By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Disney is probably the last thing you think about while watching Star Trek. After all, what do fanciful fairytales 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 horrific episodes was secretly inspired by a fairytale made even more famous by Disney. The writer of the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Faces” ended up basing the storyline 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 any fairy tale (Disney or otherwise). This is the torrid tale of an alien who uses freaky 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 the genetic disease plaguing his entire race, but once he develops affection for her fully Klingon self, Torres must use her combined feminine wiles to work out a dramatic escape.
One of the reasons that most fans would never associate this Star Trek: Voyager episode with Beauty and the Beast is that this is basically a horror episode. There are some basic body horror elements when it comes to the two sides of Torres clashing, and a race of rotting aliens (the Vidiians) is pretty freaking scary on its own. But none of that holds a candle to the scene where the scientist tries to woo Torres by murdering her colleague and then wearing his face. Like, this was before Bryan Fuller wrote for the show, but this scene would have fit right into his later Hannibal series.
Despite those horror elements, though, “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 that fairy tale because “It occurred to me that if you came from this culture your ideal beauty may be someone who was physically imposing and powerful, like a Klingon.” To an alien who was born dying (like, even more than the rest of us), the strong Klingon was a real fantasy object, and the writer liked the idea that the scientist “would develop an infatuation with B’Elanna and she might use that Klingon sexuality to get him to do what she wanted.”
Now, Star Trek nerds tend to be highly literary, so it’s worth emphasizing that Biller didn’t explicitly name-drop 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, a mere four years before “Faces” came out. Considering that it would have been written even earlier, we’d bet all the latinum Quark has squirreled away that Biller hummed “Be Our Guest” at least once while penning this memorable episode.
As noted before, Star Trek and Disney rarely overlap, but the Beauty and the Beast connection in “Faces” proves it should happen more often. Biller did what some of the best writers do: take inspiration from something old to create something vibrant and new. Plus, if Trek fans are okay with Captain Kirk ending the entire Original Series movie run with a 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.
