Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About B'Elanna Torres

10. From Con(n)cept To Character

In the heady days of the early 1990s, when Star Trek: The Next Generation was coming to a close and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was entering its second season, secret discussions were being held to add another series to the Trek pantheon. The show didn't yet have a name — options included Star Trek: The Journey Home, Flight of the Voyager, Voyager's Mission, Outer Bounds… Galaxy's Rim (!) — but its cast of characters was already beginning to take shape.

If not quite B'Elanna herself, the idea for a B'Elanna-type character was there from the very start of the development process. Published in Star Trek Voyager: A Vision of the Future, Voyager co-creator/executive producer Jeri Taylor's notes from July-August 1993 mention a half-human, half-alien character as a possibility for the new show. However, at that early stage, the then-unnamed officer was not half-human/half-Klingon, nor even Maquis, but the "latest thinking" was "Bajoran/Cardassian". This officer also had B'Elanna's future husband's job at the Conn.

In fact, Taylor's initial outline for "STAR TREK: THE NEW SERIES" gave the engineer character as "an older human male". But (and, sorry Carey, but you're about to be bumped), by the time it came to the first draft of the Voyager Series Bible, completed in September 1993, the "Engineer" was already "B'Elanna., R, half Klingon, half-human female".