The Gorn Suck

 I’ve mostly been enjoying Star Trek Strange New Worlds. It does feel maybe a bit less ambitious than Star Trek Discovery, playing it far safer with a cast full of legacy characters, even if most other than Spock were barely defined before the start of the series, and it does often feel limited by its status as a prequel - we know that Spock, Nurse Chapel, Pike, M’Benga, Kirk, and Scottie all survive the series, since all appear in TOS, we know Spock and Nurse Chapel do not end up together, we know Pike is going to get stuck in his chair and then fuck off to fantasy land (and by extension can probably conclude his relationship with Captain Batel is doomed) - as well as further handicapped by its desire to “set up” TOS in various ways, like with their copy of the Drumhead (future me: I meant Balance of Terror, but I’m keeping this mistake here so you can make fun of me) proving Kirk is the right man to handle that crisis as well as Kirk, Uhura and Spock all sharing a table in one episode - I just picture the “soyjack pointing” meme overlaid on it, even tho I hate people who use soyjacks - but yeah, I like it. Its a much more Star Trek feeling experience than Discovery, and my quibbles with it are on the same scale as my quibbles with Voyager rather than my larger ones with Discovery. But boy, do I hate the Gorn.

First off, what are the Gorn doing here? And by this, I don’t mean from a lore perspective - frankly I don’t know enough about TOS lore to know whether its an issue for Pike to have encountered the Gorn as much as he has before Kirk meets them in TOS, and I don’t super care - while I do think series should avoid directly contradicting established canon as much as possible, I have no issues generally with them twisting it to tell the story they want or to explore a cool idea, AS LONG AS THE RESULT IS GOOD. And the Gorn episodes of SNW are not very good.

Let’s take my weakest objection first. They look dumb. Their only major resemblance to the classic goofy rubber suit is some similarly goofy looking lips on the full adult Gorn - but its a passing resemblance at best. If you showed me both side to side out of context I doubt I’d guess they are suppose to be the same alien. I don’t have a big issues with the lack of resemblance - if the new design looked good, I could ignore the change just like the 90s update of the Klingons or Discovery’s update of the Klingons, neither of which bothered me and honestly I downright liked Discovery’s, although I do think bringing hair back in Season 2 was the right choice as it opened up a lot more variety in Klingon appearance that helped make them both more recognizable and more distinguishable from one another, an important aspect of alien race design. These Gorn, though, as babies, juveniles, and adults, all look weirdly low poly and shitty and not very scary, none of which would be a big deal if they were cheap to make, but I am sure this is them pulling all the stops on their CGI budget. They would have looked honestly better if they had just done some shitty puppets and rubber suits, and I have to imagine massively cheaper - and if they had actually spent that same budget on GOOD puppets and rubber suits, probably a lot better. Maybe someone likes how they look - I hope at least the artist who made them did - but I don’t, and they feel like wasted budget that could have been better used on literally anything else. But, at the end of the day, aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder, and even had they looked amazing and terrifying, that would not have solved my problems with them.

My big problem? Whats the point of them? What are we suppose to take away from Starfleet’s encounter with them? What lessons were learned? Do they represent some real world people or challenge or reality we must face? Star Trek is suppose to be a utopian scifi that pushes progressive values. Not every element of the show needs to always fit that - the series has often explored non-utopian aspects of the future at various points and with varying degrees of success, and writers certainly are allowed to have fun, not every aspect of every episode needs to mean something - but the Gorn are a major adversary for all three seasons of the show (I am only in E1 of S3, but even if they never appear again, them being such a huge deal in E1 I feel justifies this statement). A major adversary like that probably should lend itself to some meaningful interpretation, some progressive takeaway, some political point being made. And like.. maybe there is? But I am not sure what it is.

Honestly, they just feel like rip-offs of xenomorphs from Alien. But Alien does actually make progressive points. Alien is about how capitalism will force underpaid blue collar workers to risk life and limb to make a profit. Nothing about the alien itself necessarily furthers that, but the story itself does. If the story of Alien were actually a two part Star Trek episode, and the Weyland-Yutani corporation was Ferengi owned or some other way clearly identified as exploitative in it, I could accept it as a Star Trek story. But the Gorn, despite their visual and biological similarities to xenomorphs, are not positioned in the same way as the xenomorphs in Alien, and Starfleet is not Weyland-Yutani. Instead of being an unknown lifeform of unknown intelligence which is humanity’s first exposure to any alien life, period, Gorn are a known intelligent species whom Starfleet has had limited contact with before, and who clearly are intelligent enough to engage in diplomacy - they send Starfleet a picture of a peaceful demarcation line at one point. But they are also portrayed as vicious, violent monsters who despite their human-like intelligence and technology cannot possible be reasoned with who only want to eat or parasitize humans as brood pods for their young.

Is the lesson that sometimes, people are vicious monsters who want to lay eggs in your chest cavity and should be genocided? Cuz thats not a Star Trek lesson. Is the lesson that sometimes people are vicious monsters who want to lay eggs in your chest and you need to find a way to mimic the radiance of a star not going through a solar flare cycle in order to calm them down? That… maybe could be a Star Trek lesson? I guess? I don’t understand what, if any lesson is actually being conveyed here, and I think I know the reason - there isn’t one. Which is actually pretty rare for Strange New Worlds. Now, I do remember some Star Trek like progressive messaging in the first Gorn episode - it just had nothing to do with the Gorn but a subplot - and there probably was some hiding away in this episode too, but again, the A plot of the Gorn was incidental to it. I just think, if this is going to be your major plotline of your series for three seasons, and you are writing Star Trek, that you should put some thought into the implications of including an intelligent race of vicious bloodthirsty monsters who will genocide humans if we don’t genocide them first. It rhymes with blood libel, frankly, and the fact they are reptilian aliens is perhaps not the biggest coincidence. Kinda surprised the ADL doesn’t have anything to say about them to be honest, guess they are too busy sucking up to Israel or whatever.

Okay I kinda went off track, but like, seriously. Monsterizing an intelligent race just seems like something Star Trek shouldn’t do. Even the Borg got humanized, plus the Borg could be read as representing consumer culture or monoculture or authoritarianism or any number of interesting things, not merely “some cultures are just evil.” I don’t know what to do with the Gorn as written in a Star Trek universe, and thats a problem. Now, I will grant, maybe I’m just missing something. Or maybe a later episode will give more context on the Gorn and fix this. But as is, big thumbs down for me. And I fucking love reptiles, so an even bigger L to have ruined a cool reptilian alien race by making them alien rip-offs.