By Chris Snellgrove | Published
You wouldn’t normally associate Star Trek with Ridley Scott Alien. After all, Trek is about the thrill of exploring strange new worlds, and the 1979 film focuses on how life on other planets can be truly terrifying. In addition, the terrifying Xenomorph is like something not found in the popular franchise of Gene Roddenberry.
Well, almost nothing: in one of the anonymous retcons, Strange New Worlds transformed the lizard-like Gorn into characters that wouldn’t feel at home chasing Ellen Ripley. However, decades before that show evolved into existence, the flagship show Star Trek modeled one of its iconic races after Ridley Scott’s cinematic creation. We are talking about the Trill symbiont, its expression in Deep Space Nine the episode “Invasive Procedures” was inspired by Alien.
For Your Trill
In case you lost yours The Star Trek Encyclopedia (have you checked behind the helm console?), here’s a quick primer on the Trill. These aliens often look human, many of them (most famously, Jadzia Dax) have a line of spots running down each side of their bodies. What makes the Trill special, however, is that a few of them become hosts to a special symbiont that can be transferred to another Trill when their host dies. These symbionts retain the memories of their previous hosts, which is how (for example) Jadzia Dax had all the memories of Captain Sisko’s previous mentor, Kurzon Dax.
Most Trills don’t work as hosts, and less than a third of those who apply get the symbiont. Of Deep Space Nine episode “Invading Processes,” a station (largely evacuated due to a plasma storm) is attacked by a group of criminals. Their leader is a human who applied to be a host and was rejected, and now wants to take Jadzia Dax’s symbiote by force.
Is There a Doctor in the House?
What does this all have to do with it? Alien? In the episode, Dax’s symbiote is removed from his body and inserted into another Trill and, before the credits roll, is sent back. This led to Star Trek giving us our first good look at the new symbiote design (it looked very different from what we’ve seen of it. The Next Generation), which presented a special challenge to the show’s special effects experts.
After that (as reported in Captains’ Logs Supplemental–The Unauthorized Guide to New Voyages), Deep Space Nine Producer David Livingston admitted that everyone working on the episode was concerned that the symbiote would “look cheap” on screen. Finally, they took the path that Ridley Scott started in his most famous film, “That’s the whole idea Alien; in fact, you don’t want to see it too much because the audience will get bored with it or say it’s too hokey.”
Contextually, Scott was famously minimalistic in his portrayal of the Xenomorph in Alienit mainly shows us small glimpses of the creature just before it kills another victim. It’s the same method that worked for Steven Spielberg in Jawsit’s a movie made more scary because of how little we see of the shark. Scott and Spielberg brought us two of the best horror movies ever made, and each of them learned an important lesson along the way: less is always more.
Iconic Horror Movie Inspires The Ultimate Sci-Fi Show
While Star Trek wasn’t trying to scare us with the Trill symbiote, the producers of “Invasive Procedures” faced the same problem. If we showed more, half of the audience would think the symbiote was too fake, and the other half would think it looked too bad. Fortunately, they struck the perfect balance, and the symbiote became one of the most prominent aliens in all of Star Trek, some of whose influence has continued into the NuTrek era as well. Adoption again Starfleet Academy.
So there you have it, space cadets: the story of how a forgotten Star Trek episode was inspired by one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made. If not at Ridley Scott’s AlienTrek’s most interesting aliens are likely to appear as a complete joke to the audience. Instead, “Invasive Processes” helped fans take the symbiote to task, and help Deep Space Nine establish the gravitas it needed to become the best show in the entire franchise.
