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Disney is probably the last thing on your mind when watching Star Trek. After all, what do fantasy 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 grossest and scariest episodes of the franchise was secretly inspired by the fairy tale made famous by Disney. Book writer Star Trek: Voyager episode “Faces” ended by basing the story of a kidnapper 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 crazy plot, most fans would never associate it with any fairy tale (Disney or otherwise). This is a captivating story about foreign who uses strange technology to split the half-Klingon, half-human Voyager engineer B’Elanna Torres into two separate people. It’s all an experiment to help the alien discover a cure for a genetic disease that plagues his entire race, but once he develops an affection for her fully Klingon self, Torres must use her combined feminine wiles to make a dramatic escape.
One of the reasons most fans would never associate it Star Trek: Voyager episode with Beauty and the Beast is that it’s basically a horror episode. There are some basic body horror elements when it comes to the clash between the two sides of Torres and the race of rot aliens (Vidiians) is pretty scary on its own. But none of that holds a candle to the scene where the scientist tries to lure Torres by murdering her colleague and then putting his face on it. Like, this was before Bryan Fuller wrote for the show, but this scene would fit into his later Hannibal series.
Despite these horror elements, however, “Faces” writer Ken Biller insists that this episode of Star Trek shares a lot of DNA with Beauty and the Beast. He later said that he directed this tale because “It occurred to me that if you come from this culture, your ideal beauty might be someone who was physically imposing and strong, like a Klingon.” For an alien who was born dying (like, even more than the rest of us), the powerful Klingon was a real fantasy object, and the writer liked the idea that the scientist would “fall in love with B’Elanna, and she could use that Klingon sexuality to make him what she wanted.’
Star Trek nerds tend to be highly literary, so it’s worth pointing out that Biller didn’t specifically mention the name Disney when comparing his Voyager episode to Beauty and the Beast. However, Disney’s iconic animated adaptation of this classic 18th-century French tale came out in 1991, just four years before “Faces” was released. Given that it would have been written even earlier, we’d bet all the Quark Latin was gone that Biller hummed “Be Our Guest” at least once while writing this memorable episode.
As noted earlier, Star Trek and Disney rarely overlap, but Beauty and the Beast the connection in “Faces” proves that this should happen more often. Biller did what some of the best writers do: take inspiration from something old and create something alive and new. Plus, if Trek fans are okay Captain Kirk termination of the whole The original series the movie is running Peter Pan 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.
