Star Trek episode impressed by a Disney fairy story

By Chris Snellgrove
| Printed 1 hour in the past

Disney might be the very last thing in your thoughts whereas watching Star Trek. In spite of everything, what do whimsical fairy tales and speaking animals need to do with The Closing Frontier (please do not say Worf was a speaking animal, he finds these feedback hurtful) ? Nonetheless, one of many franchise’s grossest and most ugly episodes was secretly impressed by a fairy story made much more well-known by Disney. The author of Star Trek: Voyager The episode “Faces” ended up basing the story of a captor falling in love along with his captive on Magnificence and the Beast.

Magnificence and the Beast

“Faces” was written by Ken Biller, and due to its insane plot, most followers would by no means join it to a fairy story (Disney or in any other case). That is the torrid story of a stranger which makes use of weird know-how to separate Voyager’s half-Klingon, half-human engineer, B’Elanna Torres, into two separate folks. It’s an experiment to assist the alien uncover a treatment for the genetic illness plaguing his total race, however as soon as he develops affection for the totally Klingon self, Torres should use her mixed female wiles to discover a dramatic escape.

One of many the reason why most followers would by no means affiliate this Star Trek: Traveler episode with Magnificence and the Beast is that it’s primarily a horror episode. There are some fundamental physique horror parts in the case of clashes between the 2 sides of Torres and a race of rotten folks. aliens (the Vidiians) is fairly scary in itself. However none of this holds as much as the scene the place the scientist tries to woo Torres by murdering his colleague after which sporting his face. This was earlier than Bryan Fuller wrote for the sequence, however this scene would match completely in his later movie. Hannibal sequence.

Regardless of these horror parts, “Faces” author Ken Biller insists that this Star Trek episode shares a number of DNA with Magnificence and the Beast. He later mentioned that he channeled this fairy story as a result of “it occurred to me that in the event you got here from that tradition, your ideally suited magnificence is perhaps somebody bodily imposing and highly effective, like a Klingon. » For an alien born to die (much more so than the remainder of us), the Klingon fort was a very incredible object, and the author preferred the concept the scientist would “develop an infatuation with B’Elanna and that she might use that Klingon sexuality to get her to do what she wished.

Now, Star Trek nerds are typically very literary, so it is price declaring that Biller did not explicitly drop his title. Disney by evaluating its Traveler episode to Magnificence and the Beast. Nonetheless, Disney’s iconic animated adaptation of this traditional 18th-century French story was launched in 1991, simply 4 years earlier than the discharge of “Faces.” Contemplating it will have been written even earlier, we might wager all of the Latin that Quark has scoured that Biller hummed “Be Our Visitor” a minimum of as soon as whereas penning this memorable episode.

As beforehand famous, Star Trek and Disney not often overlap, however the Magnificence and the Beast the connection in “Faces” proves that this could occur extra usually. Biller did what a number of the finest writers do: draw inspiration from one thing previous to create one thing vibrant and new. Plus, if Trek followers agree with Captain Kirk finish the entire Unique sequence movie shot with a Peter Pan I quote: It is too late for any of us to say we’re too cool to understand a great fairy story reference from our favourite sci-fi franchise.