The Beloved Star Trek Race Secretly Inspired By A Horrifying Sci-Fi Classic

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 1 hour ago

You wouldn’t normally associate Star Trek with Ridley Scott’s Alien. After all, Trek is all about the joys of exploring strange new worlds, and the 1979 film focuses on how terrifying life on other planets can truly be. Furthermore, the creepy Xenomorph is like nothing that can be found in Gene Roddenberry’s famous franchise.

Well, almost nothing: in one of its stranger retcons, Strange New Worlds transformed the lizard-like Gorn into characters that would have felt right at home chasing down Ellen Ripley. However, decades before that show warped into existence, Star Trek’s best show modeled one of its most iconic races after Ridley Scott’s infamous cinematic creation. We’re talking about the Trill symbiont, whose portrayal in the Deep Space Nine episode “Invasive Procedures” was inspired by Alien.

For The Trill Of It

In case you lost your Star Trek Encyclopedia (did you check behind the helm console?), here’s a quick primer on the Trill. These aliens generally look human, with many of them (most famously, Jadzia Dax) having a row of spots going down each side of their bodies. What really makes the Trill special, though, is that a handful of them become hosts to a special symbiont that can later be passed to another Trill when their host dies. These symbionts retain the memories of previous hosts, which is how (for example) Jadzia Dax had all the memories of Captain Sisko’s previous mentor, Kurzon Dax.

Most Trills never apply to be hosts, and less than a third of those who apply ever get to receive a symbiont. In the Deep Space Nine episode “Invasive Procedures,” the station (which has been mostly evacuated because of a plasma storm) is invaded by a group of thugs. Their leader is someone who previously applied to be a host and was rejected, and now he wants to take Jadzia Dax’s symbiont by force.

Is There A Doctor In The House?

What does all this have to do with Alien? In the episode, Dax’s symbiont is transferred out of her body into the other Trill and, before the credits roll, transferred back. This resulted in Star Trek giving us our first really good look at the symbiont’s new design (it looked significantly different from what we saw in The Next Generation), which presented a special challenge to the show’s special effects gurus.

Afterward (as reported in Captains’ Logs Supplemental–The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages), Deep Space Nine producer David Livingston admitted that everyone working on the episode was worried that the symbiont would “look cheesy” onscreen. Eventually, they adopted the approach pioneered by Ridley Scott in his most famous film, stating, “It’s that whole idea of Alien; you don’t really want to see it too much because the audience is either going to be repulsed by it or say it’s too hokey.”

For context, Scott was famously minimalistic in his portrayal of the Xenomorph in Alien, primarily showing us small glimpses of the creature right before it kills another victim. It’s the same approach that worked for Steven Spielberg in Jaws, a movie made so much more terrifying because of how little we actually see the shark. Scott and Spielberg brought us two of the best horror movies ever made, and they each learned a quintessential lesson along the way: less is always more.

An Iconic Horror Movie Inspires The Ultimate Sci-Fi Show

While Star Trek wasn’t trying to scare us with the Trill symbiont, the producers of “Invasive Procedures” faced the same dilemma. If they showed us too much, half the audience would think the symbiont was too fake, and the other half would think it was too gross-looking. Fortunately, they struck the perfect balance, and the symbiont became one of the most iconic aliens in all of Star Trek, one whose influence has continued into the NuTrek era with both Discovery and Starfleet Academy.

There you have it, space cadets: the tale of how a forgotten Star Trek episode was influenced by one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made. If not for Ridley Scott’s Alien, Trek’s most fascinating aliens might have appeared as a total joke to audiences. Instead, “Invasive Procedures” helped fans take the symbiont seriously, helping Deep Space Nine establish the gravitas it needed to become the best show in the entire franchise.