In a shocking twist for anyone who grew up watching Star Trek in the ’90s, Pike and his crew have achieved what few other entries in the franchise can boast: a first season that’s actually good! In both critical reaction and audience demand, it’s clear that Strange New Worlds (SNW) is one of the most successful Trek shows ever made, and I expect that will continue in later seasons.
Which makes it all the more glaring when one episode doesn’t fit with the others. That episode is All Those Who Wander, and it’s basically the movie Alien squished down into 53 minutes, with the Gorn repurposed as store-brand xenomorphs, right down to the acidic bodily fluids. It has the same strong performances and excellent production values as the rest of the show, but there’s something undeniably off about it. This episode doesn’t feel in theme with its fellows, because its plot simply does not work with the Star Trek setting as constructed by both SNW and shows that came before. What does that mean? I’m glad you asked!
Spoiler Notice: Season one of Strange New Worlds
The Characters Know Too Much
Alien is a horror movie, and a big source of that horror is how mysterious the xenomorphs are. The less well known an enemy is, the greater their capacity to inspire fear, as the audience imagines all kinds of horrible things that might happen. Alien’s setup supports this. The main characters are space truckers whose job is moving cargo from one location to another. They aren’t explorers, and they certainly aren’t soldiers. It doesn’t even seem like alien life has been discovered in this setting. This is also important for helping to justify choices that are obviously unwise to any genre-savvy viewers, like breaking quarantine against Ripley’s orders.
SNW doesn’t have a setup like that. The Enterprise’s crew are all seasoned explorers, both knowledgeable about aliens and trained in combat.* They even know about the Gorn specifically, both from their security chief’s personal testimony and from discovering a log entry that tells them what’s happening on the abandoned ship. They are perhaps the best-prepared group of people to handle an Alien-type encounter.
Right away, this decreases the episode’s tension. These Starfleet officers have faced down lots of dangerous aliens before; this creepy ship is an average Tuesday for them. When they act all spooked anyway, it feels forced. From there, the frustration sets in, as the crew have to make numerous bad decisions so the Gorn can be a threat. To name a few:
- Assuming all the Gorn are gone based on flimsy evidence.
- Wandering around the ship alone.
- Leaving an intern to guard the possibly infected survivor.
- Forgetting that Gorn eggs can evade bio-scanners.
- Not sounding an alarm when the infected survivor is clearly seconds away from hatching a new passel of Gorn.
You can see why this is so frustrating. Instead of untrained newbies figuring out xenomorphs for the first time, we have a bunch of professionals acting like they can’t find their aft torpedo tubes with both hands. SNW could have avoided some of this by not giving the characters so much specific information about the Gorn, but that would still have left general mistakes like assuming the threat is over because some of the monsters are dead.
There’s a reason horror movies tend to focus on inexperienced and unprepared characters, and even then, the poor decision-making can get annoying. When the characters know what they’re doing, a good horror story has to change tactics. That’s why Alien’s sequel, Aliens,* switches things up by giving its badass marine heroes a horde of aliens to fight rather than just one. This SNW episode is like putting those marines through the first film’s plot and expecting them to not immediately solve the problem.
The Technology Is Too Advanced
Despite working on a spaceship, Ripley and her Alien costars have very little in the way of advanced technology. This makes sense, as they’re working for a megacorporation. Their bosses are unlikely to provide any equipment the crew doesn’t absolutely need, and even that can’t be guaranteed. The crew certainly don’t have any weapons; the best they can do is jury-rig some clumsy flamethrowers. This is important, because if they had guns, the xenomorph’s only threat would be causing a hull breach with its acidic blood.* That’s why the marines in Aliens have to fight hundreds, if not thousands, of xenomorphs, as they do have guns. But even the marines’ tech is barely more capable than what the US military was using in 1986.
Star Trek’s technology is, to put it mildly, a bit more advanced. They have directed energy weapons that, according to some episodes, can wipe out an entire regiment of soldiers. How powerful phasers are is actually a subject of some debate, but the important bit is they’re a lot more powerful than traditional projectile weapons, and that’s just the tip of the techberg. Pike’s crew also has access to faster-than-light communications, long-distance transporters, scanners with near-magical levels of precision, and medical technology that can rearrange your entire body with a single hypospray.
Dealing with the Gorn should be child’s play, so the writers have to employ a series of increasingly bizarre contrivances. First, communicators and transporters just don’t work on this planet, for technobabble reasons. Okay, Star Trek does that a lot; we can roll with it. Also, the Gorn are invisible to sensors. Which sensors are they invisible to? All of them. Uh-huh. Keep in mind these are baby Gorn without any tech of their own, so they somehow just evolved to be undetectable. And once a person is infected with Gorn eggs, there’s nothing that Starfleet’s supernatural medicine can do about it, for reasons.
It is viscerally frustrating to watch these contrivances play out and even more so when the writers forget some important tactic that the characters could have used. Even if the Gorn are somehow invisible to sensors, surely scanning an infected person would show big gaps in their tissue where the larvae are. We know that tricorders can create detailed maps of a patient’s body, and there’s not a lot of empty space inside a person. But later in the episode, the Gorn’s sensor immunity vanishes so that the characters can shout status reports about where the monsters are, so not even the writers were particularly devoted to this plot device.
Nothing is as frustrating as the phasers though; there isn’t even a conceit there. The characters shoot at the Gorn and miss a couple times, after which they apparently just give up on the idea and never use their phasers again. Even while using phasers, the characters still quake in their boots about these dog-sized lizards as if they aren’t all armed with advanced energy weapons. It just feels backwards. The Gorn should be afraid of them. The episode also wants us to be scared of the Gorn getting bigger, but that would just make them easier to hit!
Star Trek doesn’t have a great track record for horror in general, but the few successful examples all involve either a thinking enemy with their own tech or some kind of extradimensional being, sometimes both. You might remember the DS9 episode where Garak turns evil and hunts O’Brien for sport, or the TNG episode where some cosmic-horror aliens are kidnapping the crew and experimenting on them. Voyager also has a great horror episode about an evil clown who lives in your brain.
That’s the kind of setup you need to make horror work in a high-tech space-opera setting like Star Trek. Either that or contrive a reason for the characters to be dumped on a barren rock without any of their stuff, but you can only do that so many times before it gets old.
The Aliens Are Contrived
If you stop to think about it, the xenomorphs don’t make a whole lot of sense. Their first stage develops in an egg, then hatches into a facehugger. The facehugger, with limited mobility, has to then latch on to a hostile animal and deposit a larva, which then becomes the xenomorph. That’s a really convoluted reproductive cycle that doesn’t seem to offer many advantages, and that’s not even considering how the baby xenomorph puts on 500 pounds of chitin and muscle in a few hours.
The nice thing about Alien as a purely horror franchise is that it doesn’t encourage us to ask those sorts of questions. We watch an Alien movie to enjoy people getting eaten by xenomorphs, not to imagine how they fit into a bigger world.* Star Trek, in contrast, is about a bigger world, and the Gorn are more than just one-off monsters. In fact, the Gorn play a central role in at least one very important episode of the Original Series.
This makes it much harder to ignore how completely absurd the Gorn are as a species. Gorn babies apparently kill each other until there’s only one left, which seems very unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. The closest real-life comparison I can find is how certain shark species will actually eat each other in utero, but that has the direct benefit of allowing the survivors to grow larger before they’re born. I don’t see any corresponding benefit for the Gorn.
The Gorn also have the same growth problem the xenomorphs do, with their size doubling several times as they grow into full adults over just a few hours. At that growth rate, we should be able to see them getting larger in real time. Plus, they’re capable of asexual reproduction in that same time frame. When you add in all of their weird tech immunities — and even an immunity to telepathy, for some reason — the Gorn feel less like a species and more like a grab bag of monster powers.
But what really drives home the absurdity is that the Gorn are also a sapient species with spaceships. So they have all the abilities needed to make them unstoppable monsters, and they have advanced tech? That’s a little much, don’tcha think? It’s not like SNW’s writers have to spend evolution points when building their aliens, but it still feels unbalanced for one species to get so many powerful perks.
The Message Is Wrong
As a movie about morally uncomplicated monsters, Alien isn’t overly concerned with any messages its xenomorphs might be sending. They’re basically big wasps with extra mouths, and killing them is no different than calling an exterminator to get rid of that hive under your porch.
The Gorn are much more complicated, or at least they were before SNW came along. Before this episode, the Gorn’s most prominent appearance was in the episode Arena, where the big message is that while the Gorn seem scary, we can ultimately make peace and coexist with them. That episode has some problems, like never addressing how eager the Gorn were to bomb a civilian outpost, but it’s a good message regardless.
In SNW’s view, that message is wrong. To make it acceptable for the heroes to kill Gorn without any remorse, this show casts them as the galaxy’s greatest monsters. They hunt down other sapient species to torture and eat, then use the survivors as hosts for their parasitic young, which is basically another form of brutal torture. And thanks to this episode, we can rule out that such behavior was only from an extremist faction of Gorn: they’re literally born like that.
Strange New World’s Gorn are a strong contender for the most evil species the franchise has ever seen. Even the Borg don’t come close: they kill and assimilate because it’s the most efficient way to expand their power. The Gorn go out of their way to torment other sapient beings. If it’s really necessary to incubate their young in a living host, they could just use cows. Instead, they run around dishing out trauma as a national sport.
At this point, even if the Gorn offered to live in peace, the Federation would be very silly to accept it. The Gorn are dangerous to be around, both culturally and biologically. The only rational response is to keep them away by whatever means necessary. Anything else is just inviting the scorpion to climb on your back while you swim across the river.
That is, to put it mildly, a bleak outlook. The only way for the Gorn to fit in with Arena’s message* is to reinvent them via retcon. And if that episode didn’t exist, SNW’s Gorn would still be a bad fit for Star Trek. As Strange New Worlds emphasizes in several of its other episodes, this is an optimistic setting where peace is always possible. If two species are enemies today, they might become friends tomorrow. That’s impossible with the Gorn, who are now just Space Satan.
The only silver lining is that, as big lizards, the Gorn don’t appear as an obvious stand-in for marginalized people in real life. At least, not to the extent species like the Klingons do. Despite that, such an over-the-top and inherently evil species doesn’t fit with the ethos of Star Trek in general, or Strange New Worlds in particular.
The Tone Is Discordant
Modern Trek has a serious grimdark problem. The first and second season of both Discovery and Picard suffer badly from it, with characters literally being tortured to death for the flimsiest of reasons. This doesn’t appear to be something many fans want and is a major contributor to the popularity of rival shows like The Orville.* That show’s first season is a garbage fire, but at least it’s a relatively light garbage fire.
Fortunately, Star Trek is slowly kicking its grimdark habit. Discovery’s third and fourth seasons both have a much more balanced approach, and it sounds like season three of Picard will be more heavily focused on TNG nostalgia than horrible depictions of suicide. However, it’s Strange New Worlds that really demonstrates modern Trek turning over a new leaf. This show does a great job portraying an optimistic future* while still exploring serious topics. It’s a show where one episode can address the horrors of sacrificing children to an AI god, while another has the characters do fantasy cosplay for 45 minutes.
That’s why it’s so jarring to press play on this episode and be greeted with a cavalcade of blood and gore as the Gorn tear various redshirts apart, sometimes from the outside in, sometimes from the inside out. It even does that thing where we suddenly talk about a side character’s backstory right before they’re brutally murdered.
This is all perfectly at home in a horror franchise like Alien, where tearing people’s spleens out is a thoroughly unremarkable event. But Strange New Worlds isn’t a horror show. At least, the early episodes give little indication of it being a horror show. Previously, the show only made things as dark as they absolutely needed to be. In the AI god episode, we don’t watch the child sacrifice writhing in agony, because there’s no reason for that. It’s plenty tragic to know that a child is suffering. In a previous Gorn appearance, our heroes found bloodstains where people had been killed but not any mangled bodies, because that wouldn’t have added anything.
This episode takes all the hard work of establishing the proper mood and tone for SNW, wads it up into a ball, and chucks it out the airlock. For fans of Alien-style movies, this might not be a big deal, as they probably already have a high tolerance for gore. But for anyone who was watching SNW specifically for its lighter and more optimistic aesthetic, the shock is unpleasant, to say the least. Oh, and the episode also kills off the blind engineer, robbing the show of some much-needed disability representation. This is why we can’t have nice things!
What really gets me is that all of this was clearly on purpose, even if there wasn’t an interview to confirm it. The writers set out with the goal of doing Alien in a Star Trek show, with seemingly little consideration for this being a completely different franchise. It doesn’t feel like Star Trek with an Alien twist or even Alien with a Star Trek twist. It’s just Alien masquerading as a different franchise.
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Additionally, about TOS episode The Arena: It’s based on a stand-alone short story by the same name. The biggest difference between TOS and the source material, though (apart from how the alien changed from a truly alien form to a man in a rubber suit, but that has its obvious explanation) is the ending.
In the short story, the alien WAS from an Evil Race (something that the MC, as far as I recall, was able to just intuit somehow). In the end, the MC kills the alien, and it’s portrayed as an unambiguously good thing.
But Kirk refuses to kill the Gorn at the end of the day. He says that maybe the Gorn thought that bombing those civilians was necessary to protect themselves (which I guess, at the time this ep came out, might have been a Vietnam war reference or something? The US did stuff like that, and it was horrible, but it still doesn’t mean that Americans are an “evil race” who do things solely for the evolz).
TOS also features a silicon-based lifeform with acidic blood which is near invulnerable and picks off a bunch of miners one by one in the ep The Devil In The Dark, so several clear parallells to the xenomorphs. This creature, though, turns out to be a smart enough animal that Spock can telepathically get in touch with her, and it turns out she does this because the miners destroy her eggs (which are everywhere; the miners thought they were mineral formations). Also, after trying to kill her with weapons over and over, the miners have actually managed to hurt her, and she lashes out in pain. In the end, the humans and creatures learn to co-exist.
Overall, it seems like Strange New Worlds is really aimed at people like me – Star Trek fans with a soft spot for old TOS, but who aren’t bigots. Too bad they stick an evil xenomorph race in there! TOS is obviously a mixed bag, but that’s like shitting on two TOS episodes that both had good aesops.
In the original Story there was a war between humans and aliens, and the winner of the fight would survive along their specie while the loser was destroyed. It was a plan of “something” higher than both contestants.
The point was that the alien way of communicating was painful to humans,(a form of telepathy that provoque nausea if i don’t mixing it with The man in the Maze) so they couldn´t come along even if they wanted.
>That’s a really convoluted reproductive cycle
Many real-life parasites have really convoluted reproductive cycles, some involving multiple hosts
And some secondary (non-canon) sources suggest the Alien might have been created artificially
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>When (the Orville) first aired, nearly every review of it I could find mentioned how nice it was to have a light scifi show at last
The fans still feel that way
My preferred read on Prometheus was that the Engineers created humans as basically a petri-dish, and that the extermination plan was essentially arbitrary, when they decided they wanted to create and test the oil/Aliens.
(As opposed to getting annoyed because we crucified alien space Jesus).
I remember reading somewhere that Gorn aren’t a single species, but rather several different reptilian aliens sharing an identity. The Gorn seen in this episode could be one of the more brutal sub-species or even genetically engineered super-soldiers (their own Khan, basically).
Though, I admit, a technologically advanced enemy would have worked better. Like say, explaining the inability for technology to work by having the Gorn fill their nesting planet with scramblers and other countermeasures. The enemies could have likewise not been the babies themselves, but, for example, caretaker robots meant to protect them.
The Khan-alike option is an interesting – if that war is happening now in terms of the series, then it does allow for the regular Gorn to have come out on top in the span of eight years. Maybe we can even suggest that the Gorn bombed the outpost because they were afraid (rightly or wrongly) that it was infested with the engineered ones.
Wasn’t also Strange New Worlds responsible for making Kirk’s “shoot first and then ask questions later” mentality the moral approach to things by making Pike’s diplomacy wrong and useless?
I prefer the Borg being now allies to the Federation than this spit on the whole optimistic future this series has given us, because the Borg redeeming themselves makes more sense than whatever Strange New Worlds did.
Also regarding the Gorn being Lizardmen, isn’t this type of fantasy creature based on the Antisemitic conspiracy theory of the Jews being somehow not human and instead, belonging to a race of Humanoid Lizards, even if that doesn’t make sense?
It’s true that the conspiracy theory of lizard people secretly controlling the world often overlaps with (or is a thin covering for) antisemetic conspiracy theories. However, that’s a pretty specific situation, and I don’t really think a non-secret lizard species is similar enough to invoke the same idea.
Yeah, the Gorn to our knowledge are not the secret rulers of the Galaxy(The closest thing to that are the Dominion and even then, they were bested by the Federation).
I agree with your comment, I am just concerned regarding that fantasy race, but as long as they don’t have them influence pre-warp earth, all is fine, I guess.
It’s true. In this case, just being reptilian doesn’t make the Gorn antisemitic cutouts. And for animalizing Jews, in most contexts look for rats. Warhammer Fantasy’s Skaven, for instance, are a laundry list of bigotry if you think about them for even a second.
It’s a little more complicated then that, Re: Kirk and Pike in SNW.
What the episode is trying to show is that in that specific instance, force was the appropriate response, and that Pike’s preference for diplomacy wouldn’t serve well in that particular instance. Unfortunately, that part of the episode isn’t very well constructed, and it falls apart in several places. Most notably, the TOS episode they’re referencing has Kirk grapple with whether or not to use lethal force, so having him jump their automatically in this episode feels like a mistake. The show has also established that Pike is perfectly capable of using force when the situation calls for it, so that part also feels weird.
Over all, I’d still give SNW the optimistic cake well above Picard. The Borg turning into a good guys is a neat idea, even if it’s not handled very well in the show, but Picard also portrays a Federation where mental health services haven’t improved from the present day.
I heard this from my brother, I have yet to watch it, so thanks for the clarification.
Picard has no mental health service? How? WHAT WAS TROY’S POSITION THEN? What the heck? How did even Humans as a species evolved beyond their violent history, if they don’t do something with the very science that should explore our Mental health? Who wrote that?
Honestly, if people want Grimdark Sci fi stories, why not go with Warhammer 40k, it’s literally Hell in Space.
Admittedly the mental health services thing requires some extrapolation.
*spoilers for Picard Season 2 and CN for fictional suicide*
So what happens is we learn through flashbacks that Picard’s mom was suffering from an unspecified form of mental illness which gave her severe hallucinations and drove her to self harm, along with putting her kid in danger.
There are some issues with how accurately her illness is portrayed, but I’m not qualified to address them. For our purposes, the important thing is that when Pappa Picard finds out, he doesn’t try to get his wife help. Instead, he locks her in her room, supposedly show she can’t hurt herself. Surprising no one, this doesn’t work.
None of the characters express shock at this incredibly callous treatment, leaving us with two possible explanations:
1. They’re all horrified in their own heads and just not saying anything.
2. Pappa Picard’s actions are justified because there isn’t any help to get for his wife.
Oren, they say in the show that she REFUSES to get help.
But that’s it’s own huge problem.
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but the stereotype that madpeople randomly refuse to get psychiatric help just because they’re too crazy to understand their own good is really damaging, and this ep plays into that stereotype.
Sure, it CAN be the case that you don’t want to get psychiatric help just because you’re convinced that there’s nothing wrong with you – I’ve been there myself. However, people for whom that’s the case are still often willing to at least have a talk with a psychiatrist or other mental health practitioner if they’re sufficiently empathetic and willing to listen. That’s particularly true when you’re not in some happy, grandiose manic state, but actually SUFFERS (like we see Picard’s mum doing) – when you suffer, you WANT a sympathetic and understanding ear, it’s just hard to find one because to people around you, you’re strange and scary.
Unfortunately, few mental health practicioners ARE sufficiently empathetic and willing to hear their patients out, at least if said patients are psychotic. The good ones exist, but they’re too few and far between. Many mental health practitioners seem to find psychosis scary as well, so they withdraw, don’t want to engage the patients, just label them with some diagnosis and medicate them, but not have any serious talks with them.
Also, it’s sadly not uncommon for madpeople to have past experiences of humiliating and disrespectful treatment by mental health staff, sometimes in ways that might not look too bad to an outsider who’s never been in that situation but really hurts for the person it concerns, sometimes straight-out abuse. (Psych ward patients are kind of perfect victims for abusers, since they won’t be believed. I’ve only been in a psych ward once, and the worst I got were some condescending nurses, but I have an acquaintance who suffered through staff members who enjoyed messing with her and scaring her. Won’t go into detail, because that would require a big-ass TW.)
VERY OFTEN when people “refuse to accept help” they have their reasons. But Picard plays into this stereotype that crazy people are just crazy like that, and there’s nothing to do about it (except locking them up).
Sorry, now I saw that you wrote in the first post in this subthread that “mental health services haven’t improved from the present day”, not that they don’t exist.
I get a bit worked up over this because both Husband and I enjoyed the hell out of Picard season 2 (I get that it has problems that can be criticized, but all the call-backs and nostalgic fan-pandering worked like a charm on us) until this shit hit us (both, but mostly me, because I’m the madwoman) like a gut punch.
No problem, I did forget to mention that aspect, which is an important part. If the Federation had actually made major improvements in mental healthcare, Pappa Picard would have a more compassionate option to help his wife than locking her in a room, even if she did say she “didn’t want treatment,” which is already an extremely fraught setup as you’ve explained.
That sequence is such a mess that it’s hard to remember which things you need to critique first.
I really felt like that went against he whole concept of the Borg. Traditionally in Star Trek, almost any interspecies conflict ends with a realisation of “maybe we’re not so different after all,” and peace and understanding are possible through empathy and diplomacy.
The Borg were so threatening because none of that applied to them. They were completely different from us in virtually every regard, could not be reasoned with, did not feel, did not think like us, had none of the same needs and desires, possessed no humanity and instead robbed others of it, driven only by a directive to evolve themselves by taking whatever was useful and destroying whatever was in their way. There were no civilians among them, no innocents, their fundamental nature was a violation against other sapient beings, and their very existence was an urgent existential danger so long as even a single nanoprobe from a single drone remained active. An enemy where destroying them was not only relatively ethically uncomplicated, but actively good and arguably even morally necessary.
So it didn’t make much sense to me for the final end to the conflict with them to be talking to the Borg Queen so she basically says “Oh yeah, guess we never saw it that way before,” and now we’re friends with a formerly all-consuming hivemind.
Grimdark isn’t really a good feel for any Star Trek franchise. The first two Star Trek series were basically rooted in mid-20th century to late 20th century liberalism and are rather optimistic. Reason, logic, science, and technology can be used to solve problems and sentient species do not need to resort to brute force. You can’t really get more optimistic than that in mass media science fiction. This is the basic foundation of Star Trek morality and ethics. Going grim dark or against the essential optimism of mid-20th century liberalism is rather un-Star Trek even if done well.
It’s like having a mild flavor be bitter, it doesn’t work.
If people want a bright future, go with Star Trek.
If people want a Grimdark future, where everything is terrible, go with Warhammer 40K.
> That’s a really convoluted reproductive cycle that doesn’t seem to offer many advantages
Boy, do I have news about our real-life Earth parasites…
The liver fluke starts as a juvenile form in ponds before being eaten by cattle. Once in the intestine, it then activates and migrates from the lining to the liver and into the bile ducts, where it matures to become a more adult form.
It then lays eggs that are flushed with the stools, find their way into a pond and then must first infect a water snail to hatch inside and matures and then be released into the pond…
This is completely nuts, if you put it in a movie I would say it’s so contrived and pointless, but here you are, an over-the-top life cycle because doing things the simple way is too boring…
Sure but the river fluke doesn’t have to wrestle a wildebeest in order to reproduce ;)
There’s a reason such complex life cycles are usually resolved for much smaller creatures.
Rhyzocephaleans are my personal favorite. They’re basically the Flood from Halo. They have a free-swimming larval phase, than pass as spores into a host, where they take over the host’s body, focusing on the nervous system. In females they make decapods perpetually gravid; in males, they make the decapod adopt more female characteristics (wider tail, certain behaviors related to caring for eggs, etc). Rhyzocephaleans are limited to infesting decapods, but life finds a way…
As for size, look at plants. Plants undergo alternation of generations, where each generation looks VERY different from the previous. This is dramatically illustrated by liverworts (the classic biology classroom example), but in reality all plants do it, though many have one generation that’s entirely encased within another.
The only thing unlikely about xenomorphs is their adoption of host traits, but even that has its roots in biology. Bacteria are able to exchange plasmids, for example. But even at larger scales gene transfer occurs. Parasites often exchange genetic material with their hosts, including in chordates. The rate is lower, but it occurs. The odds of an alien organism evolving to be able to use our DNA is statistically unlikely, in the same way that the Sun is a tad warm, but not actually impossible. In its original form, using the host for food for the young (the way wasps a dung beetles and a bunch of other critters do)? Absolutely plausible. See “Rare Earth” for a discussion (from the perspective of someone who doubts intelligent life exists outside our planet) of just how common our biological building-blocks are.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but weren’t The Gorn supposed to be pretty much unknown to the Federation before Arena? Of course, Chapel is supposed to be married and I really don’t buy that Uhura served under Pike with Spock, so we probably jut have to accept some inconsistances.
The worst thing about this is that stories like this are exactly what I am expecting of Star Trek these days. And Star Wars, just without the torture porn.
This might be an outlier, but when people expect this nonsense by default things have gone very wrong for a long time.
Possibly the horrific and sadistic nature of the Gorn could be attributed to their prevailing culture, rather than the species inherently and as a whole, perceiving themselves as superior to the point that the only value other sapient beings have is their usefulness to the Gorn as food, labour, or hosts, and this culture has fallen from dominance by the time of The Original Series. We’ve never seen their civilian populations, so we can’t really say that they’re all like this. If you’re in Poland in 1939 and haven’t been to Germany and met a lot of people, any Germans you encounter are probably going to make it seem like they’re all evil.
As to their means of reproduction, I have a fan theory which could allow it to make some amount of sense. Gorn individuals appear in TOS, ENT, and SNW, and all look very different; perhaps, in another parallel to Alien, their development is influenced by the genetic material of the host creature, perhaps as a means of accelerated evolution, or perhaps as a means to inject some genetic diversity into asexual reproduction. In this case, it might even be that if they did not use sapient hosts, the offspring would not develop sapience. Although realistically it’s just a reference and the series itself is pretty dubiously canon despite what the higher-ups claim, Lower Decks, which takes place after all these series, shows a Gorn wedding, and all of them are in line with their TOS design (particularly the compound eyes), perhaps suggesting that they stopped using captives as hosts, and instead switched to using a single, possibly non-sapient species, or more likely have switched to sexual reproduction (or at least otherwise-conventional parthenogenesis) at the expense of outside genetic material accelerating their evolution; in Into Darkness, Dr. McCoy indicates that Gorn are capable of giving birth to live young.
Realistically a lot of these details are just retcons and redesigns, but I do think they can be made coherent and semi-logical.
Personally though, I like the extreme and sudden swing in tone for this episode – I think it’s more effective precisely because people wouldn’t have expected it was coming, couldn’t brace themselves for it, wouldn’t know to avoid it because it isn’t usually that kind of show. It probably had some people’s heart rates shooting up as they went into fight or flight, others turning their heads quickly and shielding their eyes at graphic scenes, some screaming to turn it off (too late) before the kids see this, some simply feeling sickened and betrayed, some sitting there frozen in silent horror, not wanting to keep watching, but unable to turn away. Some probably went to bed that night feeling like they’d sincerely been through something. That’s the true way to horrify people – put horror where they aren’t ready for it.
Genuine shame about Hemmer though, I quite liked that character. And in addition to his having served as some disability representation (which realistically would be even more common than it is in the real world today since they’ve sworn completely off genetic modification), for a supposedly interplanetary organisation, Starfleet has always been weirdly short on aliens, especially aliens who can’t readily pass for human, and is always at least human-dominated.