon, half-human engineer, B’Elanna Torres, into two separate people. It is an experiment to help the alien discover a cure for the genetic disease plaguing his entire race, but once he develops affection for the fully Klingon self, Torres must use her combined feminine wiles to find a dramatic escape.
One of the reasons why most fans would never associate this Star Trek: Traveler episode with Beauty and the Beast is that it is essentially a horror episode. There are some basic body horror elements when it comes to clashes between the two sides of Torres and a race of rotten people. aliens (the Vidiians) is pretty scary in itself. But none of this holds up to the scene where the scientist tries to woo Torres by murdering his colleague and then wearing his face. This was before Bryan Fuller wrote for the series, but this scene would fit perfectly in his later film. Hannibal series.
Despite these horror elements, “Faces” writer Ken Biller insists that this Star Trek episode shares a lot of DNA with Beauty and the Beast. He later said that he channeled this fairy tale because “it occurred to me that if you came from that culture, your ideal beauty might be someone physically imposing and powerful, like a Klingon. » For an alien born to die (even more so than the rest of us), the Klingon fort was a truly fantastic object, and the writer liked the idea that the scientist would “develop an infatuation with B’Elanna and that she could use that Klingon sexuality to get her to do what she wanted.
Now, Star Trek nerds tend to be very literary, so it’s worth pointing out that Biller didn’t explicitly drop his name. Disney by comparing its Traveler episode to Beauty and the Beast. However, Disney’s iconic animated adaptation of this classic 18th-century French tale was released in 1991, just four years before the release of “Faces.” Considering it would have been written even earlier, we’d bet all the Latin that Quark has scoured that Biller hummed “Be Our Guest” at least once while writing this memorable episode.
As previously noted, Star Trek and Disney rarely overlap, but the Beauty and the Beast the connection in “Faces” proves that this should happen more often. Biller did what some of the best writers do: draw inspiration from something old to create something vibrant and new. Additionally, if Trek fans agree with Captain Kirk end the whole Original series film shot with a Peter Pan I quote: It’s too late for any of us to say we’re too cool to appreciate a good fairy tale reference from our favorite sci-fi franchise.
