star trek strange new worlds gorn

'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds': Who Are the Gorn?

Who are the mystery aliens pursuing the Enterprise?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recently released its fourth episode, "Memento Mori," and with it, used its prequel status to return to an iconic piece of Star Trek lore dating back to 1967. This episode doesn't shy away from saying the infamous species' name, either. However, revisiting the Gorn isn't all that surprising, considering Lt. La'an Noonien-Singh ( Christina Chong ) revealed the heartbreaking backstory that found her a victim of the ruthless species, even if that wasn't quite the lore the audience was expecting based on the character's name. But fifty-five years is a long time, so if you don't remember everything about the antagonistic species, nobody would blame you. So, who are the Gorn?

The Gorn are an intelligent, bipedal, and reptilian species that are incredibly hostile and unfortunately warp-capable with technology on par with The Federation's. Thanks to Lower Decks , the assumption can be made that they have at least two genders and that marriage is a part of their reptilian culture. The species are very durable, strong, and have incredible stamina, however, this also makes them slower and less agile creatures. While the eye appearance of the reptiles' eyes varied among the species, they had razor-sharp teeth, holes on the side of their heads for ears, and claws on their hands and feet. The Gorn are carnivores.

RELATED: How ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Perfectly Balances Classic and New Trek

Until Strange New Worlds , it was assumed that the first contact with the Gorn was with Captain James T. Kirk ( William Shatner ), but we now know of at least two previous interactions. The first occurred in the 2200s when the reptilians captured a human colony ship and transferred the entire complement to a facility where they were used as live food or breeding sacks. According to the Gorn's culture, the last surviving person is jettisoned into space aboard a life raft, allowing for Lt. Noonien-Singh's survival and rescue by Una Chin-Riley ( Rebecca Romijn ). Later, the Gorn attempt to lure The USS Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike ( Anson Mount ) into a trap, but thanks to the previous experience of Lt. Noonien-Singh, the Enterprise is able to evade capture, destroy one of the ships, and escape.

The Federation made contact with the species when they attack a colony/outpost on Cestus III, a system in what the Gorn considered their territory, in Star Trek: The Original Series episode, "Arena." When USS Enterprise pursues a Gorn vessel, another alien, a Metron, transports both Kirk and the Gorn Captain to a deserted planet where the iconic fight scene takes place. Kirk eventually wins, but instead spares the Gorn. The Metron is surprised but impressed, deciding to spare The Enterprise while still sending them thousands of light-years away from that sector of space.

A Gorn was next seen on The Animated Series episode, "The Time Trap." He was seen on a ruling council of a pocket reality, implying that some of the species became separated from the whole. It's important to note that generally The Animated Series isn't included in the recognized Star Trek canon. The Gorn are also in several Lower Decks episodes. In addition to the huge marriage revelation, the series also gives fans an amazing tidbit of information: A Gorn resides on Starbase 25 and is a chef at 'Mr. Krada Leg'.

Finally, a Gorn named Slar is also used in Enterprise 's "In A Mirror Darkly, Part 2" to help contextualize the mirror universe and show how brutal and violent the alternate reality is. Slar is a slavemaster for the Tholian Assembly, leading a salvage mission of the USS Defiant (NCC-1764), a ship from the prime universe, stuck in the mirroring one. When Terrans also board the ship, Slar attempts to keep control of the ship but is killed by Captain Jonathan Archer ( Scott Bakula ) in the process. Star Trek: Discovery also shows that because of the size and might of the species, it isn't unusual for members of The Terran Empire to take their skeletal remains as trophies, as seen on Georgiou's ( Michelle Yeoh ) ISS Shenzou.

The Gorn may not have a history as complex as the Andorians or Bajorans, but the Gorn rightfully earned their place in Trek lore even just by being the first thing that comes to many people's minds when mentioning Star Trek or Captain Kirk. The inclusion of this species in La'an's backstory gives the opportunity to flesh out this species even more in Strange New Worlds , potentially providing more context for the goofy fight that aired over 5 decades ago.

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Published May 26, 2023

How Strange New Worlds and the Gorn Makes Arena's Message of Mercy More Powerful

The Gorn's brutality makes it harder and more necessary to believe they deserved Kirk's mercy.

StarTrek.com

From the very start, Star Trek villains have served the narrative purpose of revealing exactly what values the Federation represents. Starfleet and the Federation may give decent speeches about how evolved they are and how much they want to "seek out" new life forms, but enemies like the Klingons, Romulans, Borg, Dominion, and Kazon have consistently tested Starfleet's limits. On Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , the Gorn take on the role of the show's most threatening adversary, while showing what type of officers make up Captain Christopher Pike 's crew. Their appearance on Strange New Worlds draws comparisons to their introduction on Star Trek: The Original Series . During their first appearance, the Gorn illustrated Captain James Kirk 's capacity for mercy, and Strange New Worlds challenged Kirk's decision by inviting the audience to wonder if it was the right choice. Audiences caught their first glimpse of the Gorn in The Original Series ' episode, " Arena ." The episode began with Kirk, Spock, and Dr. Leonard McCoy looking forward to spending downtime on the Observation Post located on Cestus III. Upon their arrival at the outpost, they were horrified to discover that it had been destroyed. As Kirk and his crew tended to the few survivors, the Gorn began an attack on both the landing party and on the Enterprise .

After Kirk and Spock fashioned a grenade launcher and mounted a counter attack, the Gorn quickly retreated back to their ship. "Arena" then turned its focus from the alien attack to the emotional effect the Gorn's attack had on Kirk. Lt. Harold relayed, to a furious Kirk, the Gorn's choice to continue their assault the outpost despite their repeated pleas for mercy and their inability to defend itselfVisibly moved by the retelling of the attack, Kirk pursued the Gorn, even after the Gorn vessel retreated. A high-speed space chase ensued, and Spock correctly pointed out that destroying their adversary would not bring back the lives lost in the outpost. Kirk retorted, "If the aliens do not go unpunished, they'll be back, attacking other Federation Installations." However, Kirk's plans for vengeance were thwarted by the Metrons, who forced the Gorn captain and Kirk to fight one another in arena-style combat. During the fight, the Gorn captain claimed that they were only protecting themselves against a Starfleet invasion of Gorn territory. Upon gaining the upper hand, Kirk could not bring himself to kill the Gorn captain. Instead, he extended an offer of mercy, saving the lives of the Gorn captain and his crew. Kirk mused, "Maybe you thought you were protecting yourself, when you attacked the outpost." Kirk's mercy is based around the conjecture that the Gorn were defending themselves.

When the Gorn showed up in Strange New Worlds , that conjecture was no longer possible. These Gorn were a highly intelligent sentient species capable of hunting down prey, and they viewed the Starfleet crew as prey. In both " Memento Mori " and " All Those Who Wander ," members of Pike's Enterprise were hunted and killed due to the feeding and mating habits of the Gorn. Kirk had no way of knowing whether the Gorn were telling the truth about "defending" their territory. But with the additional information that Strange New Worlds presented about the Gorn, it is entirely possible that the Gorn were hunting the outpost. How does that change Kirk's decision to be merciful? Arguably, the depiction of the Gorn in Strange New Worlds makes Kirk's act of mercy all the more powerful. With the full knowledge of the brutal way that Gorn rip their prey apart and the vicious death the Gorn eggs cause when exploding out of an unsuspecting person's body, the Metrons' comments to Captain Kirk ring even more true — "You surprise me, Captain. By sparing your helpless enemy who surely would have destroyed you." The Metrons argued the Gorn would never have shown the same mercy that Kirk did; "Memento Mori" and "All Who Wander" reaffirmed that notion. We can look back at the Gorn in "Arena" and wonder whether Kirk's death would have been simple; whether he would have made a delicious meal, or whether his body could have served as host for the Gorn hatchlings. Perhaps the Gorn in the current series had full bellies and simply wanted to extract vengeance and leave. But there is little doubt that mercy would have ever been an option had the Gorn won. But Kirk's mercy remains. In light of how violent a death Kirk could have received at the hands of the Gorn, his mercy may be incomprehensible to some. For some, the brutality of the Gorn may place the viewers squarely in the same position that Kirk was at the beginning of “Arena,” with the view that the Gorn deserved their fate. Some may even be swayed to the belief that by sparing the Gorn captain and his crew, Kirk ultimately endangered the next batch of prey.

While the Gorn may have escaped to feast another day, the alternative — the very one that Kirk found himself wanting to pursue in the beginning of this episode — is one that goes against the values of Starfleet and the Federation. Had Kirk claimed vengeance or destroyed the Gorn because of the threat they might have posed, he would have permanently put the Gorn into a category of "monsters." Despite all of the conflict Starfleet has experienced in the galaxy, its mission has never been about "othering" the enemy. The captains always strive forward and attempt to find common ground with their enemy. It's what made communication with the Horta possible, and it’s why Spock sought peace with Klingons and Romulans. It’s also why Star Trek: Voyager was able to rehabilitate former Borg into their crew. Sometimes personal interests and experiences get in the way momentarily, as Kirk's hatred of the Klingons did in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country or Picard’s did when dealing with Hugh. Ultimately, Spock’s words in "Arena" explains the belief of the Federation towards their enemies, “I merely suggested that a regard for sentient life.” Though Spock was interrupted by a still-furious Kirk, his point was that their enemy was not a faceless monster. They were being capable of sentience, and that shouldn’t be forgotten. How do the recent additions to the Gorn’s portrayal change that argument? If you truly dedicate your life to the mission to "seek out strange new worlds, new life, new civilizations...," will you be able to respect that sentient life when it doesn't respect you back? Or will you turn to annihilation when that species possesses no conscious? Will you extend mercy, or will you justify the reasons why you should eliminate them instead? These are the questions that the Gorn’s depiction in Strange New Worlds invites you to ask about Kirk’s offer of mercy.

For audiences watching “Arena” now, the answer is more complicated than it may have been in 1967. After what we have seen the Gorn do, agreeing with Kirk that the Gorn deserve mercy might not be easy — which makes it all the more necessary and powerful when that mercy is delivered. With the new information about the Gorn, Kirk’s decision to exchange vengeance for mercy rejects the worst of humanity’s impulses towards destruction and violence, and embraces Star Trek ’s goal of showing a better way forward.

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This article was originally published on September 15, 2022.

Annalisha Fragmin (she/her) is a freelance writer from Ohio, and she writes about superheroes, Star Wars, and Star Trek. “Devil in the Dark” is her favorite episode of Trek. Tweet her at @annafragmin.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In addition, the series airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern Europe. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Legacy Effects wizard J. Alan Scott on creating the Gorn for 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' (exclusive)

The Academy Award-winning creature designer discusses the show's Gorn-centric season finale.

Paramount+'s "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" just wrapped up its impressive second season showcasing the intrusion of a particularly combative enemy species.

The finale episode, titled " Hegemony ," ended in an unsatisfying cliffhanger that upset some faithful fans after a brilliant season filled with entertaining episodes like "Ad Astra per Aspera," "Among the Lotus Eaters" and the historic singing and dancing chapter, " Subspace Rhapsody ."

Despite some narrative hiccups in that climax, there's no argument regarding the return of the Gorn and the reveal of the snarling, 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) alien decked out in an ultra-cool Gigeresque spacesuit.

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The Academy Award-winning visual effects studio Legacy Effects was responsible for hatching the principal onscreen villain for "Strange New Worlds" using a clever synthesis of old-school puppetry, modern 3D fabrication, digital modeling, cutting-edge animatronics and suited-actor practical effects.

From screeching Gorn hatchlings to crawling younglings to a full-sized bipedal Gorn clad in a gothic environmental ensemble complete with an illuminated helmet, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers chose wisely when deciding to use the angry reptilian monsters as the show's primary antagonists.

Watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount Plus: <a href="https://paramountplus.qflm.net/c/221109/175360/3065?subId1=hawk-custom-tracking&sharedId=hawk&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paramountplus.com%2F" data-link-merchant="paramountplus.com"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Get a one month free trial 

Get all the Star Trek content you can possibly handle with this free trial of Paramount Plus. Watch new shows like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and all the classic Trek movies and TV shows too. Plans start from $4.99/month after the trial ends.

We spoke with Legacy Effects co-founder J. Alan Scott — whose mindblowing resume includes everything from "Jurassic Park," "Galaxy Quest" and "Real Steel" to "Pacific Rim," "Avengers: Infinity War" and "The Expanse" — about the genesis of the Gorn and how his team created the terrifying cinematic magic.

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Space.com: As a Hollywood creator working in creature effects for over three decades, what inspired you about the form and function of the Gorn?

J. Alan Scott:   What's nice for us is that the reveal of what we've been developing for two seasons now is that we still haven't revealed the full creature yet, so we now have another opportunity to do that. We originally designed it for Season 1 and then they wanted to inch into it and wanted to tease and build up the expectation, which for me is a great horror trope. The anticipation and the anxiety of it is much better than the reveal. But you still have to show it.

With my roots with "Jurassic Park," when they said they wanted a horror episode — and I'm a huge horror fan and love the idea of scaring people — to take what was in broad daylight at Vasquez Rocks with the original " Star Trek " episode's Gorn, there's no scare factor there. It was great, but what would they have done if the series could have supported a horror episode?

When we were designing, they had a couple rules. They wanted to tie it back to the original as much as you can. But the idea to make it a hard-R horror movie with carnage and blood and gore was for me — couldn't have been a better ask. The trick was adding technology and figuring out where they land. Which was different from the original show that was basically just a loincloth and a bandolier. It didn't really inform what they were capable of. 

Space.com: Take us through the developmental challenges in creating a hostile alien species beyond its humble origins in "Star Trek: The Original Series."

Scott: Since they'd already explored in Season 1 that they've got space travel and warp drive technology , the trick is, How do you make a monster that's sentient and intelligent? Can you talk with it? Does it speak? And that mix of horror and technology was a long exploration that culminated in the EV suit. I'm still looking forward to see if they wear armor. Do they have weapons? Do they wear sidearms? All that's going to come later. Do they use communicators? Are they using iPads? What are they using with their hands, and how do you do that when you got this thing that's supposed to be a ravaging beast? How do they interact with each other?  

They can't be screaming raptors all the time. But raptors are a great parallel. They have a culture, and there's a society there. Now add technology to that. Now how do we design the EV suit around that whole thing? You can only screw it up. That's the problem with something as iconic as the Gorn: You're being asked to recreate something, modernize it and do it in a respectful way, but also make it exciting.

You have to be very cognizant of whether it's going to be silly. The writers and the production team guide us through all of that. I'd love to say that these were all of my ideas. They're not. It's a visualization of a team of ideas. It's a balance and a little bit of exploration that unfortunately happens in a very quick timeline. It seems like it was two seasons' worth, but you really only get two months to build it in the end, and then there's no time to go backwards and change it.

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Space.com: What was discussed for lighting schemes in the zero-G fight scene?

Scott: Yes, we have to work with the lighting team and the DP [director of photography] and the director on how much we're going to reveal. We actually had to alter the design of the helmet because the lighting wasn't quite right. The fixtures team came to us, and they got new LEDs and put them in there, and we had to change that a couple of times to get the right balance. It's not something that we can anticipate here, even though we'd sent up a mockup [to Toronto]. Uplighting was great because it makes a real spooky face, but then it wasn’t really enough of the eyes so we changed the helmet so we could hide LEDs inside to illuminate the eyes more. In that dark set, it pops, and you can see the teeth and eyes and the movement in there. You see the animal inside.

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Space.com: For "Strange New Worlds" Season 3, what can fans expect with the Gorn? Will we see them flying their strange starships and firing weapons?

Scott: We haven't shot it yet, but there have been discussions, and I'm looking forward to the same thing. We've seen their entire life cycle now, discussed and designed, so I love the fact that we're just inching into it. I'm looking forward to seeing it full-body. We've seen the EV suit, but we don't know what they look like inside yet. For Season 3 Episode 1, we're anxious and waiting almost as much as everyone who watched [the finale] last night!

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 2 is streaming now on Paramount+.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.

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Spock, Kirk, Gorn — Oh My! How ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Breathed Thrilling New Life Into the 56-Year-Old Franchise

SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in several episodes of the first season of “ Star Trek : Strange New Worlds,” including the season finale, currently streaming on Paramount+.

As with any fandom, Trekkies can be a fickle lot, which makes the enthusiastic reception for “ Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ” — the latest “Star Trek” TV series, which just concluded its first season — that much more remarkable. Not since J.J. Abrams’ 2009 feature film have fans been this near-unanimous in their appreciation, even adoration, for a new “Star Trek” venture, which is saying something in an era in which “Trek” fans have more viewing options than ever before.

In its first season, “Strange New Worlds” ranks with “The Mandalorian” in striking a wildly successful balance for a new iteration of a legacy franchise between nostalgic fan service and bold, unexpected storytelling. Which isn’t to say that the series has pleased all the people all of the time.

Set on the U.S.S. Enterprise roughly a decade before the events of the original “Star Trek” TV series from the 1960s, “Strange New Worlds” includes vividly rendered younger versions of several classic “Trek” characters, such as Spock (Ethan Peck), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), and it’s breathed robust new life into characters from the original “Star Trek” pilot, namely Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and his first officer, Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) — known as only Number One for decades until “Strange New Worlds” gave her a full name.

“When someone hands you a ‘Star Trek’ show, you can’t treat it like you’re going to break it all the time and only do what you think is safe,” Myers says. “If you do that, you’re not going to do a good show. That said, choosing to do things that might push the boundaries is going to bug people. I just don’t want that to scare them away.”

To get there, Myers, Goldsman and their team of writers had to learn how to transform one of the most common complaints fans have for a legacy series into an advantage.

“People will sometimes feel like you’re playing with people’s childhoods,” Myers says. “What has been a real freedom for me is to say, ‘I’m not playing with your childhood: The things from your childhood haven’t happened yet.’ I have to act like I don’t know what’s going to happen. Uhura doesn’t know who she’s going to be. Spock doesn’t know who he’s going to be. If you can accept that, you can understand that their experience is real and interesting and happening now .”

In an in-depth interview with Variety , Myers reflected back on some of the biggest highlights and challenges of the first season of “Strange New Worlds.”

“We’re Just Gonna Try to Do Classic ‘Trek'”

When CBS All Access (now Paramount+) re-launched “Star Trek” as a television enterprise in 2017 with “Star Trek: Discovery,” it’d been 12 years since a “Trek” show was last on the air. In that time, serialized storytelling became the dominant narrative model for streaming dramas, especially genre ones; “Discovery” has followed suit, telling a single, ongoing story every season. Starting in 2020, “Star Trek: Picard,” a sequel series to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” starring Patrick Stewart, has done the same.

Fan response has been mixed. “Trek” has ventured into serialization before, with the 1990s series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” and “Discovery” and “Picard” have taken full advantage of the opportunity to paint on a broader narrative canvass. But the original “Trek” series and “The Next Generation” remain among the most beloved — and re-watched — “Trek” series because they adhered to the old school, episodic structure of a brand new adventure every week.

“Telling a really long overarching story is so challenging,” Myers says. “You don’t often get little downtime moments.”

“Strange New Worlds” has forged a middle path, with each episode telling a self-contained story while threading longer character arcs that span multiple episodes — or occasionally, the whole season.

“The other ‘Star Trek’ shows are doing bigger, broader experiments, which I think are cool,” Myers says of “Discovery” and “Picard.” “They’re definitely trying to open up the sandbox and do different kinds of things with ‘Trek.’ We’re sort of the opposite. It’s a little easier to be like, ‘We’re just gonna try to do classic ‘Trek.'”

Most episodes of “Strange New Worlds” focused on one or two characters as the central driver of that week’s episode, and the self-contained storylines allowed the writers more breathing room to allow the characters to simply bounce off each other. “I love genre storytelling, but when it skimps on character, it just never works, and when it delivers on character, it makes everything work,” Myers says. “We get to relish the downtime moments. It’s the comforting part of television that you don’t always get out of movies. If we focus on character, the action will feel like it has more stakes, the romance will feel like it actually matters, and the humor will be funnier, because it’s coming from people that we know and like to hang out with. I think that that’s the thing that we’ve gotten to do a little more than other [‘Trek’] shows.”

“ We Didn’t Know if We Would Be Able to Get Kirk”

One of the most inflexible pieces of “Star Trek” canon is that until the original series episode “Balance of Terror,” it had been 100 years since anyone in the Federation had seen or heard from the Romulans — one of the most lasting and resonant “Trek” villains ever. The “Strange New Worlds” writers solved that problem with its season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” which transported Capt. Pike into a future, alternate timeline in which he , not Capt. Kirk, was leading the Enterprise during the events of “Balance of Terror.”

The episode, Myers says, was the marriage of two ideas floating in the “Strange New Worlds” writers’ room. Idea one: “What if we took a classic ‘Trek’ episode and changed the timeline so we’re retelling that episode with our characters in a high-budget context?” Idea two: “What if your future self comes back and says, ‘Don’t do what you’re about to do’ — how would you respond?”

In the original series, we learn that Pike suffered a horrific, debilitating accident that removed him from command, allowing Kirk to take his place. On “Strange New Worlds,” Pike knows of his eventual fate, and in “A Quality of Mercy,” he tries to change it, causing his future self to appear and show Pike what will happen if he takes that path.

Placing Pike at the helm of the Enterprise when Kirk was meant to captain it also presented the tantalizing prospect of having the two men share the same scene — but that meant finding an actor to play Kirk. Myers says that after extensive auditions, they ended up offering the role to “The Vampires Diaries” star Paul Wesley , but the decision came down to the wire.

“Part of that episode ended up being about the differences of command the differences between Kirk and Pike and how they approach things very, very differently,” Myers says. “But there was a brief moment when we didn’t know if we would be able to get a Kirk. I wrote two versions of the script, one with Kirk and one without.”

“There’s a Reason People Haven’t Touched the Gorn”

The reptilian aliens made their debut in an episode from the first season of the original series, “Arena,” in which Capt. Kirk (William Shatner) is pitted in a fight to the death on an alien planet against a Gorn captain. Since then, the species has occupied the fringes of the “Trek” universe, showing up again only fleetingly over the years, most often in animation. That’s because on the original series, the Gorn looked like, well, a man in a giant rubber lizard suit.

“You couldn’t do the Gorn now the way they did the Gorn,” Myers says. “I think audiences would have an instinctive organ transplant rejection to the classic version of the Gorn. Audiences now are sophisticated, they expect a certain level of effects work, of verisimilitude.”

But Myers says that Goldsman “has wanted to do something with the Gorn forever,” and made resurrecting the species a goal for Season 1 of “Strange New Worlds.”

“I mean, look, I love ‘Arena.’ ‘Arena’ is a great episode. But there’s a reason people haven’t touched the Gorn much since then,” Myers says. “They’re extremely hard to do. It’s expensive, it’s challenging. You have to reimagine them.”

Doing so meant bending “Trek” canon a bit, and reconceiving the Gorn as at once highly intelligent and yet feral in their primal, ferocious aggression. It also meant keeping the species largely off screen, since making them look realistic to 21st century eyes required a full, and costly, CGI redesign. The result maintained the feeling from “Arena” that the Gorn were unrelentingly dangerous while deepening their mythology enough to place them on par with the A-list of “Trek” alien adversaries.

“I’m aware of some of the the canon challenges,” Myers says. “Knowing that you’re going to have to change them is an opportunity to try to do something different.”

“We Wanted to Show That There Were Stakes”

Characters die all the time on “Star Trek,” but it remains exceedingly rare that it happens to a member of the main cast — and even then, it’s because the actor involved wanted to leave the show. That wasn’t the case with Hemmer (Bruce Horak), the irascible chief engineer on Enterprise who sacrifices himself at the end of Episode 9, “All Those Who Wander,” after his body is implanted with Gorn offspring. The writers knew from the start that they were going to kill Hemmer off.

“When we cast Bruce, we told him,” Myers says. “He was like, ‘Great. I’m down. This is awesome!'”

The issue, Myers explained, was that “Strange New Worlds” had to make clear the characters were at real risk. “One of the knocks on a prequel is that we know Uhura’s going to make it, we know Spock’s going to make it,” he says. “We wanted to show that there were stakes in this show.”

Don’t worry: While Hemmer is dead, the actor who played him is not gone. “We are finding and have currently found ways to have Bruce circle back in our universe in a very classic ‘Trek’ way,” he says. “It won’t be the last you see of Bruce Horak.”

“It Was All About Telling the Story About Spock”

Perhaps the most surprising twist in Season 1 of “Strange New Worlds” was the revelation that Spock’s fiancée T’Pring (Gia Sandhu) is unknowingly overseeing a Vulcan prison that houses Spock’s half-brother, Sybok. The character was introduced as the main villain in the 1989 feature film “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” as played by Laurence Luckinbill (after Sean Connery couldn’t do it), but the movie is widely considered one of the worst “Trek” films ever, and the character has since faded into obscurity. (It didn’t help that Spock had never mentioned Sybok before “Star Trek V,” either.)

Myers can’t remember who had the idea to bring Sybok back into the “Trek” fold, but says it grew out of the conception of Episode 7, “The Serene Squall,” which centered on Angel ( Jesse James Keitel ), a nonbinary space pirate who befriends — and then betrays — Spock in an (initially successful) attempt to commandeer the Enterprise.

“We wanted to do a villain that harkened back to classic ‘Trek’ — a really fun, scenery-chewing villain who you just want to see again and again and again, but also could be a villain that we can only do now ,” Myers says. “In doing a story about someone who’s nonbinary, it really tied into the story about Spock reckoning with his identity. The Sybok piece was an interesting way to tie into Spock’s past, and to reclaim a piece of ‘Trek’ lore.”

Despite Sybok’s dubious origins in “Star Trek V,” Myers and the writers liked that the character’s decision to forsake logic and embrace his emotions contrasted with Spock’s dogged pursuit of pure logic.

“You know, look, that movie is, uh — let me just say it’s not my favorite of the ‘Trek’ movies,” Myers says with a laugh. “But even in the ‘Trek’ movies that don’t work as well, there’s always something interesting. I liked that character, and the idea of a Vulcan who is wrestling with emotion. Science fiction is about playing with ideas. We’re not just moving chess pieces around.”

Sybok appears only from the back at the very end of “The Serene Squall,” and that’s the last we see of him in Season 1. But Myers is tight-lipped on when, or whether, he may show up again. “Sometimes you do these things in TV where you pull the thread just to see where it gets you,” he says. “You don’t have to wrap everything up. We wanted to throw out some more ideas that may come back and intersect with the show in the future.”

“This Is the Pike Show”

The future of “Strange New Worlds” is, at least in part, already written: The series wrapped production earlier this month on Season 2, and will feature Wesley as Kirk years before he becomes a Starfleet captain.

When Mount, Peck and Romijn were first cast, it was for Season 2 of “Discovery” — with no sense at the time that they would ever be spun-off into their own show. Now that Myers has actors for Kirk, Spock and Uhura, however, it’s hard to ignore the prospect of continuing the “Star Trek” story into the era of the original series.

“Look, I would love nothing more than to then to go all the way forward to the future, and eventually do that with them,” he says. “But there’s a lot of stories before that. I’ll tell you what Kirk isn’t: He isn’t the replacement captain. This is the Pike show. This is the Spock show. This is the Number One show. We have a lot of stories yet to tell with them. That said, who knows what the future holds. We would be so lucky to have that Enterprise.”

He pauses, and answers with a knowing glint in his eyes. “I think that that would be an unbelievably interesting experiment,” he says. “But I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, because I love this show. And I hope we get to do it for a while.”

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How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Brought The Gorn To Life

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" features the third television appearance of the reptilian Gorn. It also marks the development of the third method used to bring the scary lizards to life.

The original Gorn, the villain of the classic "Star Trek" episode "Arena," was portrayed by stuntmen Bobby Clark and Gary Combs. The pair wore a rubber get-up designed by Wah Chang. When the Gorn reappeared almost 40 years later in the "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode "In a Mirror Darkly," the crew used CGI and motion capture instead. In "Strange New Worlds," the crew combined practical and digital effects, using puppetry and CGI in tandem.

Puppeteering the Gorn

The Gorn appear onscreen in episode 9, "All Those Who Wander." These Gorn are mere hatchlings, running on all fours instead of being bipedal like the previous Gorn. Given the difference in appearance, it makes sense that the crew had to find a new way to bring them to life. In a behind-the-scenes feature "The Gorn Reborn," the cast and crew discuss the process of creating the effects and what it was like filming with them.

The Gorn puppets were the work of the team at Legacy Effects, led by Alan Scott, and "Strange New Worlds" in-house prosthetics team, led by Chris Bridges. Rebecca Romijn (Commander Una-Chin Riley) said:

"Practical effects are always more interesting. They're more interesting to play with on set and they're more interesting to watch, I think."

This doesn't mean going practical was without challenges. Producer Alex Kurtzmann said:

"Puppetry is very tricky because the best versions of it have to include incredibly specific lighting, otherwise you're very aware you're looking at a puppet."

Bridges himself added:

"Traditionally, there hasn't been a lot of animatronics or puppeted characters. I think that's because when you're shooting on main unit, it's so fast-paced. And puppeteering something in real time can get quite intricate ... I think we demonstrated that [puppetry] is viable and that we would probably see a lot more of it."

The feature shows how a particularly frightening scene, where the alpha hatchling gnaws on a window to get to Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), was really just a hand puppet. I, for one, never would've guessed, so the crew clearly did something right.

CGI touch-ups

Despite the impressive practical effects, they alone didn't carry the episode. Visual effects supervisor Alexander Wood discussed how the team used CGI to hide signs of the Gorn's puppeteering and increase their expressiveness.

In particular, the scene where the Gorn hatchlings erupt out of an unnamed alien (its costume also the work of Chris Bridges' team). The minuscule Gorn newborns were puppets too, held on rods; the rods obviously had to be removed with digital touch-ups. Wood also spoke of how the VFX team added micro-movements to the Gorn that made them look more alive, like head twitches, "the very little subtle things that go from puppet to a very realistic-looking alien."

CGI and practical effects are often discussed in competition with each other, but "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" proved how the two can be used together. At the end of the day, both types of effects are tools. Practical is better for some jobs, and VFX better for others; it's the filmmaker's job to know which situation calls for which.

Star Trek just changed Gorn canon with an Alien -inspired twist

Writer Davy Perez gets into all the nitty-gritty details of Star Trek’s big swing at starship horror.

In the final frontier, no one can hear you scream. In the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 — “All Those Who Wander” — the crew of the Enterprise are dropped into a nail-biting starship horror story, with heavy influences from the 1979 classic Alien . Along the way, we learn a lot more about a certain alien species. Episode writer Davy Perez gave us the scoop on why these aliens are different, and what it all means for the canon of The Original Series and the future of Strange New Worlds . Spoilers ahead.

In Episode 4, “Memento Mori,” the Enterprise crew had a close encounter with the nefarious Gorn, a lizard species. No one actually saw the Gorn, but this week, while looking for survivors on the crashed USS Peregrine , our Starfleet heroes encounter horrifying Gorn babies. The big news is that these Gorn reproduce by popping out of the bodies of other lifeforms, just like the gory xenomorph chestbursters from Alien .

It’s a big change for Trek. Other than one glimpse in the Mirror Universe back in 2005 on the prequel show Enterprise , the only “adult” Gorn we’ve seen is still the classic lizard person from The Original Series episode “Arena.” So, how do these baby Gorn fit in? As with “Memento Mori,” writer Davy Perez felt that “Arena” offered a good amount of “wiggle room” in terms of what Kirk and Starfleet actually know about the Gorn.

Kirk versus the Gorn in the 1967 Star Trek episode, “Arena.”

“Kirk’s idea of the Gorn is different from what he is being told by the Metrons,” Perez tells Inverse, referring to the powerful aliens who force the two to fight . “The Gorn he’s meeting in ‘Arena,’ doesn’t sync with his expectations of them. It was a personal choice I made in my own headcanon that allowed me to have fun with the writing. Viewing it that way creates more possibilities for Gorn stories to continue.”

While the classic rubber monster suit Gorn, designed by Wah Chang in 1967, is iconic, Perez points out that it’s clear in TOS that the Gorn was a “one-off,” meaning some canon trickiness was bound to emerge. The loophole Perez points out in “Arena” is the fact that Kirk’s phrasing in the original episode is specifically vague: “Weaponless, I face the creature the Metrons called a Gorn.”

The classic episode takes place in 2267, while Strange New Worlds happens in 2259. So, if Kirk knows what Pike and the crew know, then the lizard-man Gorn doesn’t really check out with the Velociraptor meets chestburster critters in Strange New Worlds .

“Maybe Kirk has never seen them, he could even be one of those people who still doubts the stories, or maybe even he has seen them and they don’t look the same,” Perez says. “I think the safest thing to say is we have no idea what the Gorn are really like.”

Over the years, various fan theories — and material from Star Trek roleplaying games — have suggested the existence of a variety of Gorn subspecies. In “All Those Who Wander,” Dr. M’Benga discovers the Gorn are “genetic chameleons,” which is why they don’t show up on sensors. Perez points out that, even after this episode and La’an’s childhood experience with these aliens, “we quite literally don’t know very much about the Gorn at all… and that’s what makes them so hard to fight.”

The Enterprise crew investigates the crash of the USS Peregrine, echoing the crashed alien ship investigated by the crew of the Nostromo in Alien .

Outside of all the TOS canon-weeds, the obvious thrill of “All Those Who Wander” is the way in which the episode brings the flavor of Alien, and other sci-fi horror classics, to Star Trek. There’s never quite been a Trek episode like this.

“Yes, Alien was something I’ve been inspired by many times in the past, and here especially,” Perez says. “It’s hard not to draw the comparison when writing a ‘horror story in space.’ Even back when discussing Episode 4 we started talking about Alien , and not just in what we liked about it, but more how to avoid retreading it wholesale. Our story is unique and specific to Trek, similar inspirations but different in execution.”

But it’s not just Alien that Perez and the SNW team drew upon for inspiration. When Nurse Chapel is chased by the tiny Gorn we get to see the latter’s point of view, which is evocative of Predator . And Perez notes the influences run from the obvious, like John Carpenter's The Thing , to the less obvious.

“You might laugh, but Gremlins !” Perez says. “Think about it, tiny monsters that roam around wreaking havoc with these ‘rules’ that mean the difference between life and death. Baby Gorn are just more deadly Gremlins. Or more aptly put, Tribbles with teeth.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is streaming now on Paramount+.

Ryan Britt's new book on the history of Star Trek's biggest changes. From the '60s show to the movies to 'TNG,' to 'Discovery,' 'Picard,' Strange New Worlds,' and beyond!

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How STRANGE NEW WORLDS Transforms the Gorn, an Old STAR TREK Enemy

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

In its first season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds reinvented one of the franchise’s oldest alien adversaries, the Gorn. They gave this classic antagonistic species an upgrade by injecting some blood from two of cinema’s most deadly extraterrestrials. We’re talking about Gorn inspired by the xenomorph from the Alien franchise and the Predator. In the season two finale of Strange New Worlds , “Hegemony,” the Gorn returned. And these aliens destroyed a Federation starship, along with most of a human colony. So how did Strange New Worlds update this alien race once thought of as a silly product of its 1960s time? First, we’ll tell you all about Star Trek ‘s Gorn and why they haven’t appeared much for five decades.

Who Are the Gorn, Star Trek ‘s Race of Reptilian Aliens, and Where Have They Been?

First appearing in the original Star Trek series episode “Arena,” the Gorn Hegemony was a warlike reptilian race who decimated a Federation outpost on the planet Cestus III. When Captain Kirk chased the enemy Gorn ship deep into space, an advanced species called the Metrons forced Kirk and the Gorn captain to fight for survival on a remote world. This fight scene, with a man in a very fake-looking alien lizard suit, became the subject of parody. It was even parodied in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey . Perhaps because of that, Star Trek has seemingly almost totally avoided the Gorn, beyond cameos and name drops across different series. The Gorn popped up briefly in CGI form on Star Trek: Enterprise in 2004 and in the 2013 Star Trek video game, for which the Gorn and William Shatner reunited for a silly promotion.

Strange New Worlds Reinvents the Gorn

But Strange New Worlds changed everything about these aliens, making the Gorn intergalactic boogymen. In the episode “Memento Mori,” we learned that La’an Noonien Singh (Christina Chong) had some serious PTSD based on her childhood trauma of surviving a Gorn massacre. During her childhood, the Gorn attacked and captured the SS Puget Sound, a colony ship, and left its crew on a Gorn breeding planet. The survivors, including La’an, were hunted for sport or eaten alive by their newborn hatchlings. Only a young La’an Noonien-Singh survived and told her tale to Starfleet. This was the first documented encounter with the Gorn on Star Trek , although it was not considered an official first contact. As La’an says, “Many people have seen the Gorn, but few live to tell about it.”

In “Memento Mori,” the Gorn only appeared in their Star Trek space vessels. We don’t actually see them in the reptilian flesh. Their vicious ways were only spoken of by Lt. Noonien Singh. In fact, they are described and treated as the shark in Jaws . When La’an described her childhood encounter with the Gorn and their lifeless eyes, it’s almost like hearing Quint talk about the shark that killed his crewmates on the U.S.S. Indianapolis . But in Strange New Worlds season one, episode nine, “All Those Who Wander,” we truly saw the Gorn for the first time in this Star Trek series. And they owe their newest incarnation to two classic sci-fi adversaries, the Xenomorph and the Predator.

The Gorn Become Terrifying Foes in Star Trek ‘s World

When the Enterprise responded to a distress beacon from a crashed Starfleet vessel, the U.S.S. Peregrine , they found the ship in shambles on an ice world and the crew of 99 officers dead. The logs showed that they had picked up three stranded refugees, all infected with Gorn eggs. They found a human girl (shades of Newt in Aliens ) and an unknown alien in the wreckage. Despite initial scans showing nothing unusual, the Gorn eggs were hatching inside one of the aliens.

Just like in Ridley Scott’s Alien , the hatchling busted out of the victim’s body and scampered off. Two others then emerged from the body of another victim. The four hatchlings quickly became two as they killed the others and fought for dominance. The POV shots of the Gorn hatchlings looked extremely similar to the heat signature vision of the alien hunters from the Predator franchise. Their reptilian appearance was also like the Predator, although that predates the movie, as the Gorn first appeared in 1967. Like the Xenomorph from Alien, the Gorn matured at an exponential rate, but the Enterprise crew managed to kill it before it grew to full size.

But the Enterprise crew took a heavy casualty when they fought the Gorn. The Gorn hatchling spit a type of venom onto Chief Engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horack), similar to the Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park. But this was more than venom. La’an revealed that this is how the Gorn lay their eggs. Hemmer took his own life before allowing the Gorn to take hold of him. In the two separate episodes of season one, they did not show a full-grown Gorn.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Two Reveals a Full-Grown Gorn

In season two’s “Hegemony,” the Gorn attack the human colony world Parnassus Beta, and decimate most of the population. Only a few survive. They also destroy the U.S.S. Cayuga . The episode shows that the Cayuga’s Captain, Marie Batel, has been infected with Gorn eggs. We finally see an adult Gorn in this episode, in a space suit no less. Unlike their Star Trek: The Original Series counterpart, this Gorn has a tail. Although Spock kills this particular Gorn, at the end of the episode, the Gorn Hegemony has the upper hand over Pike’s Enterprise , leaving us with a massive cliffhanger ending.

Of course, this sets up certain continuity issues. Technically “Arena,” the episode where Captain Kirk fights the Gorn in The Original Series , takes place about eight years after Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . Spock and Uhura don’t seem to know anything about the Gorn in The Original Series , which doesn’t make much sense. You’d think with their experiences in these Strange New Worlds episodes, they would have a few thoughts about this particular enemy. But it’ll be interesting to see how Strange New Worlds deals with this all of this, as we are no doubt going to see the Gorn continue to be a significant threat to Pike and his crew as the show continues to unfold.

Originally published on July 1, 2022.

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The Gorn were a warp-capable , bipedal reptilian species from the Beta Quadrant . Their interstellar government was known as the Gorn Hegemony .

• 1.1 Life cycle
• 2.1 Mirror universe
• 2.2 Alternate reality
• 3.1 Starship classes
• 5.1 Appearances
• 5.2 Background information
• 5.3.1 Video games
• 5.4 External links

Biology [ ]

A Gorn skeleton

Gorn were a cold-blooded species, with green , rubbery skin , red blood , and an average height of approximately two meters . They tended to be many times stronger than most humanoids . While young Gorn were very agile and fast, adults tended to be slower and less agile but with greater stamina. Nonetheless, a single adult Gorn was able to dispatch a fully armed Starfleet landing party with ease. They, like most cold-blooded species, preferred warmer temperatures and hated the cold. The Gorn had at least two genders : male and female . Despite being reptilian , Gorn females appeared to have breasts , which were generally found on mammals . ( TOS : " Arena "; ENT : " In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II "; LD : " Veritas "; SNW : " All Those Who Wander "; et al. )

Some Humans had an instinctive revulsion to the Gorn, as they were a type of reptile , and thought them primitive or unintelligent. This was unwise, as the Gorn were at least as intelligent as Humans.

Through the eyes of a Gorn

Gorn ears were simple holes on the sides of their skulls , while their mouths boasted an impressive array of sharp teeth and their hands and feet possessed vicious claws . In the mirror universe , Phlox quipped that the Gorn were comparable to that of the extinct Velociraptor , based on one Gorn's size and bite radius . ( ENT : " In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II ") Some Gorn displayed eyes that were silvery and faceted, much like the compound eyes of insects , while others had typical humanoid eyes complete with pupils.

They also possessed incredible durability and were able to take an extreme amount of punishment. During a skirmish between Captain James T. Kirk and a Gorn captain , Kirk hurled a boulder at his opponent, only for it to bounce off the Gorn's skin. Later, he caused a giant boulder to roll down a mountain and hit the Gorn captain. Though this temporarily stunned him, he was not injured. Kirk finally managed to wound and disable the Gorn with a primitive cannon comprised of rope -wrapped bamboo as a barrel , with raw diamonds as projectiles and a homemade gunpowder mixture as propellant. ( TOS : " Arena ")

Life cycle [ ]

External effects of parasitic Gorn eggs

The Gorn hatched from parasitic eggs that incubated inside humanoid hosts. The maturation cycle varied depending on the species of the host, lasting months within an Orion but days within a Human . When ready, the hatchlings or younglings would rip their way violently from the body of their host.

A Gorn youngling

Newly emerged Gorn were white in color; they became green as they fed voraciously and grew rapidly in size, molting their skin in the process. The hatchlings were quadrupedal and exceptionally fast and strong, and possessed prehensile tails . They were uncontrollably aggressive toward other lifeforms and even members of their own species, fighting each other for dominance, which ensured that only the strongest and smartest survived. Even before they were fully mature, the hatchlings developed ducts by their mouths that enabled them to spit venom , which not only blinded their prey but also infected additional hosts with eggs. Because of their biological makeup both eggs and hatchlings were invisible to sensors . Despite their bestial nature, the hatchlings were highly intelligent and could prevent themselves from being sensed telepathically – evolutionary advantages that made them dangerous hunters.

The Gorn maintained breeding planets where they deposited sentient beings to be used as breeding sacs or hunted as food by the hatchlings. Adult Gorn periodically returned to the planets to harvest their young. ( SNW : " Memento Mori ", " All Those Who Wander ")

The Gorn could also become pregnant with live young, and Caesarean sections might be indicated. Births of eight children were known. The infants were apparently highly aggressive even when born in this manner. ( Star Trek Into Darkness )

History and culture [ ]

A Gorn wedding ( 2380 )

Like many humanoid species , Gorn got married as well, as they had weddings , just as Humans and Vulcans did. ( LD : " Veritas ")

Of the Gorn, Orion privateer Harrad-Sar said in 2154 , " The less said about them, the better ". However, he did concede that the Gorn brewed the finest meridor in the five systems . ( ENT : " Bound ")

In 2256 , Captain Gabriel Lorca had a Gorn skeleton in a USS Discovery laboratory . ( DIS : " Context Is for Kings ")

Unconfirmed First Contact report for the Gorn in the personnel file of La'an Noonien-Singh

Although unconfirmed at the time, the first encounter between the Humans and the Gorn occurred in the 2230s or 2240s , when the colony ship SS Puget Sound was captured and the entire ship's complement was deposited on a planetary nursery . According to La'an Noonien-Singh 's accounts, the Gorn would eat some of their captives alive, while other captives would have their bodies slit open and used as "breeding sacks,” and some captives would be hunted as a sport before being fed to infant Gorn. In accordance with some sort of ritual , the final survivor would be spared, only to be placed in a life raft and abandoned in space. The survivor was not expected to live. ( SNW : " Strange New Worlds ")

La'an explained to Captain Pike that there had in fact been multiple contacts with the Gorn by 2259 – including the attack on Finibus III that the USS Enterprise dealt with in that year – but they hardly ever left survivors and were therefore still listed as never officially encountered. ( SNW : " Memento Mori ") That same year, the USS Peregrine fell victim to Gorn hatchlings that unexpectedly emerged from refugees rescued by the crew. The hatchlings were neutralized by a landing party from the Enterprise . ( SNW : " All Those Who Wander ")

La'an, who had survived being hunted on one of their planetary nurseries, described the Gorn as "plain evil" and impossible to empathize with or come to an understanding with them, unrelenting when they hunt. Gorn considered warm-blooded species their prey. They employed ambush tactics and used injured prey as bait to lure in more. For example, they would allow a group of survivors to escape while attacking a Federation colony so they would call for help and bring in more prospective prey. They were even willing to sacrifice one of their own (or even one of their ships) to force their prey to reveal itself while it was hiding from them. Gorn were also willing to kill their own if they became weak or one of their ships became compromised by an enemy, making sure only the strongest survived. ( SNW : " Memento Mori ")

A Gorn in an EV suit battles Lt. Spock aboard the USS Cayuga

Later that year, a Gorn attack ship was identified near the Galdonterre system , causing Admiral Robert April to fear that a war between the Federation and the Gorn was coming. ( SNW : " The Broken Circle ") This was part of a larger buildup of Gorn forces on their border with the Federation as tensions increased between the Federation and the Gorn Hegemony . In response, the Federation developed better weapons and technology to combat the Gorn and the Gorn protocols which Lieutenant Erica Ortegas dubbed "break in case of Gorn." ( SNW : " Hegemony ")

Eventually, the Gorn attacked the colony of Parnassus Beta which was just outside of Federation space, destroying the USS Cayuga in the process, although most of the crew were on the planet's surface at the time. The Gorn Hegemony then sent a message to Starfleet Command with a demarcation line through the system, placing Parnassus Beta on their side of the line. With Starfleet wanting to avoid possibly triggering a war over a planet that was out of their jurisdiction, the Enterprise snuck a landing party down by having it play dead amongst the Cayuga 's debris field. On the surface, La'an noticed that the Gorn were exhibiting strange behavior such as their juveniles cooperating instead of fighting each other for dominance, suggesting that something else was going on beyond usual Gorn activities. The landing party encountered Lieutenant junior grade Montgomery Scott who had been aboard the USS Stardiver one system over studying solar flares when the Gorn had attacked and destroyed the ship. As the system's red supergiant had begun emitting coronal mass ejections right before the Gorn had attacked, Scott suspected that something about the flares had lured them out while Sam Kirk compared it to locusts having their swarming instincts triggered by environmental factors. With the Gorn communicating through light, Kirk suggested that they had some kind of an ingrained sensitivity to it that somehow triggered their actions.

Eventually, Lieutenant Spock and Nurse Christine Chapel were able to restore comms and transporters by crashing the wrecked saucer section of the Cayuga into the Gorn tower . However, a Gorn destroyer and several hunters attacked the Enterprise with more ships on the way. Although the Enterprise tried to beam out the surviving colonists and the landing party, the Gorn got to them first, leaving Pike with a tough choice as Starfleet ordered the Enterprise to withdraw immediately. ( SNW : " Hegemony ")

Kirk fighting the Gorn captain

In 2267 , the Gorn attacked, with impunity , the Federation colony and outpost on Cestus III . The Gorn saw the strike as a preemptive move, since they regarded the Cestus system as part of their territory. The Enterprise pursued a Gorn starship from Cestus III into a previously unexplored region of the galaxy, near 2466 PM . There, both starships were immobilized by the Metrons , who transported Captain Kirk and the Gorn captain to a planet's surface where the two captains were instructed to settle their differences in a "contest… of ingenuity against ingenuity, brute strength against brute strength." Although the Gorn captain was physically stronger than Kirk, Kirk was able to construct a makeshift cannon out of materials on the planet's surface and defeat the Gorn. When Kirk showed mercy to his defeated opponent, the Metrons sent both captains back to their respective ships and transported the Enterprise out of the area. ( TOS : " Arena ")

While on the Enterprise in 2268 , Benjamin Sisko admitted to Jadzia Dax that he would like to ask Kirk about the fight with the Gorn captain during this encounter. ( DS9 : " Trials and Tribble-ations ")

A Gorn served on the ruling council of the pocket dimension Elysia , in the late 23rd century . It is unknown how long members of his species had been trapped in that universe . ( TAS : " The Time Trap ")

A Gorn chef on Starbase 25

By the 2380s , relations between the Federation and Gorn had seemingly improved. By 2381 , some Gorn resided on Federation Starbase 25 , including a Gorn chef who operated the restaurant Mr. Krada Leg . ( LD : " An Embarrassment Of Dooplers ") In 2384 , a Gorn starship was among those that came to the aid of Federation vessels hijacked by the living construct . ( PRO : " Supernova, Part 1 ")

In the wake of The Burn , the Gorn attempted to artificially create a wormhole , resulting in the destruction of two light years of subspace . ( DIS : " That Hope Is You, Part 1 ")

Mirror universe [ ]

In the mirror universe , a Gorn named Slar was a slave master working for the Tholian Assembly in 2155 . He was in charge of the workers assigned aboard the USS Defiant until the crew of the ISS Enterprise took it over following the Battle of Vintaak . Slar was suspicious of Terrans and vicious when it came to dealing with them. He was ultimately killed by Jonathan Archer . ( ENT : " In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II ")

A century later, in 2257 , a Gorn skull was on display aboard the ISS Shenzhou . ( DIS : " The Wolf Inside ")

Alternate reality [ ]

In the alternate reality , first contact between the Gorn and the Federation had taken place prior to 2259 , as Dr. Leonard McCoy recalled having performed a Caesarean section on a pregnant Gorn. ( Star Trek Into Darkness )

Technology [ ]

As of the late 23rd century , much of Gorn technology was on par with that of Starfleet . A Gorn ship was almost as fast as a Constitution -class starship , which would have to push its engines to a dangerous point to overtake a Gorn ship.

Their weapons were described as "like phasers , only worse" by a survivor of the Cestus attack. This description may have been colored by fear, as they were later described as disruptors .

Gorn ship-to-ship communication

Gorn ships would employ visual communication in the form of light signals when in visual range of each other. ( SNW : " Memento Mori ")

Gorn shields were capable of enduring an initial full barrage of phaser and photon torpedo fire, with little or no appreciable damage.

They had transporter technology, and possessed voice duplicator equipment that was at least good enough to fool a casual listener.

Gorn ground tactical units utilized powerful disruptors, capable of completely disintegrating targets at ranges of between 1,200 and 1,500 yards . Their sensor technology may have been less effective than that of the Federation, as they had some difficulty targeting a landing party during their ambush at Cestus III.

The Gorn were able to home in on signals from a tricorder , allowing them to "bracket" the user with fire. ( TOS : " Arena "; SNW : " Memento Mori ")

Starship classes [ ]

• Gorn destroyer
• Gorn hunter
• Gorn starship
• Gorn warship ( mirror universe )
• Slar ( mirror universe )
• Unnamed Gorn

Appendices [ ]

Appearances [ ].

• TOS : " Arena "
• TAS : " The Time Trap "
• ENT : " In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II "
• " Context Is for Kings " (skeleton only)
• " The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry " (skeleton only)
• " Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad " (skeleton only)
• " Much Ado About Boimler " (model only)
• " Veritas "
• " No Small Parts " (model only)
• " Mugato, Gumato " (model only)
• " An Embarrassment Of Dooplers "
• " The Inner Fight "
• " Memento Mori " (ships only; no visual contact)
• " All Those Who Wander "
• " Hegemony "

Background information [ ]

The original Gorn without its outer costume

The cast list in the final draft script of "Arena" described the Gorn as " a large (six foot four) lizard-like creature, well-muscled, very strong. " When the Gorn first appeared in the scripted events of the episode, the description of the alien read, " It is a lizard, who walks like a man… two-legged, two-armed, a thick glistening scaly hide, the size of a man with outstanding musculature… a wide mouth full of sharp teeth, a ridge of hard plate running down his back, even a prehensile, thick, strong tail. He is wearing a garment like a short robe [....] He does not wear shoes of any sort. " Detailing other aspects of the Gorn's anatomy, the script later referred to the creature as having shoulder blades as well as eyes that at one point "glitter[ed]" and the script further stated, " He has two tiny earholes on his head, where a Human being's ears would be. " The script also described the Gorn's voice, as heard through his Metron communicator , as "harsh, whistling, hissing" and deemed his strength to be comparable to that of a grizzly bear .

The original Gorn was played by several people, including Bobby Clark , Gary Combs , and Bill Blackburn . The voice was provided by Ted Cassidy .

The Gorn's costume was designed by Wah Chang , who also created the M-113 creature (aka the "salt vampire"). ( The Art of Star Trek , p. 34; et al. ) The Gorn captain in "Arena" was intended to not be particularly agile, with the episode's script stating about the Gorn, " It moves slowly, awkwardly, " and referring to the creature as "sluggish" and "lumbering". " He's big and awkward… That all fits the costume, " said Bobby Clark , who wore the reptilian suit. " Because the costume was thick rubber, it had big muscles – you couldn't bend your arms. You couldn't walk fast because the feet would hold you back. You couldn't run, because you'd be walking like you had two swimming fins on your feet. And we were walking in brush a lot, so that was tough… [The producers have] said several times that, in their estimation, it was the slowest fight they'd ever seen. Well, yes, it was slow. If it was fast, it would've been the funniest fight they'd ever seen. " ( SFX , issue #200, p. 135) Michael Westmore attributed the slowness of the alien to the makeup design for what he termed "the lumbering Gorn." Westmore commented, " For all his mobility in Wah's costume and props, the Gorn, because of the heavy rubber appliances and the thick wet suit, is relatively slow and cumbersome […] even though the Gorn was a very advanced creation for his time. " ( Star Trek: Aliens & Artifacts , p. 43) Dan Curry agreed that the Gorn suit "was very bulky and very hard for the actor to move around in." ( Inside the Mirror Episodes , ENT Season 4 DVD special features)

A Gorn appears on the cover of A Child's Garden of Lifeforms in Our Galaxy , a book that was designed by Doug Drexler for DS9 : " Time's Orphan ". ( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion  (p. 579))

One day shortly before 14 May 2001 , someone asked Archer actor Scott Bakula about the Gorn. " I hadn't thought about him in a long time, but oh, my gosh, it was just so terrible, " said Bakula, remembering the relatively primitive special effects used to depict the alien in "Arena". ( Star Trek: Communicator  issue 135 , p. 25)

The Gorn were originally planned to be featured as the villains in the 2001 Star Trek: Enterprise first season episode " The Andorian Incident ". One reason why their role in the story was replaced with the Andorians was that the Gorn, unlike the Andorians, were considered to be unable to talk. ( Star Trek: Communicator  issue 136 , p. 37) Near the end of Enterprise 's first season , staff writer Michael Sussman offered, " Before we decided to have the Andorians, we all talked about doing the Gorn [....] But when we looked at the show, it was decided by Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] that it was pretty clear that Captain Kirk's run-in was the first time anyone had seen a Gorn. So, as much as we would love to use them, it doesn't fit with what's been established, so they're kind of off the table for us. " ( Star Trek: The Magazine  Volume 2, Issue 11 , pp. 48-49) Subsequently, Berman didn't, however, completely rule out the possibility of including the Gorn in Enterprise . On the contrary, he declared, " The Gorn are certainly a possibility. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 101 , p. 18) In fact, prior to the Gorn's appearance in " In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II ", Enterprise 's writing staff spent much time trying to find some means of including the Gorn into the series without violating continuity. ("In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II" audio commentary , ENT Season 4 DVD ) David A. Goodman was one production staffer who spent a lot of time developing a Gorn episode of Enterprise . ( Star Trek Magazine  issue 118 , p. 15)

The mirror universe setting of the "In a Mirror, Darkly" two-parter finally allowed for the Gorn's inclusion in ENT. ("In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II" audio commentary , ENT Season 4 DVD ) " Yeah, we had to get a Gorn in there, " noted Manny Coto . " I always wanted to do a Gorn. " ("Before Her Time: Decommissioning Enterprise , Part Two: Memorable Voyages", ENT Season 4 Blu-ray special features) On the other hand, Garfield Reeves-Stevens remembered, " The Gorn is the one [alien] they almost didn't have [in the 'In a Mirror, Darkly' two-parter] and we put on an impassioned plea to have it and Manny capitulated. Manny wondered if it was integral to the story and we mounted a defense for it. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 69)

As described in the final draft script of "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II", the Gorn were "giant reptiles" with three clawed fingers and "razor-sharp teeth." Slar was also scripted to be wearing "the Gorn equivalent of an EV undersuit." As for Gorn language, the script commented that, immediately before being shot by Archer, Slar was "cursing at Archer in his own tongue."

Initially, the production crew were perplexed as to how they would create the Gorn required for "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II". Michael Westmore explained, " With the Gorn… in the beginning, they didn't know what direction we were gonna go in. Are you going to put a man in a suit? And if we do, what modifications are you going to make, so it doesn't look like the original one […] which was very bulky and very hard for the actor to move around in? We played around with the idea, and we all came… Basically, all of us came to the same conclusion. If we want to do something that's new and that's still à la Gorn, it's going to have to be an optical – not a man in a suit. " ( Inside the Mirror Episodes , ENT Season 4 DVD special features) This method of creating the modernized Gorn would allow it to have much more freedom of movement than had been possible with its predecessor in the original series. ( ENT Season 4 DVD text commentary )

A starting point for creating the ENT Gorn was concept artwork by Dan Curry. " We looked at the Gorn from the original series, " he explained, " and then I did some sketches on how the Gorn might look more reptilian and made anatomical changes in the skin [....] After I did the sketches we turned that over to the makeup department under Mike Westmore's supervision and Earl Ellis sculpted a maquette of the Gorn. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 69) The maquette created by Ellis – a sculptor in Westmore's makeup department – measured eighteen inches and was made from clay. This potential Gorn design was further developed with input from producers Manny Coto, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga . Westmore later echoed their advice, saying, " 'Well, maybe it should be a little bit more of this. The shoulders should be a little bigger. Maybe the chest should be a little bigger. It looks too much like a Human. Can you extend the torso?' " As the final maquette was a very useful starting point for the creation of a digital model, the maquette was given to Dan Curry who, in turn, gave it to digital effects supervisor John Teska at Eden FX . Teska was then able to transform the design into a fully animated computer-generated Gorn. ( Inside the Mirror Episodes , ENT Season 4 DVD special features)

Meanwhile, footage of Stunt Coordinator Vince Deadrick, Jr. , playing the Gorn – dressed in a fitted black leotard outfit that had white grid marks on – and acting alongside Scott Bakula , was filmed. ( Inside the Mirror Episodes , ENT Season 4 DVD special features) After the same shots were repeated without Deadrick playing the Gorn, the computer-generated version of the alien was added into the shots, replacing Deadrick's movements. ( ENT Season 4 DVD audio commentary ; Inside the Mirror Episodes , ENT Season 4 DVD special features)

For close-up shots of the Gorn's alien hands, a pair of Gorn gloves were especially designed by Michael Westmore's makeup effects department. ( Inside the Mirror Episodes , ENT Season 4 DVD special features)

Ultimately, Manny Coto had mixed feelings about how successful the Gorn in "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II" had been. " I wish our little Gorn had looked a little better than it did, " he critiqued, " but I would have loved to have done more Gorn stuff in season five, which would have been fun to explore [....] I think we had talked about doing Mirror-Universe Gorns. Uh, you know, expand that whole thing. " ("Before Her Time: Decommissioning Enterprise , Part Two: Memorable Voyages", ENT Season 4 Blu-ray special features)

The Gorn were referenced in an ultimately omitted line of dialogue from the first draft script of Star Trek Nemesis , in which Picard, delivering his best man's speech at the wedding of Riker and Troi , recalled that Riker's bachelor party had included "three Andorians, two Tellarites and a Gorn." According to an interview given by John Logan to Star Trek Communicator ( citation needed • edit ) in 2003, the scene was not in the final version of the film.

The Gorn prisoner cut from Star Trek

A Gorn was among multiple individuals Barney Burman and his company, Proteus Make-up FX Team , created for Rura Penthe prison scenes in the film Star Trek , footage that was ultimately cut from the movie's final release . Including the Gorn was the idea of Sculptor Don Lanning , who had spent the past year and a half sculpting surgeries for television series Nip/Tuck . " I immediately wanted to revisit the Gorn from 'Arena', " he said, " because I had just spent a lot of time sculpting realistic stuff, so I was ready for some hard-core fantasy! " Hired onto the production in the role of key sculptor, Lanning was permitted his wish of furthering a redesign of the Gorn. This developed into one of two sculptures which he worked on whenever he got some down time, the other being the M-113 creature . " The Gorn was our best effort to revisit the original material, " observed Lanning, " and I think it was very successful. " Lanning was left with the impression that the Gorn was removed from the film because Director J.J. Abrams and others on the production staff wanted the upcoming film to concentrate on newer aliens. ( Star Trek Magazine Special 2014 , pp. 135 & 137)

Gorn EV suit

The Gorn EV suit was also discussed in TRR : " Hegemony ".

Apocrypha [ ]

The Star Fleet Battles and Federation Space board games, published by Task Force Games , indicated that a Gorn confederation formed when three separate but nearly identical sentient species, each having developed on a different planet (Gdhar I, Gdhar II, and Gdhar III, presumably in the Gdhar system) joined into a single political entity. The Gorn are a civilized and cultured race. The Star Fleet Battles game universe refers to an initial brief conflict between two hotheaded starship captains over what was then considered a misunderstanding (an indirect reference to the events in "Arena"). This conflict was resolved peacefully and led to the Gorn being a close ally of the Federation. It is said to be one of the few alliances in the SFU that is apparently based on mutual trust, respect, and desire for friendship as opposed to political convenience (see also Star Fleet Universe ).

The graphic novel The Gorn Crisis is the story of Jean-Luc Picard 's attempt to ally with the Gorn in the Dominion War despite a Gorn civil war . The novel Articles of the Federation followed up on this and stated that the Gorn fought in the Dominion War on the Federation's side. The crew of the USS Enterprise -E helped to convince them to join the fight against the Dominion . In A Singular Destiny , the Gorn joined the Typhon Pact ( β ) – an alliance including the Romulan Star Empire , the Breen Confederacy , the Tholian Assembly , the Tzenkethi , and the Kinshaya ( β ) which was set up in competition with the powers of the Khitomer Accords .

Sisko gets to meet the Gorn captain from "Arena" in the short story "Where I Fell Before My Enemy" that was published in the first Strange New Worlds anthology.

According to The Worlds of the Federation reference book, the Gorn homeworld is called Gornar, also known as Tau Lacertae IX.

The Gorn appear in the FASA RPG adventure book Demand of Honor , where their government is called the Gorn Alliance and their homeworld is called S'sgaron.

In the Star Trek: The Original Series - Core Game Book , the Gorn homeworld was called Agornu.

In the twenty-fourth issue of the Star Trek: Ongoing comic series set in the alternate reality , the Gorn return following the events of the 2013 game. The Gorn featured were a more peaceful faction who separated from the Armada during the Milky Way invasion where they settled on the planet Parthenon 559, but came into conflict with a Federation mining team there. After learning the settlers attacked first and that the Gorn only attacked in self-defense, Kirk placed the planet under quarantine , deciding it was best to leave the Gorn alone.

According to the Star Trek Adventures - Beta Quadrant sourcebook, there are multiple species of Gorn. The Ssessekh are the Gorn seen in The Original Series and the Russth are the Gorn seen in Enterprise . Agornu, Garag, Gornar, Koreb, Shekkis and S'sgaron are all names for the Gorn homeworld used by different Gorn species.

Video games [ ]

The Gorn are playable races in several Star Trek video games. These include Star Trek: Starfleet Command , Star Trek: Tactical Assault , Star Trek: Klingon Academy , and Star Trek Online . The game manual for Star Trek: Bridge Commander mentions the Gorn were allied with the Dominion during the Dominion War.

In Star Trek: Klingon Academy , the Gorn are available as a playable race in Skirmish and Multiplayer modes. According to the game's manual, their government is referred to as the "Gorn Kingdom", rather than the more common Gorn Confederation. They are engaged in a mutual exchange agreement with the Federation, and as such their vessels are equipped with similar technologies, such as phasers and tractor beam weapons. Like the other non-campaign races in the game, the Gorn possess fewer ship classes than the Klingons or the Federation.

The Gorn are also a playable race, and allies of the Klingon Empire , in Star Trek Online . When designing a Gorn character, only the male gender is selectable. Gorn are also the enemies faced during many Federation missions, and some employ a rock-throwing attack reminiscent of the battle between Kirk and the Gorn captain in "Arena". Furthermore, in Star Trek Online , the Gorn engaged in late- 24th century war against the Klingon Empire. The Klingons eventually prevailed – allowing the Gorn to maintain their rule over their space – but, in exchange, made allies. In this continuity, the insect-like eyes seen on the Gorn captain from "Arena" are explained as a set of eyepieces that give a tactical heads-up display. The tie-in novel The Needs of the Many reveals that the difference between the Gorn seen in The Original Series and Enterprise is part of a caste system; the silver-eyed, five-fingered Gorn are from a warrior caste, while the gold-eyed, three-fingered Gorn are members of a technological caste.

The Gorn of the alternate reality

The Gorn are the villains of the 2013 Star Trek game set before Star Trek Into Darkness , featuring fifteen varieties of male and female Gorn ranging in size, intelligence, and color, designed by Neville Page . [1] They are depicted as originating from another galaxy which they have conquered by the time they reach the Milky Way Galaxy via a wormhole created by a terraforming device on New Vulcan . The Gorn utilize a mind controlling virus to turn enemies on each other, practice bio-enhancement , and just as in the film, McCoy mentions they are viviparous . He recounts Hikaru Sulu having stunned a pregnant female while on the surface of the Lymax planet, necessitating McCoy's medical intervention to deliver the babies.

External links [ ]

• Gorn at StarTrek.com
• Gorn at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• Gorn at Wikipedia
• 3 USS Antares (32nd century)

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‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Showrunners Talk Season 3, Gorn, Scotty, And More TOS Characters

| August 16, 2023 | By: TrekMovie.com Staff 388 comments so far

Last week’s cliffhanger ending of the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds still has fans talking. Now the executive producers and co-showrunners are offering some clues on what to expect in season 3 and beyond.

More genre-hopping in season 3

Season 2 was touted for the “big swings” into different genres, which included a partially animated crossover and a musical. Apparently this genre-stretching will continue into season 3, as co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman explained to Variety :

We’re going to keep going. We genre hop. So where we haven’t been, we will try to go. Henry’s watchwords for Season 2 were, “Let’s do Season 1, just bigger and better.” That’s become the truth of Season 3. We’re always doing the thing that we do best, which is secretly just a lot of relationship stories in space. We’ll keep unfolding those hopefully in ways that are different, in the same way that the tones of our episodes will be different. But yeah, ambition will taper off only when we can’t figure out a thing to do we haven’t done before.

One of the big surprises of the season finale was that it ended on a “to be continued” cliffhanger. With the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes delaying a start on production, the third season is that much further away. Speaking to Inverse , co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers talked about how this is impacting their planning:

We knew the broad shape of this finale going into Season 2. And we knew the broad shape of what the follow-up would be. Now, there obviously have been some slight changes because it’s gonna be hard to work on things for a little while.

From “Subspace Rhapsody” (Paramount+)

Scotty and more TOS characters “inevitable”

Another big surprise in the finale was the introduction of Scottish actor Martin Quinn as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. Regarding Quinn’s Scotty, Myers confirmed with TV Line “we will see him more.” He also talked about why they chose now to introduce the character:

We’ve been talking about him for a while as a general idea. As we were going into the finale, it suddenly became a weird, rare opportunity to introduce him for a lot of different reasons. What we’d like to do with the characters [from the original Star Trek series]… We don’t meet our understanding of who they are in that series, we meet who they are before. They don’t know who they will be, and they aren’t that person yet. They have some stuff to go through… We also had a great opportunity to cast someone who’s from Scotland, who can do that Scotty, but also who can go through all of the things that we want to see him go through before he becomes the person that we know.

With Kirk, Uhura, and Scotty already introduced, what about other familiar characters from Star Trek: The Original Series ? Goldsman made it clear to TV Line that we should expect more, saying “It starts to become inevitable that we start to pull in more folks that are sort of TOS-based.” And he told Variety :

The longer we stay on the air… the more likely it becomes. Given our druthers — because Henry and I are both greedy and gluttons for punishment — we’d go right into the TOS era and see what happens. So, if we’re around long enough, sure.

Martin Quinn as Scotty in “Hegemony” (Paramount+)

For SNW, the Gorn are “monsters”

Strange New Worlds has reimagined the Gorn, first seen in the TOS episode “Arena,” as a well-established threat to the Federation and Starfleet. Goldsman outlined his vision for the Gorn on this show to Variety :

I thought it was important for there to be real monsters in our galaxy. That doesn’t mean that 10 years, two seasons from now, we won’t be having a nice chat with the Gorn. But right now in Seasons 1 and 2 and 3, they’re the monsters. By the way, many of the other “Star Trek” antagonists began as alien, as Other — forgive the use of “alien” — but we learned to connect with them. Not so the Gorn. The Gorn are not understandable to us in this way, not relatable to us in this way. Part of our galaxy is be good, be kind, be empathetic, and also understand that evil exists, because seeing with compassion does [ sic ] mean you should be blind to horror. The Gorn are monsters.

With Inverse, Goldsman was even clearer on how they are not planning on resolving the differences between how the Gorn were depicted in “Arena.”:

You will never see the Gorn like that. This is the Gorn as we perceive them… This is our version of the Gorn. It’s an interpretation. In the same way, the transporter room on the Enterprise is never gonna look like the transporter room looked in TOS, right? It’s our interpretation of it.

Behind the scenes with the Gorn on Strange New Worlds in “Hegemony” (Paramount+)

All episodes from season 2 of Strange New Worlds  are available on  Paramount+  in the U.S, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Season 2 is also available on SkyShowtime elsewhere in Europe. The second season will also be available to stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with premiere dates to be announced.

Keep up with news about the  Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com .

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Love Scotty. A pure joy. Adorable. Not sure why the Gorn sprouted a new appendage (tail) that wasn’t in TOS. This is kinda like Disco’s Klingons that miffed everyone. Why do that? It’s simply a distraction.

In Enterpise Gorn had tail too.

The Disco Klingons were an issue because we had seen them in hundreds of eps on TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT as well as loads of movies. We had two major characters in the old design (Worf and Torres). The Gorn on the other hand don’t bother me one bit.

I agree, the Klingons looked great as they were and didn’t need updating…. The Gorn however? How anyone can complain that they look too lizard like compared to the styrofoam TOS version is beyond me

Yeah I’m not bothered by the look of them at all. The WAY they are using them however…

Anyone who doesn’t like they way they are using them clearly doesn’t understand Arena.

The point of that episode is that Kirk thought the Gorn were monsters when he encounters them…

Therefore, any use of the Gorn in SNW should show them as monsters. Now we understand why Kirk was so vicious: the federation had at least some history with them, and viewed them as animal-like monsters unable to be negotiated with.

If they were to show the Gorn as being anything else, then THAT would be contradicting Arena.

It’s like the people who claim to be the most canon obsessed don’t actually understand the episodes.

Dude, the Broken Circle established Starfleet already knew Cestus III is in Gorn territory. Why does this keep getting missed lol.

I’m not even solely talking about the Monster angle. The ENTIRE canon of them even meeting makes no sense now. Everything about it is now goobly gook. The ‘monster’ angle is my least biggest issue. Just say its a REBOOT and do what you want.

I had no idea Starfleet knew that Cestus III belonged to the Gorn? I take it that it was in the final scene with April? By that point I had pretty much checked out of the episode and it was on solely as background noise.

If that’s the case and they did know…. Ugh.

Yes it’s the last scene with April in that episode. To be clear Cestus III doesn’t belong to them but the system borders their space. The point is they already know they change their borders on a whim as apparently they did in Arena. So if you already know where Gorn space is and you believe they are monsters who will attack anyone which is what Goldsman is suggesting, why would you ever make an outpost around their territory then? That’s why it’s even more ridiculous now.

Space is really, really, really big. Make your outpost some place else then where these nuts can’t attack you at anytime. It’s just dumb and make Arena feel ridiculous now.

“Dude” that’s not what people are complaining about, and you know it.

You’re deflecting because you can’t admit you’re wrong.

Go look for yourself; the complaints are about the depiction of the Gorn, not that starfleet knew about Cestus or whatever.

You’re seriously going to pretend that’s the thing people are upset about?

You have lost all credibility. It seems the new comment section after all those bannings is the same as the old one: full of dumb comments from people who just want to complain and then go on fighting like children.

Genius, I’m talking about MY complaints lol. You responded to me first and arguing over my post when you obviously didn’t even know what my complaint was about. Dude, so am I right or wrong about Starfleet knowing about Gorn space? I’m right yes? YES? So how did I lose ‘credibility’?

You’re the one acting like a child since you clearly you cant accept people who has a different opinion than you or whoever don’t like the show. And I like the show a lot.

And this site is the way its always been. No one is forcing you to be here man. Also correct, yes?

This is why it’s now so ridiculous. If A. they already knew them B. considered them monsters and C. had multiple run ins with them where they have literally destroyed other colonies and ships by being anywhere near their territory then why are you sooooo surprised Cestus III was attacked by them years later???

Why do you still have a colony there? Why is anyone so surprised and stunned they were attacked by these ‘monsters’? They already hit two colonies (and my guess will be many more by the time show is done). How could anyone not figure out it was the freaking Gorn then??? If you live near bears and wake up one day to find your car has been smashed in, are you surprised to learn it’s the bears that did it? And can you blame the bears? Well no, because they are b-e-a-r-s! Now you literally just created the same issues with the Gorn in Arena. Starfleet sees them as monsters, so why are they so shocked to find what they did with the colony? Is it the Gorn’s fault then? No, you just said it, they are monsters and you can’t negotiate with them so who is the idiot that made a colony in their space? That’s MY problem, OK?

So do you have an explanation for that or just want to keep sounding snarky any time people raises legitimate issues with this story?

Still waiting for an answer. Shocking not another pithy and snarky response yet, shocking.

I’m just speaking common sense, correct? This is my entire problem with this story line, it makes Arena either a non-factor or completely nonsensical. I really wish they just picked either a different species like the Naussican or Breen they could’ve done a similar story line with without any of the canon issues or here is a crazy idea, just come up with something new .

All Goldsman is doing is digging a bigger hole for himself.

And folks like Ralph seem to be supplying the shovel and the dirt.

This is why I wish we had an ignore button. I see this guy all the time here and just constantly wants to argue with anyone who has issues or don’t like the show as much as he does. It’s certainly OK to love the show and tell people why you disagree with certain opinions but this guy constantly acts offended that people have the nerve to even question the show at all.

And he’s certainly not going to respond to what I wrote because he knows I’m right. It’s just basic common sense and why I have a big problem with using them among other things. You are so convinced the Gorn are raging lunatics that just want to eat people but you’re going to put up a colony in their space anyway? And then the biggest kicker no one can even figure out it was the Gorn who attacked them…in their space lol. Um…what??? It just make Starfleet look completely incompetent. They would never set up a colony around Borg space, so why would do it here then??? Arena makes less and less sense every time the Gorn is mentioned on this show.

But he was ready to put me in my place and tell me how I can’t possibly understand the episode when he didn’t even know what my argument was lol. Of course it would be nice if he came back and said, “Yeah I see your point now. That’s fair.” I probably have a better chance of getting the Gorn to admit they were wrong. ;)

I really do wish Goldsman would stop talking about it. It is what it is and what is done is done. I’ve said this esp to you before my friend that I wish they used a name other than “Gorn” as well but given this was just one ep of TOS and not the abomination of what was done to the Klingons which we have had for almost 60 years and 2 main characters it doesn’t bother me as much.

Honestly since I was a kid I wished Trek would do a true Dinosaur episode or even species and this so could have been it in the way that the VOY ep totally failed to be.

Yeah Goldsman is just making a bigger mess because it just doesn’t jive with Arena at all anymore. People are splitting hairs in the craziest way but none of it make sense.

Think if you are new Star Trek and you are told SNW is a ‘prequel’ to TOS and you watch the Gorn episodes and then Arena. You would be so lost because it’s like suddenly everyone has complete memory lost on that show even though in SNW it’s gotten so bad with the Gorn they are making new weapons specifically for them now to fight them. And worse because it’s the same ship who has encountered them multiple times lol.

It’s ridiculous Kirk wouldn’t know who the Gorn are at this point because they have attacked multiple colonies and starships. EVERY Starfeet officer would know who they are now. If you have an enemy in the real world attacking countries and killing people at whim, the entire world would know lol. This is what drives me up the wall, like you lose all common sense to defend these excuses. This is Starfleets biggest villain right now. What has the Klingons to anyone in the last year? Or the Romulans? Now look at everything the Gorn has done in just the last year alone.

It’s more silly because you are talking about a species you can’t even reason with and will attack you without provocation so every star ship would be briefed on them for no other than to avoid them or what are the rules to engage them if you do meet them in space.

And in the real world we have territory disputes even today, Taiwan and China being the biggest example. Imagine if China decides to bomb that island into smithereens. China would now be the world’s pariah as Russia is right no over Ukraine. But yeah, we have to somehow pretend Kirk is completely oblivious who they are right now. It’s sooooo ridiculous and makes no sense.

I don’t know why they just didn’t come up with a new species or just put them in Picard or something if they wanted to use them again? That’s the bigger irony, they can work on any other show except SNW.

Yeah I agree Goldsman is digging a bigger and bigger hole RE the Gorn canon. Maybe it doesn’t bother me a lot because I like the show so much, but stubbornly trying to reimagine a legacy alien species was a needless violation of canon. In my post below I compared it to the reimagining the Klingons in Discovery, which of course was a dismal failure and an uphill battle they were never goung to win. Trying to reimagine the Gorn has a good chance to succeed where Discovery failed, but honestly the whole thing seems so uneccesary.

Yeah it was completely unnecessary. And as I said myself, I’m not that personally bothered by it. I get why they want to use them. But you have make up your mind, is it canon to TOS or an alternate timeline of some sort?? How is it NOT the latter if you are making wholesale changes to their behavior and history with Starfleet? It wouldn’t bother people so much if they weren’t trying to attach it to a 57 year old episode.

And also what is funny to me is how they keep moving the goalpost. A year ago before episode 9 of season one, the excuse was that no one had really seen the Gorn as La’an made clear and how Kirk and company could be surprised who he was facing in Arena, as if it’s never gotten out they are human size lizards lol but whatever. It was always a bit ridiculous but OK. Now EVERYONE knows what they look like. This is problem with these excuses, the more they develop a species or character the more they will naturally just be more familiar to everyone. That’s why today no one is even bothered everyone seems to know who T’Pring is now when a year ago people were suggesting maybe she will never even board the Enterprise and only Spock will meet her to keep it in line with canon. Now that’s no longer even a debate anymore as her family was literally brought aboard the ship this season.

By next season, don’t be shocked we get an episode where the Gorn invades Enterprise.

That is patently untrue. When Kirk first meets the Gorn in Arena, there is a voiceover of him saying that he must struggle to remember that the Gorn are an intelligent species. The one he was fighting is a ship’s captain, just like himself.

and his wording implies he’s never even heard of the Gorn:

“ I face the creature the Metrons called a Gorn. ” – not “oh shit…a Gorn”

It’s funny how Kirk knows EXACTLY who the Klingons are and they are seen as pariah in the Federation because they had attacked ships and killed Federation citizens. Oddly enough the Gorn has done that and more in SNW, but in Arena Kirk seems absolutely clueless about them.

It is called a retcon. R-E-T-C-O-N

Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work which have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former.

It’s a ridiculous retcon. Suddenly the ship that has been directly involved in conflicts with them has no memories of them….at all? Did Q show up, snap his fingers and tell them all to forget?

It’s dumb and unnecessary.

An incredibly poor one. Being critical of the Retcon, does not mean that we’re opposed to the idea of a retcon. ]

Kirk also never hosted animated characters on his ship nor did he ever break into song and dance numbers on the E.

Those are much bigger issues

I think the Gorn are upsetting certain people (myself included), but I don’t get the feeling it’s everyone. The Klingons are a lot different situation because there was decades of history, dozens of characters, and a whole mythos that was built around Klingon culture that a very vocal portion of the fan base saw as something that could not be messed with. There are Klingon groups with dozens (if not hundreds) of members who built their identity on everything that was established from The Motion Picture through Enterprise. The Gorn had one episode, and I think most of the frustration is turning them into mindless monsters, which goes against the point of the TOS episode. But I don’t think there are any Gorn-purists out there who are extremely frustrated that SNW didn’t feature a guy in the original Arena suit.

Ya but Klingons are MUCH bigger of a deal. Minus ENT, the Gorn only appeared in a single ep of Trek previously. They were never that big to canon other than their laughable appearance in the ’60’s The Klingons OTOH are world famous for their Worf style look.

Gorns get the tail bobbed when they make Captain.

I really enjoyed Season 1. Season 2 spent a bit too much time away from the captain of the ship. With TV for Star Trek now doing 10 episodes a season as opposed to 22 to 26 per season, when we spend more time with the nurse…who is great, not knocking her character or performance, it just takes a bit away from the point of view that I would like to see more of from this series. I like the dynamic between the trifecta of command we saw in other trek shows. I would love to see more Pike, Spock, Una episodes. It would also be nice to see Pike in the captains chair more.

The reason why Pike wasn’t in many episodes was because Mount and his wife just had a baby prior to shooting the season. He wanted to be around the family more and the producers obliged him.

Good to know. Thanks for the info

I wonder if before this series ends Uhura and Scotty will switch to the gold division to match their wardrobes in Where No Man Has Gone Before. And when Sulu is introduced, will be wear a blue uniform or a gold one?

There is much previous discussion along the lines of some sort of “in universe” (canon) reason for Uhura and Scotty wearing gold uniforms in TOS’s first episode(s), and at least some of that would account for how FEW those stories were. It has to do with how Starfleet personnel are often cross-trained in other departments, and can officially were the uniform colors of another division while in that training, and/or if ordered by superior officers to do for whatever appropriate reason(s). I have seen interviews with Nichelle Nichols where she would state, for the record, that TOS show-runners, including Gene R. himself, told her that Uhura was FOURTH IN COMMAND of the Enterprise, and that would likely also offer an “in-universe” explanation of why such personnel would be cross-trained and/or wear uniform colors of other Starfleet divisions. Also, if one watches various episodes of TOS, you will often see background cast members wearing different colors from episode to episode, which lends credence to such explanations of main characters doing the same.

I apologize for typographical errors in the above response: auto-correct would not let me change “were” to WEAR, and I also continued getting a red bar stating “You are posting too fast; slow down.”

No problem.

It occurs to me that we could end up seeing in live-action what we saw in animation with Rutherford switching divisions four times in an episode of Lower Decks.

It may possibly be that Uhura, Scotty, and Sulu were going from one division to another before they settled in the one they ended up in.

Just FYI: Scotty in Where No Man (1st Kirk pilot) and ALL the OPS division were in tan — same as with The Cage 11 years earlier. They didnt introduce red for Ops until the series w Man Trap — and even so, Uhura was in command gold for 2 eps ebfore she switche to red.

But Scotty was always in Ops— just tan, not red.

My headcanon is that some tyrant quartermaster admiral kept tryng for tan as the Ops color and he got it through twice – in 2253-54, and in 2264-65. Just a little turf battle, his own little fiefdom he could try to control. Typical political battle among the brass. And then he;d lose out, and they’d flip the synthesizer program AGAIN.

Well I find it hard to believe Sulu wasn’t 4th in command. But I’m guessing he wasn’t sleeping with Gene during that conversation.

Snark aside, if we went solely by the uniform colors Sulu should have been third in command after Spock and Kirk. But uniform colors aside, that ended up being Scotty. And, honestly, he was quite the badass when in command.

Well going back to TNG for a minute, Picard and Riker wore red. Data wore gold, but he was 3rd in command so…

Clearly, then, it’s a matter of rank and not division.

Yeah thats what I think too but sometimes it’s not even that. In TNG Crusher outranked Data but she was needed in Sickbay. Later Troi outranked him too. It’s really at the end just the position on the ship you are assigned I guess.

FYI, in the season finale, the 4th officer (after Pike-Una-Spock-Ortegas) is JENNA MITCHELL. or at least she has the captain’s chair when all others are off-bridge.

Oh I missed that, good to know.

That last name can’t be a coincidence…

Troi did get an on-screen promotion to justify her having a higher rank. Crusher may have had a higher rank than Data too. I’d have to check Memory Alpha…

I used to think DeSalle was fifth in command because it seemed like CATSPAW played a lot in syndication, where Scott, Sulu, Kirk and Spock are all planetside. Maybe this is the show Nichelle was so PO’d about where her assuming command got written out?

BTW, the actor who played DeSalle is still kicking. He quit acting, went to law school and joined the Coast Guard according to Memory Alpha.

Thing is, though, there were no red uniforms in that episode. No Uhura either, but she did start off the production episodes in gold (or green if you like) before they decided the actor looked better in red.

I think what we’ll end up seeing is that there will be episodes toward the end of SNW as a series in which Starfleet will introduce new uniforms (the ones from Where No Man Has Gone Before) to replace the ones seen so far in SNW.

Eh, no. I don’t think many people except purists treat the uniforms from the two pilots as canonical. WNMHGB was simply re-using The Cage uniforms for budgetary reasons, and when the full series order came in, the directive from RCA, NBC’s parent company at the time, was to juice up the color so they could sell color TV sets.

It wouldn’t really make sense to casual viewers to switch from the iconic red, gold and blue uniforms at this point, nor to invest a six-figure sum reworking all the costumes for the cast, guest stars and background players.

Chalk it up to Early Installment Weirdness, as they say at TVTropes.

For SNW, it would be for one or two episodes, at best. Just to set up Where No Man Has Gone Before, which is absolutely canonical.

I hope they totally ignore that. We don’t need a whole storyline to explain a single episode discrepancy.

That’s what prequels do, man. They’re supposed to fill the holes in the narrative, otherwise they become glorified fan service.

It is up to the people that make it to come up with a story that goes with why Uhura and Scotty switched divisions and then went back.

For instance, between Strange New Worlds and Where No Man Has Gone Before Uhura was promoted several times Such a promotion could have included a change in division from red to gold, which would explain her being fourth in command.

In my opinion, that isn’t a big enough narrative hole to bother explaining. In a series where the Enterprise itself seems vastly larger than in TOS (even the Shuttles are twice as big), worrying about characters wearing different color uniforms is way down on my “hey, what’s that all about?” list. Your mileage may vary.

Someone elsewhere mentioned that Pike’s crew is smaller than Kirk’s crew. Ergo, the difference in the ship’s size can be attributed to a future refit to make more room for more people. That’s why Kirk’s quarters are smaller than Pike’s (i.e., no kitchen).

That too should be the focus of an episode in the final season.

Don’t hold your breath. This is just what the ship and uniforms are now. And why would you make sick bay smaller if you have a bigger crew of people onboard now?

These are just part of the show, they don’t seem to have ‘canon’ reasons other than making a more modern show with a bigger budget.

Absolutely. As I’ve often said before, Enterprise, Discovery, and Strange New Worlds are all part of a new timeline that is being written as we watch these shows.

I believe it was Daniels who told Archer that changes to the timeline come in waves. That means that the last episode of the second season of SNW is merely the tip of the wave, which is why TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, etc., have been generally unaffected.

I just hope they don’t kill Ortegas. She and La’an are the only non-legacy (main) characters the Gorn captured, and I can’t imagine they’d get rid of La’an since she’s sort of become the female lead.

Or better yet…bring on Mott the Barber so Ortegas can 2.0 the hair. 60s beehive would be awesome.

Ortegas’ current hair is awesome. It really wouldn’t be true to a character who, in Navia’s own words, “brings a degree of queer energy,” to force them to conform to 1960s gender stereotypes. It’s the 23rd century, presumably people having short hair or wearing trousers isn’t a big deal.

I think La’an leaving is more likely than Ortegas. Christina Chong showed more range this season and was given a couple episodes to shine. With the extended break due to the strike, I wouldn’t be surprised if another project with a better payday comes calling before it’s all over. Ortegas the character – on the other hand – was just too small a piece of the puzzle this year (I know there are reasons) and not enough there that I think Melissa Navia isn’t in danger of leaving. But you just have to wonder if the potential longevity of the strike could really shake things up.

Akiva Goldsman is supposed to be a big fan of the Gorn and couldn’t resist using them here. But he seems to completely misunderstand “Arena”. The fact that he is dead set on making them monsters is frustrating. Their actions were brutal and from our standards, an overreaction to say the least. However, there is a path to better relations and understanding that is not there if all of them are monstrous xenomorph-like monsters.

I don’t think it’s misunderstanding, it’s a lack of caring and self-fulfillment. Goldsman has probably fantasized about the Gorn being the “big bad” and a monster for years and was given the keys to the candy store with no one above him to say no. I don’t think he even cares that Arena existed other than to give him a monster from TOS that he can tie into SNW. To be fair, there weren’t many non-humanoid options in TOS, so if you were going to pick one to make a monster, I think you’re down to Gorn and the Horta. The Horta storyline was too strong and iconic to destroy, so why not go for the Gorn? Sigh….

agree. Mugato maybe? lol

THOLIANS!!!!!

I’m thrilled to have Gorn fleshed out .. if you re-interpret one Kirk line from Arena to confusion about not having seen a Gorn that look ed like THIS, you can do it and give them prior contact. And have their captains (the only one seen in Arena) be elders, at the opposite end of the metabolism scale as the hyperkinetic hatchlings. The young adult Gorn fighter in EV suit even kinda resembles the ENT Gorn that got so much scorn in 2005.

Just, when you go from 0 to 60 with these guys after 50 years, give us a clue that’s what’s going on.

Go watch the Ready Room and see what he says about the Gorn. It’s ridiculous.

It seems you’re the one who misunderstands Arena.

They may not be monsters (though there’s really nothing to say in Arena that they aren’t just that their reason for the attack was somewhat territorially justified), but the federation clearly thinks they are.

SNW is establishing WHY they think the Gorn are monsters.

To my earlier point though, the fact that the Gorn slaughter an entire colony just for being in their own territory… that tells me that they are monsters. They killed hundreds of thousands of people rather than just tell the federation “move your colony please.”

Even the Sheliac gave the federation a warning.

Love how fans try to paint SNW as not “understanding” classic trek when it’s the fans who clearly don’t get it lol

Why is it anytime Akiva Goldsman speaks to the press, he takes the most defensive tone? It’s like he knows he’s pissing off fans left and right, but is determined to double down on doing so. He really doesn’t understand Star Trek, which is evident because he completely misunderstands Arena and the Gorn- or what makes Trek work.

The show would suck if he listened to the kooky old school fans.

If new fans have demonstrated anything it’s that they’ll gush over anything. And that goes back to Voyager.

Some of the reactions to the show still confuse me, but I think it has to be from a lack of understanding or lack of previous fandom in Star Trek. I get that this may be one of the better space shows available at the moment, and maybe that’s just enough to bring in people who could care less about the previous series. But I have a hard time understanding how someone could compare this to anything that came before and really feel like it’s still Star Trek. At least Voyager felt a lot more like Trek than this.

The show only exists because they listened to the kooky old school fans. ;)

They planned this spinoff the moment they casted Pike. You guys had no input.

I have always believed this, too.

You can believe it, but it’s not true. Goldsman and Anson Mount said it was due to the fans pushing for one.

I’m sure the fan push helped. But you don’t build a massive standing set for the Enterprise bridge when it’s used for basically one episode. You don’t cast Rebecca Romijn for a glorified cameo.

It was always planned for a spin-off, they may have just been waiting for fan reaction to get it going officially.

Don’t be deliberately obtuse just to try to be right. Admit you’re wrong and move on, tiger.

They literally did the same thing for In a Mirror, Darkly on Enterprise when they built the original Enterprise bridge for that story. And with Discovery, the bridge was made for two episodes, not one. Oddly enough how they justified building the Enterprise D bridge in Picard because they also used it for two episodes.

Rebecca Romijin is popular but she’s not Julia Roberts or Robbie Margot either. She guest starred in multiple TV shows where she was only in 1 or 2 episodes. She actually does ton of voice work too and only did a few episodes in animated shows as well. Look up her resume on IMDB.

I’m going to say it again. There was NO plans to make a Pike show, none. Yes Goldsman wanted it just like Matalas wants the Legacy show, but nothing was in production because they had other shows they were already producing like Section 31. Mount, Peck and Romijn signed a one year contract to do Discovery and when that was over, that was it. Mount said it over and over in every interview he knew absolutely nothing about a Pike show because there was no show at the time. If they had planned a spin off from the beginning, he obviously would’ve known about it lol. And they would’ve signed the guy to do it the second he won the role of Pike in Discovery. That’s usually how it’s done.

It wasn’t until fans pushed for it that motivated Kurtzman to make it and probably why Section 31 got cancelled because they saw the show fans actually wanted.

Oh yeah and what’s funny is A34 was the same guy back in 2019 and 2020 telling everyone there wasn’t going to be a Pike show lol. He argued over and over again a show was never going to happen because not enough fans were interested in it.

Now he has changed his tune yet again and saying a show was always planned. This is what frustrates me about message boards and when you are constantly trolling on them and changing your argument just to appear ‘right’ at the moment.

He kept saying a show was only a pipe dream and a figment of imagination in fans head. Now he’s saying it was always going to happen. This is why I try not to engage with certain people here.

I don’t remember saying that. Could you please show some evidence since you seem to know everything I do here. Do you keep a file on me or something? Man that’s creepy. Dude you need to get out more. You’re obsession with me is getting to “Fatal Attraction” levels.

A Pike show would got boring fast.

A34   Reply to  VZX  March 26, 2019 2:29 pm

Nope, a Pike show would be boring. I doubt the actor playing Pike would want to do it anyway.

A34   Reply to  Bryant Burnett  April 7, 2019 9:15 am

A34   Reply to  Tiger2 March 26, 2019 3:17 pm

No one wants to be typed casted. Just looked at most of the TNG cast.

A34   Reply to  Jack November 18, 2019 8:35 pm

Leave the Enterprise for the movies.

Reply to  MikeB  November 8, 2019 5:24 pm

I don’t want it [a Pike show]. Leave the adventures of the Enterprise for the movies.

I was right about the “Fatal Attraction” levels. I just played you to see what you would do. Wow you need help Tiger. Stop with the obsession over me. It’s not healthy.

No dude you’re a troll and I simply called you over it. And genius I asked you for YEARS to ignore me…I can pull up a dozen of those posts too.

But since you think I’m an obsessed stalker, then here is the solution . I will no longer respond to you and you no longer respond to me, yeah?

Because you know I have NO problems avoiding you at all. So ignore me completely from this point on and I promise I will you lol.

Deal? If you can’t say yes then it just proves the opposite and I’m not the obsessed one here. ;)

You’re too obsessed with me to ignore me. I’m in a hurry right now so I haven’t read many of your posts but they all seem just to be my personal opinion of the show. You obviously don’t know the difference between opinions and fact. Personally I still find the show boring and I haven’t even finished watching the first season yet and I have no idea when I’ll get around to watching season 2.

Oh please man I ignored you for years and you know it. I just started talking to you again this year and I now realize that was a mistake because you’re just here to troll and have zero integrity. All you do is lie and just bait people. I don’t want any part of it.

And you know I don’t care you hate the show lol. In fact, please do yourself and the rest of us a favor and NEVER watch it again, OK? Don’t bother ever bother with season 2. Just rewatch season 4 of Discovery instead along with the other dozen people who liked it. Somehow the world will keep spinning.

Now, will you PLEASE ignore me? Please!

I don’t have the luxury of ignoring you. You’re a stalker and I have to protect myself.

I’m not going to play this silly game. Leave me or I’ll start reporting you.

And so you DIDN’T believe a Pike show was happening before. So you admit you were just lying because you wanted to be ‘right’, correct?

This is why I don’t like you. You are a complete waste of time here. And it’s funny all you do is whine about what people posts here and yet you won’t go away. Hypocrite much?

Dave Luscombe  Reply to  JonBuck  April 19, 2019 3:53 pm

A Pike series will be great and they already have a full bridge mock up. I paid special attention to part 2 Enterprise bridge, if they don’t do a new series what a waste of the art departments time

A34  Reply to  Dave Luscombe  April 19, 2019 4:09 pm

They build and disassemble sets all the time. I’m sure that set is already packed away.

————–

I rest my case your honor. There are probably a dozen more quotes by you making it very clear you never thought a show was happening lol. This is why you’re a troll. I have no problem talking to people I disagree with. It’s another thing when you are always lying and changing your argument or worst off pretending like you never said it.

No one needs to keep a ‘file’ when you post here daily for years and repeat the same thing over and over and over and over again lol.

One last thing (sorry, we can’t edit right now, sigh), if the Pike show was always in production why would you need to make a petition for it lol.

Again, this is just basic common sense man. If there was a show at least in development, guess what, they would’ve just said that the minute Discovery’s second season ended. You know how I know that? Because they announced the Section 31 show before Discovery’s second season even started, like a week or two ahead of that season.

So why was that show announced so far in advance but the Pike show wasn’t even though BOTH actors and characters were a part of that season of Discovery? Simple, because one show was actually in development with the actor signed on and the other wasn’t at all at the time. If so they would’ve announced a Pike show at least after the season of Discovery, especially since fans was already clamoring for one IF it was already in development, right?

So stop telling me I’m being ‘obtuse’. There was no show until literally a year later and (not surprisingly) when all production on Section 31 had completely stopped.

You’re gullible if you really believe that and I don’t think you’re gullible. Their PR has been blowing smoke up the butts of the fandom for years now.

And I’m now going back to ignoring you. Once again I TRIED. But I don’t like liars and hypocrites man. My biggest pet peeve. You spent all your time telling everyone a Pike show wasn’t happening for years and now you’re trying to act like it was inevitable.

But I just outed you multiple times in your own words to show you’re a complete liar , correct? It’s funny you claim to hate Trump but you pull the same BS he pulls on these boards for years now.

So ignore me please.

Akiva Goldsman said they wanted to do a Pike show, but no show ACTUALLY existed until the fanfare and pushed for one. He has made this clear in multiple interviews.

Yes Goldsman personally wanted to do a Pike show just like Matalas wants to do a Legacy show. But TPTB had nothing on the table or any plans to make one until fans pushed for it because they already had plans to do Section 31. And that’s WHY Section 31 is no longer a show because SNW essentially replaced it as one. ;)

Again, you read all the interviews Kurtzman gave when Discovery season 2 was airing. All he talked about was Section 31 and Picard. A Pike show wasn’t even on his radar back then.

According to my sources a spinoff was never actually intended. More Star Trek, yes. Pike era Enterprise? Not necessarily, no.

Lol yeah I trust “Denny” and his “sources” lol

Anson Mount said it himself many times no one ever talked to him about a spin off show when he was making Discovery. It wasn’t until after the show aired and all the hoopla over his performance by the fans discussions about it began and that was already a year after he signed on.

Again if there was even a possibility for a spin off they would’ve signed them all on for it when they hired them for Discovery and not wait until later when he now had more power over the show.

Because there was no show at the time, period .

Actors lie for a living.

And so do you as proven. Go away.

I wish I was an actor, but I’m too shy for that kind of work.

I’m going to keep asking you to leave me alone. And then when it proves you are stalking ME I will report you. I just want to be left alone.

Your gaslighting won’t work.

Go away. All you do is troll here. You really should be banned.

I’m can’t believe I agree with you…

Can I get a hug?

Fans (and commenters) are legitimately the worst part of every show. It’s a shame that they need them in order to keep making it, but the simple fact is that they should not listen to fans at all. That they want to strip “canon” for parts and tell us they created it is their prerogative. Just proves my thesis that Star Trek (all iterations) is now just a cartoon, because “pure evil villains” is a cartoon notion to sell toys.

Trek fans are worst thing about Trek.

Undiscerning fans are the worst thing about trek fandom, because their braying voices pretty much guarantee we’ll keep getting more crap.

Well, I sure you can find a forum that will figure out an in-universe explanation for reconciling the low budget rubber suit man from 56-57 years ago with a modern TV show.

There’s a wide margin between “discerning” and “nitpicking pedantry”/”gatekeeping”.

What’s your point exactly? I have a lot more trouble with the writing being inferior on these new shows than how a man in a suit looks decades after the fact. If you couldn’t discern that from my posts … (sigh/shrug)

Like, it’s almost 57 years since ‘Arena’ and you have people in this comments cespool genuinely speculating/complaining about why this show is not aligning with a low-budget rubber suit man from when there were 3 broadcast TV channels.

At some point the in-universe explanations have to give way to touching grass.

Again, the issue here is the original and far superior dramatic content being trashed, not how they’re doing dress-up with the critter.

I’m a fan, and not pissed off. I’m really liking what they’ve done with SNW’s.

I’m a fan and I’m frustrated and annoyed and mildly pissed off. There’s a part of me that thinks if there had been another Star Trek show developed at the same time with the concept of SNW that would have followed more of the previous Trek formula, maybe it would be easier to dismiss SNW and move on. But for me, I think most of my negativity towards the show is based on the fact that this is currently the only live-action product that exists and is still slated to continue. I know there will be other options eventually, but for the time being, THIS IS Star Trek.

I’m not either. Unlike you I don’t really like what they are doing with the Gorn, but I’m not that bothered by it either. They made it very very clear they were going to go a completely different with them once one of the main characters had a tragic back story dealing with them and I accepted it then. But I can’t blame others for not liking it no more than I could blame people for not liking the Ferengi or Borg showing up in Enterprise or Discovery going to the Mirror Universe.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it seems hard for Trek prequels to stay away from certain stories or species when they are simply way too early to introduce. Why I wish they would just avoid them altogether but we are past that now. ;)

Same. OUt of everything they *could have* messed up, the Gorn are the very least of my worries. I was much more worried about La”an but they have handled her pretty well too.

All this whining make me want to watch the show now. I still haven’t finished the first season yet.

Unfortunately, viewership is giving the studio enough to allow this to continue. But I agree with you. He calls himself a fan, and you’re left to wonder what of? Because he has no understanding of the source material.

Being a fan doesn’t mean you have to be blindly devoted to it. For me TOS is just embarrassing and I would never waste my time watching it again.

That’s a very repub way of spinning things, citing blind devotion as a bad thing but inverting it so you can knock the good stuff while embracing the crap.

Having blind devotion to a show that aired 100 years ago doesn’t make sense. I just can’t take TOS seriously. Even when I was a kid watching TNG and old episodes of Doctor Who I always changed the channel when TOS came on.

106 years ago, Sherlock Holmes debuted — and he seems to have had legs, considered his devoted following. I would quite frankly be astonished if THE WIRE isn’t as revered a century from now as it is currently, because it truly is Shakesperian — only (for me at least) far more accessible.

As usual, your statistics are as wrongheaded as your premises and conclusions. And you’re only evincing your own blindness in trying to call my appreciation for the series — which is certainly not without faults — a blind devotion. But you must know that already, deep down inside, or else you wouldn’t keep lobbing these obnoxious softballs up as distraction.

I tried WHO once, when PBS first started running it … and couldn’t get through the first episode, a Tom Baker show about a very stupid looking toy tank, as I recall. But I don’t go to the DR WHO sites to lambast those who watch and enjoy it. (I did later watch a Peter Davidson one called EARTHSHOCK and found it okay, and then more years later watched the American TV movie while very sick, and found it pretty awful. There endeth my WHO experience, outside of the Cushing films, which were fine when I was 7 years old.)

He’s nothing but a rabid troll here to bait people. And he’s really really hurt people don’t love Discovery here as much as he does, so he pouts like a kid over it and acts out anytime someone says SNW or Picard is a better show. This is why this site needs an ignore button.

He complains about people here all the time and that the board has overly picky fans but yet spends every day for years here now and will never leave. That tells you everything.

And I never cared for Dr. Who either. I’m sure it’s a great show, just not for me personally.

More gaslighting I see. I’m not the one that posts 100 times a day here.

Ncuti Gatwa is the new Doctor, you should check it out.

I think he understands Star Trek, but he wants to do his own thing. And I’m 100% fine with that, but when you make a prequel there will simply be restrictions to some things and I think it bothers him that every interview now he gets asked about stuff like the Gorn questioning how they are being portrayed or used.

But what does he expect when you blatantly go against the canon of what TOS set up? This is not a ‘Star Trek’ thing, I’m guessing fans will call out any prequel show they expect it to fall in line with a previous story line and not over write it. And I’m sorry but that’s what SNW feels like its doing in many ways. And of course it’s not the only one since both Enterprise and Discovery got accused of the same thing and why there were so many complaints of those shows too.

SNW is at least perceived to be a better show than those (although I personally like Enterprise more but like them both), so it’s not getting some major backlash over it. I always remind people the overwhelming majority seems to like this show, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t point out its flaws either.

If you watch his interviews, you’ll see he completely misreads stuff from the original series. Either that or he’s talking BS that he doesn’t believe at all.. either way, it’s not good.

OK fair enough. I have read some of his interviews but not that many and most were about DIS and PIC at the time. And I don’t doubt his complete love for the franchise but that doesn’t mean he’s a great writer either, definitely as both DIS and especially Picard showed.

For the kid in the back sitting alone.

R-E-T-C-O-N

It’s a bad retcon man. That’s the point. You can still think it’s totally dumb which obviously to many people here it is.

I disagree with you on it being a bad retcon. Star Trek has always in one form or another retconned itself on multiple occassions. Rick Berman did it often when he was the steward of the Trek. It was in the Berman era where they placed the Eugenics Wars in the 21st Century and that was an error that has now become canon.

If you hate is so much then stop watching it. Kurtzman and his camp are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Stop watching Nerdorotic or the rest of those angry channels who spark outrage to pay their bills.

You guys are nitpicking and you are being intellectually dishonest. Trek has always done this.

Yeah we agree to disagree. No worries ;)

But a lot of people think it sucks, you seem to think I’m the only one here lol.

And I never said SNW was the only one. I have pointed out ENT and DIS has done it too….which is why I HATE prequels lol. But when DIS was in the 23rd century, I spent countless essays on its super bad retcons too. So I’m not being ‘intellectually dishonest’. The topic is about SNW, that’s what we’re discussing.

And I like the show, OK, it’s my second favorite NuTrek show after Prodigy. But I always hated this angle of it. It’s just dumb and unnecessary to me. But you like it, fine.

I seen one episode of Nerdorotic four years when he was discussing Discovery and I vowed never to watch that idiot again.

And I support Kurtzman. Anyone here who knows me here can you tell you that. I have said over and over again I like the direction he’s taken the franchise, it doesn’t mean I support every decision he’s made either. It’s not binary and I like more of the new shows than I don’t like, give me a little more credit.

LOL, I know your feelings over Kurtzman and most of these shows.

But you know I like most of them, including SNW. It’s just funny, a few months ago I was literally accused of bullying anyone here who hated the show and would try and shut them down if they said a single bad thing about it. Apparently that’s how much I loved it.

Now, this guy is accusing me of hating it so much I’m apparently a Patreon member for Nerdrotic’s channel and pushing for it to be cancelled.

Message boards can be a weird place sometimes.

Up until the last 15 years, Berman was the worst thing to ever happen to Trek. He marginalized it into institutionalized complacency, ticking off boxes and only occasionally letting something challenging slip through (usually because one of the true creatives aboard just pushed and pushed to get it.)

See I always loved Berman personally (but no, not everything)…and yet me and you get along great here for years now. You’re one of my favorite posters because of how much you hate everything lol. I just don’t understand why people can still be on a STAR TREK message board in 2023 and have such a hard time hearing dissenting opinions?

If you can’t hear people say mean things about Discovery, DS9, Voyager, SNW, Picard, whatever, then you just shouldn’t be here.

AGGGGH, we still can’t edit, it’s sooooo annoying. Anyway I was just going to add I don’t disagree with all your thoughts over Berman but I don’t agree he wasn’t willing to think outside of the box or we would’ve never gotten DS9 in the first place, which is my favorite show. That show proves he wanted Star Trek to be more than just people hanging out on another Enterprise. But I will admit he was scared to do anything that he thought Roddenberry wouldn’t approve of and he had to be talked into doing the Dominion war.

But I think he was so ingrained of what he thought Roddenberry wanted but then again people argued Roddenberry would’ve never liked the idea of DS9 itself and frankly I have to agree.

I don’t think I’d have come down so firmly against Berman if it weren’t for the CINEFANTASTIQUE issues dealing with TNG.

But even there, I found some oddities. I mean, Melinda Snodgrass is pretty explicit in her criticisms, especially regarding Piller, but I never found anything where Piller explainsedwhy he seemed so determined to trash her scripts (specifically ENSIGNS and, for me far more egregiously, THE HIGH GROUND, which could have been another ERRAND OF MERCY with her original concept.) Since we only get the writer’s perspective, it is kind of like reading Tracy Torme’s take on how Hurley utterly trashed his last couple of scripts (though in that case, it was Hurley rewriting Torme, not Piller ordering Snodgrass to de-ball and de-brain her own work.)

Since Piller doesn’t seem to address the Snodgrass issue or the other issues she brings up about the higher-ups causing the departures of folks like Behr and her, it falls to Berman, who dismisses her complaints as sour grapes from a writer who was not invited to return (her take is that she couldn’t wait till her contract was up in mid-3rd season to get away from what had turned into a nightmare. In support of this view of things, you can note how many years it was before they were able to lure Behr back, and that it had to be DS9 where it happened.)

And yet, paradoxically, s3 is when the show actually got pretty watchable for me, after I had given up watching completely near the end of s2. I often make the claim that s3 works because they had no time to rewrite everything down to previous seasons’ levels of mediocrity, but hey, I still think that is true. It’s just unfortunate that while they were having everybody remaining on staff jumping into YESTERDAY’S E in order to get pages to stage in time for filming, that they could have squandered time and resources messing up the aforementioned Snodgrass stories.

Between all this writing angst and the stuff we’d later hear about Berman’s musical ‘tastes’ and how he declares ‘we don’t do antennae’ to avoid portraying Andorians on TNG, and his tasteless and stupid observations about TOS’ reliance on togas, it’s pretty easy to see, now that I’m remembering more fully, why I started disliking the guy as soon as I heard two words about him.

I still see DS9 as an aberration that grew more out of Piller and then transmogrified under Behr (greatly enabled by Pete Fields, the 90s answer to Gene Coon for me), and since I couldn’t get through much of VOY and much less of ENT (which I thought would certainly have been a surefire winner, so long as Berman had just brought Moore on instead of Braga), I can’t have many good thoughts about Berman’s impact on things.

Actually I remember you talking about Snodgrass. I never knew any of that before. So I definitely see your point there. But I’m also a big TNG fan and that’s probably still my first go to show out of all of them and I still give credit helping to turn it around. Again obviously Pillar too but Berman is the guy who put him in charage. But we agree on the music lol.

As for DS9, I still have to disagree with you. I had the DS9 companion book back in the mid 90s and read it backwards and forward at the time. It went into so much detail of how the show was made and Berman actually introduce a lot of the ideas the show became. But yes, I will say Piller certainly had a lot of input as well but the concept did come Berman himself and they both developed it. But yes the show became great once Behr took over and became the show most fans loves today (for the people who loves it).

Never heard the TOS thing, although now I’m thinking about it…

But I get all your issues with Berman and with Kurtzman. I’m not as hard on either guy but I’m still critical just the same. Apparently I hate SNW so much I want Kurtzman fired over it, so there you go.

I meant the TOS toga thing.

I’ll try to find the CFQ archive website, it has most if not all of the TNG issues. There, at archive.org/details/cinefantastique_1970-2002:

https://archive.org/details/cinefantastique_1970-2002/Cinefantastique%20Vol%2021%20No%202%20%28Sept.%2C%201990%29/page/n29/mode/2up

That’s the s3 recap, should have the relevant Snodgrass and Berman comments in it someplace.

OK dude, that site is a bit wonky lol, but a cool archive place. I read most of those two pages and didn’t find it. And I flipped through a few more.

But man I forgot about how much coverage Star Trek used to get on CFQ. I probably read tons of those articles as a kid.

Oh and btw, I literally pointed out in the post you responded to me in that ENT and DIS did the same thing. This line:

 And of course it’s not the only one since both Enterprise and Discovery got accused of the same thing and why there were so many complaints of those shows too.

So you’re calling me ‘intellectually dishonest’ but you obviously didn’t bother to read my entire post. I’m not picking on SNW as I pointed out it’s not the first show to obviously have these issues. But this is currently the show we’re discussing, more so now since Enterprise has been off the air for a long time now and Discovery will be done after next season. SNW is the THIRD prequel and while I feel it’s done much better than DIS in terms of canon issues overall, it’s still making a lot of similar mistakes.

You’ve answered your own question with the last part of your post, the lack of self-awasreness is quite elegant, really.

Try looking up the word ‘rhetorical.’

Because dumb fans attack him for everything he does, even when it’s good and logical, and even when they are wrong about it.

Case in point: this comment section.

‘Good’ and ‘logical’ don’t really even come close to entering the equation with these scripts, Ralphie. If you keep shooting your mouth off this way, you might put your eye out.

May I suggest Robert Petkoff as McCoy? You know, our standard narrator for all recent Trek audiobooks. He looks a lot like Bones in most pictures and nails the character in his TOS readings…

He’s 60 years old… there’s no way they will go with someone that old.

It looks like all the goodwill from the excellent first season will be further destroyed. They’re acting as if season 1 was bad, when it was far superior to season 2.

Well, I liked S2 personally but lets say for a min that it is far inferior. With the strikes going on, they have plenty of time to read the forums and gauge fans’ reactions before they continue on when this is all said and done.

Although I don’t love everything Goldsman has done, overall I adore Strange New Worlds and love how much it feels like TOS, updated for modern sensibilities. I just wish he’d let Vulcans be actual ALIENS and not insist on turning them into pointy-eared humans.

In season 3 I hope they don’t do another Spock as human episode. I know Ethan Peck says he liked it but it did seem awfully similar to season 1. I would prefer they focus on other storylines for him. Preferably not romantic episodes with Chapel either. Then again I wasn’t a shipper. They did tease the existence of Sybok in the rehab center T’Pring worked at with Stonn. So maybe that’s a thread they could pick back up?

Yes, but since Sybok is a Vulcan who eschews logic, I’d really rather they did something else with Spock. I want Spock to be the calm and admirably controlled Vulcan scientist we know and love, not this unVulcan version.

Part of what makes Spock so interesting is that he really IS an alien, yet one who’s similar enough to us that we can relate to him. Making him too human defeats the entire purpose.

Yeah, it was weird that Season 2 completely dropped the Sybok plot.

These writers are dreadful h words and their show stinks. They’re like tech bros who think they’ve innovated (taxis, food delivery!) through their own genius, but instead they’ve created digital nightmares. This is the showrunners as I perceive them… this is my version of them. It’s an interpretation. In the same way that the writing on Strange New Worlds is never gonna be as good as the writing in The Original Series, right? It’s my interpretation of it.

If you’re trying to be sarcastic, point taken. If you’re trying to be serious, TOS had its share of stinkers, too. The cranky old white men who think the writing on TOS was the pinnacle of sci-fi storytelling definitely don’t have 20/20 hindsight.

I get a big kick out of the “because there were bad episodes of TOS it’s ok if most of the 10 episodes in a season of SNW stink” response. It’s an empty defense the person lobbing it thinks is profound. Also there’s no need to hold up TOS as the pinnacle of sci-fi storytelling (though, if one did, it would need to be in the category of “sci-fi storytelling on TV “). It’s simply better than the show that’s trying to reboot it. And a funny thing about the cranky old white man dunk — your heroes, Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, are both cranky old white men.

Well, so are completely baseless accusations that most (or all, depending on who’s screaming louder about some minor violation of sixty year old canon) of SNW’s episodes were stinkers. They aren’t. I can be a cranky old white man, too, when it comes to whiny fans who feel they speak for the entirety of fandom.

Who was doing that and how?

To be honest, I prefer when you simply say how you feel instead of all the sarcastic posts you usually make about this show because I think it confuses a lot of people lol.

I don’t completely agree with it since I really loved season 1 and thought season 2 was OK at least. But it’s why we call them opinions and I respect yours.

I’m not the biggest fan of Strange New Worlds, but even I’ll say that this little rant comes across as a cranky old white man yelling at the sea.

The quality of this show, for me, oscillates wildly. For everything brilliant episode (“Ad Astra Per Aspera” for example) there are two three absolute stinkers (the magic kingdom episode, “The Broken Circle”, “Cloak of War”)- and the rest are…. fine.

Interesting…the ones you call stinkers are among my favorite episodes of the show..

I didn’t care much for the magic kingdom episode either, but I liked Broken Circle and I’m pretty sure that and Cloak of War are setting up why M’Benga is not CMO for Kirk.

I think SNW is both better and worse than TOS.

Better in that it has the benefit of another 60 years of TV drama insights and stories to learn from, better technology etc.

Worse in that, almost inherently in being a remake, it can never live up to the originality of TOS. On the other hand TOS has also sorts of glaring problems like dated values and the lack of insights into how to make TV from those 60 years.

But in terms of bringing the broad tenets of Star Trek to a new generation with slightly different sensibilities I think it’s doing a decent job.

I like Martin Quinn’s Scotty. He has a nice energy, and seems to channel Doohan well without being an impression of him.

The Gorn on the other hand, well, it’s not that I don’t like monsters in sci-fi. I love the Alien film series. Okay, I love two of the films. Anyway, the thing about the xenomorphs is that it’s been difficult to keep them scary and fresh for audiences for the past 40+ years. They’re monsters, plain and simple. However, Alien also has its fair share of human and android villains to keep things interesting. SNW doesn’t have that in connection with the Gorn. It’s just them, so far.

So, where else can you go with them as recurring villains, or “monsters”? Even the faceless Borg were only that way for one episode. Then came Locutus, Hugh, Lore’s emotional Borg pals, and later the Queen. Understandably, TNG wanted to take them in new directions to try to keep it from getting stale.

Here be monsters, yeah, but else here be, Mr. Goldsman? That’s always the question.

That should be WHAT else here be.

Anyone else having trouble with the edit feature?

Yeah, the red bar won’t actually let you edit….

yeah – quite often getting the “slow down, you’re posting too fast” or whatever it is message – even hours after the fact

Yeah, same here.

Yeah same. I hope they fix it soon. It’s getting very annoying.

Though I appreciate all the throwbacks or nods to TOS, I think that SNW is short changing its own specific identity by doing this. This is a show about the crew under Pike that have their own stories. It just seems like too much TOS foreshadowing too soon. Its OK to bump into the TOS folks now and then but the writers really seem to be pushing it hard for some reason.

Yeah I do think they brought Kirk in way too soon, not that I have an issue with it per se but he should have probably been in the later seasons

Akiva just feels emboldened at this point to keep making derivative Trek, and that he can just say the quiet parts out loud. It’s not something he’s entrusted to find the story within it.. it’s his “interpretation”. All the more reason to just admit it’s not the prime timeline. But.. it’s sad really. He basically has admitted that this is a soap opera in space, not science fiction. I hope to God he will not be the show runner for 10 seasons, because I really want to see what this cast can do with good writers.

*Precisely*.

Frankly, after reading this interview, I’m seriously considering not re-subscribing to Paramount Plus for season three, at least beyond the resolution of the cliffhanger.

It’s abundantly clear that Goldsman doesn’t want to do STAR TREK. He wants to genre-hop and write musicals and animated workplace comedies. He wants horror and monster movies. He *doesn’t* want to write thought-provoking science fiction: he wants to write — and I’m quoting verbatim — “a lot of relationship stories in space.” He’s afraid to do anything serious, because that would expose his weaknesses as a writer and producer.

So we’re going to see more nostalgia, hijinks, comedies, lighthearted cotton candy fluff episodes, Sam-and-Diane cliches, and so on. Bug-eyed Slacker Mariner (TM) is sure to make a return appearance, because why not? Occasionally some of these pet projects work, but mostly, they utterly fail.

So long as this guy is in charge, we’re never getting another “Darmok,” or “The Inner Light.”

Star Trek isn’t going to survive another decade without a change in leadership.

I am absolutely loving this series!

A lot of people are. It’s some of the best Trek I’ve seen since DS9. That it’s the only P+ show to hit the streamer ratings is an added bonus. It’s a shame we won’t see season three for a while, but getting Hollywood’s labor issues sorted out to the satisfaction of the guilds is a higher priority.

Picard S3 was in the top ten streaming shows too.

Err PIC season 3 did too, as well as the Yellowstone spin-offs.

Hi Chris, I wish you had a small role in the series too, maybe as a transporter chief for an episode. Wish you all the best and good luch.

That is “good luck” of course, the edit function is still wobly here.

I feel like the whole TOS character/element being a big end of season thing is following a template they started back on Discovery season 1. There we had the Enterprise appearing, leading to Pike. Then in S2 we had the interior of the Enterprise reveal and the NCC1701 in action for the first time in decades. The SNW S1 finale you get a remix of a TOS story and the first appearance of the Paul Wesley Kirk (albeit alt universe) and then S2 you get Scotty. Pretty sure they’ll save the next TOS character for the S3 finale (assuming it’s another batch of 10 episodes).

Honestly most of these shows are doing the same thing and why no one should be surprised Prodigy is doing the same thing with the Voyager crew and what ultimately happened with Picard in season 3.

People can certainly complain about it, but fan service works. The only reason people are upset about it with SNW is because some of it feels a bit forced canon wise, especially with Kirk. But I actually don’t have a problem with Scotty because we never knew when he joined the ship. TBH, they can all be on the ship now minus Kirk and Chekhov basically. Yeah technically McCoy wasn’t on the ship at the beginning but they can easily ignore that and just have him show up next season too.

That’s true – it’s not unique to the 23rd century based shows. I don’t mind either, really, as long as there’s enough new stuff in between. I think I would have preferred the ENT model with SNW, that of two seasons of largely fresh exploring and all new stuff, before ‘doing a season 4’ in terms of older species and known storylines being expanded upon from there onwards. Being an ENT die hard, hearing ‘temporal cold war’ in SNW S2E3 was enough for me to be at peace with canon haha, but I understand how some people feel regarding it.

It makes sense to me that SNW would depict the Gorn as misunderstood monsters. In the episode Hegemony, April says that Starfleet doesn’t understand the Gorn while Pike argues that they are only monsters. It still allows for Kirk to later understand that they aren’t just simply monsters in the TOS episode Arena.

I hope Akiva Goldsman gets his wish to continue on from SNW into TOS. I’ll be watching for sure if that happens.

Apparently the Gorn in Arena has arthritis.

It makes sense to me that SNW would depict the Gorn as misunderstood monsters.

Except that aside from April chewing the fat about how a different relationship might theoretically be possible, there’s zero evidence that the Gorn have been “misunderstood.” When we actually meet them, all they do is lay eggs in people and eat them.

Maybe they’ve got some great master plan to change this; admittedly, “Hegemony” hinted as much. But Goldsman’s comments indicate he sees absolutely nothing wrong with the series — he thinks he’s some kind of modern day Cecil de Mille — so why should they change?

I admit that I am making an assumption that they have a bigger plan to flesh out the Gorn more and present stories for the characters to learn that the Gorn are more than monsters. I’m not sure that is even needed though because it is pretty obvious that they are an intelligent species that have warp capable ships and complex communication. An adult Gorn was in an environmental suit trying to access the Cayuga’s computer.

As far as eating people, Discovery Klingons do that too, and we know they aren’t simply monsters.

Maybe they have a bigger plan, and yes, they dropped some hints along those lines with April’s scene, Pike’s musings in the diner, and the coronal mass ejection stuff.

But there’s a point at which you stop giving the writers the benefit of the doubt, and the onus shifts onto the writers to prove they deserve to be the caretakers of Star Trek.

If we’re eventually going to end up with the TOS crew in place, they could avoid navigating the inevitable minefield of revisiting the original series by instead focusing on the presumed second five-year mission that took place between TMP and TWOK…an untapped era of Star Trek.

I would love that so long as they avoind TMP era uniforms lol

“Given our druthers — because Henry and I are both greedy and gluttons for punishment — we’d go right into the TOS era and see what happens. So, if we’re around long enough, sure”

The amount of fodder that continues to be thrown out there pretty much declaring SNW is a reboot (or at minimum, an alternate timeline) without saying it directly is crazy. Trying to use this as some sort of joke or tongue-in-cheek statement by talking about being “greedy and gluttons for punishment” just to avoid the potential backlash for just coming out and saying it no longer connects to previous Trek is getting ridiculous. It’s like they are scared that people aren’t going to like SNW if they just admit this is no longer the Prime timeline or a reboot, but I don’t see how you could alienate people any more than what we just got in season 2.

As far as I’m concerned, declaring it outright and getting it over with would give them so much more latitude to do whatever they wanted and those of us complaining would just let it go. It still doesn’t feel a whole lot like Star Trek at this point anyway, and if and when a season 3 comes, it sounds like that will just get worse. Just give up, claim it as your own world, and release it from the boat anchor of TOS and the Prime timeline that is just making it that much worse for those of us who care.

I for one would like it FAR more if they just admitted it’s a new timeline. Otherwise, it irritates me to no end that book writers for 50 years have been pretty great at maintaining (mostly) a solid adherence to canon while also figuring out how to make new and interesting stories. Not sure why this group can’t accomplish that.+

Heck – amateur writers have submitted short stories and done the same thing, new ideas within existing canon and several volumes were published in the now infinitely ironically titled Strange New Worlds book series.

Not sure why this group of “professionals” can’t accomplish what Joe Bob the Star Trek fan / plumber from bumville any city could.

Goldsman comparison to the transporter room shows how much the dude is missing the point. The physical appearance of the Gorn is the least of the issue.

When remaking or reimaging a product I ‘ve truly never heard a creator speak about the removal of depth, nuance, dimensionality, and thought provocation as a GOOD thing.

The series has some great episodes and characters. That doesn’t happen without talented writers on staff. Its like their is some exec at Paramount holding a gun to their head and demanding they bog down an otherwise good show with brain dead Gorn trash.

Seriously. This guy has given us Lowest Common Denominator Star Trek, in which Spock and PIke both walk around with dopey grins on their faces, and we’re supposed to think we’re viewing the Mona Lisa.

In the same way, the transporter room on the Enterprise is never gonna look like the transporter room looked in TOS, right? It’s our interpretation of it.

Looks and depictions are two very different things. The transporter room, regardless of how it looks, always served the same exact function.

If SNW handled the transporter room like they’ve been handling the Gorn, it would be a room that had a hole in the floor with a long ladder leading all the way down to the planet’s surface.

You will never see the Gorn like that. 

Than why have them be the Gorn? Why not be a new thing that doesn’t conflict with what the Gorn were? You speak of compassion yet you deliberately changed that wasn’t a monster into a monster. What’s next? Turning the Tholians into mindless spiders who wrap up their victims with webs before eating alive?

Yeah…thank you.

Kinda getting into PLANET OF THE TITANS territory there with the Tholian line …

Jeyl, you’re exactly right. I’d argue the look of TOS was canon, up until discovery aired. So you might say that visual canon changed. I think that’s not a difficult change to accept. But when they had technological changes that didn’t make sense with what had been established, is when we started running into problems that may make some interactions obsolete or contradict the resolution to established stories (intraship beaming, or holographic communication technology for instance). That has irked me from day one. I don’t think they know or care what canon actually means in relation to Star Trek. Your point about the Gorn is the same thing I’ve been saying for awhile now. It would have been so easy to not get drug for violating canon, not to mention the distraction it creates from the story they’re trying to tell. If you say you’re subservient to the story that’s being told.. wouldn’t you rather not create such distractions? It’s unbelievable how guys like Akiva Goldsman don’t get that. I have a very hard time believing he was ever a fan of Star Trek, because he treats the source material with such disdain.

The show is dead if they go down this route. More “big wings” and the gorn as enemy

There is no “Star Trek” in this show

“Big Swings” even!! What a shame, the only Nu-Trek that had potential and they have squandered it already. LLAP

So, you are never going to watch SNW again, RIGHT?

I don’t know where “never watching again” is a logical consequence of what DMDMDMDM wrote. But I for one may stop watching, depending on how much of this drivel they actually implement.

That doesn’t mean that 10 years, two seasons from now, we won’t be having a nice chat with the Gorn

I guess he doesn’t have much hope in the strike resolving anytime soon.

Strange New Worlds is the Smallville of Star Trek.

This is perfect.

In a pretty darn good way, yes. A few SNW stars did appear in Smallville.

Smallville was producing episodes for a solid, DECADE!

I would love to see Strange New Worlds go on into TOS, but not just redo the original episodes….. Lets see the other years of the five year mission and if they’re still going after that, the years between TMP and Wrath of Khan.

If they were to redo any TOS episodes, it would be cool to expand on them, perhaps as one-off event streaming movies. There’s so much potential if the cast are up for it in the long run.

The Doomsday Machine would make a great movie.

Definitely! Feature length with modern effects – it really would.

On the Inglorious Treksperts podcast, Ashley Miller said that he and his writing partner were hired to write the script for the third Kelvin movie, and that it would have been the Enterprise crew having to team up with Romulans to fight the Kelvin Universe version of the Doomsday Machine. Their script got cancelled when Roberto Orci left the project.

I didn’t know that and it’s too bad it didn’t happen. It would have been perfect for the Kelvin timeline. A completely new story for the old one.

I am glad they never made that movie, we have already seen the Doomsday machine we do not need to see it again

Exactly. This would have been STID, with its line-for-line copying of TWOK dialog, all over again. These people are incapable of giving us anything new.

So it’s the Prime Timeline AND a reinterpretation of the Prime Timeline. Got it.

I know this will ruffle some feathers but they basically established this now an alternate timeline of some sort. I’m not trying to be ML31 lol, but when an event in a timeline is permanently changed like with baby Khan, that’s the very definition of an alternate timeline.

The problem with Goldsman is he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too. One hand he keeps saying the show aligns with TOS, but then he also says his ‘interpretation’ of certain events will be different from TOS. This is what drives fans like me up the wall. You have to PICK one, either it falls in line with canon or it doesn’t. Nothing about Chapel’s back story makes any real sense to TOS other than she was a nurse and had feelings for Spock. That’s basically it. But they have completely both that dynamic and her basic back story since in TOS she joined the Enterprise because she wanted to find him since they already were in engaged. But here she hasn’t even met the guy yet.

Imagine in Solo we find out Han and Leia met earlier and a fling before they met in ANH? That’s not how a ‘prequel’ is suppose to work.

Sorry I meant Chapel joined the Enterprise because she wanted to find Dr. Korby. I really hope they fixed the editing feature soon.

She could always join *back* to find Korby?

Yeah true, but it would still a bit forced. But I am curious how they will handle Korby himself. Will he end up going missing and turn into an android like the original? I guess they have to do it but man I can’t wait to see how they do it lol.

Yup. It’s basically Goldman saying, “This is my vision of the original series era” which is all well and good but why not just firmly establish that it’s an alternate timeline? If you look at Goldman, his career is based less on original ideas than interpreting and adapting other people’s work and he’s delivering more of the same here.

That worked very well for Nick Meyer, but clearly AG is no Nick Meyer . (though the latter has had his share of turds too, but there is at least evidence of genius and supreme competence in some of his early work.)

Yes this! EP 3 this season already said baby Khan was late because of the Temporal Cold War. Great, we got it. Now top with this is the same timeline in the prime universe already and admit this is an altered one and Daniels/Archer were never able to fully fix it

I actually wouldn’t mind if they did decide to declare it an alternate timeline. The creative types are free to explore their ideas and the fans don’t have to canon nitpick as much. We can all just nitpick on other things. Lol!

I have a better idea. Paramount jettisons Kurtzman and Goldsman. A new, serious, writing team (someone like Vince Gilligan or Christopher Nolan) resurrects Star Trek in ten years. That someone ignores Disco, SNW, and their progeny, pretending they never happened, and gives us a 25th-century series that picks up 100 years after TNG/Picard. Call it “Star Trek: The Third Generation.”

This is exactly what Bryan Singer did with SUPERMAN RETURNS — he took it as picking up after SUPERMAN II, and ignore the comedy, lightheartedness, and hijinks (sound familiar?) of SUPERMAN III and SUPERMAN IV. He returned the franchise to its roots and actually expanded on it. It’s a real pity we never got a sequel with Brandon Routh.

It’s also they did with Roger Moore-era James Bond (albeit more implicitly than explicitly) when they cast Daniel Craig, and even when they cast Timothy Dalton.

There is no reason they have to stick to a decade of (mostly) flawed Trek.

How did Superman Returns work out for JJ? Seriously that is your example? I predict that when SNW is done. I imagine they will do a time jump at some point. When it is done there will be a series that is set during the original series and the stories will be told around the episodes from that era.

Book it. It is coming. The way they are trickling in the original series characters. Come on. You guys are really going to mad then.

More than likely we’ll just check it out and then check out from Trek permanently.

I am growing ever less tolerant of marginal talents traipsing over the good stuff with dirty feet and squandering the immense inherent potential in same. Instead I can marvel over the seeming perfection of THE WIRE yet again, and balance that up with fun re-viewings of MIDNIGHT RUN and THE WILD GEESE. Plus there is still a lot of Kurosawa I haven’t seen.

I can see some learning value in watching a small selection of bad KurtzTrek a single time (I remember thinking the last half of the final s2 ep of DSC was a massive lesson in bad storytelling choices reminiscent of the insanely drawn out conclusion o EXCALIBUR) … but anything beyond that is sheer masochism.

More than likely we’ll just check it out and then check out from Trek permanently.

Yeah, I’m almost at the point of saying I’m OK with the canon ending with NEM (perhaps shoehorning PICARD into that).

What I do think season one of PIC showed us is that Trek could flourish again if they really cleaned house brought in some thoughtful science fiction writers like Chabon, who would give us new ideas instead of nostalgia.

How did Superman Returns work out for JJ?

I assume you mean “how did it work out for Bryan Singer”? Critically, quite well. It got decent reviews. Financially, it was more mixed, but the Cavill movies seemingly failed to launch as well.

I tried to watch it but the seriously weak shot on digital look utterly sabotaged it. Felt more like BARNEY MILLER in a cape.

Then again, MAN OF STEEL was a dud for me as well, and except for WW, I don’t think I’ve even bothered going to the mainstream DC well since (though I did like JOKER a lot and found the recent Pattinson BATMAN to be somewhat watchable.)

They had already changed up the Bond formula for the worse with DIAMONDS, ahead of Moore’s appearance, though he definitely drove the series a lot further down during the 70s till they tried to go straight again after the buffoon-ish MOONRAKER. I just so wished Dalton had come on then, and we could have had a decade of films with him instead of just the schizophrenic pair we got. (haven’t loved a Bond movie in the post-Dalton period, or even much tolerated any of them this century outside of parts of QUANTUM.)

Yes, definitely agreed. The descent into cartoonishness began with late Connery. Personally, I wish that Lazenby had gotten to do more films. I also think they over-learned from GOLDFINGER, which, though a thoroughly fun and stylish film, shouldn’t have been a template for so many of the films that followed. My favorite Connery film is FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

I’ve liked GOLDENEYE, TWINE, and most of the Craig films. I agree QUANTUM is underrated, even if it’s not the best of the lot.

Honestly? Go with whatever interpretation works for you. I’ve mostly given up on the canon argument. It is what it is. If they’re declaring this is the prime timeline, then they’re saying that the events within it have changed, and previous stories don’t exist within this universe anymore. My rants will continue toward their stubbornness about declaring that this works within canon. As I’ve said before, I don’t think they have any understanding of what canon means within the context of Star Trek. But more maddening that that.. they also have no desire to understand it. All they do is rail against the parts of fandom that criticize them.

He wants to produce relationship drama. (No wonder they’re positioning the awful Academy show as a young adult play.) That’s why he doesn’t care about canon.

Yep. That’s exactly what it is. These are the Prime Universe characters, and this is the new look and feel for the universe. I really hated this concept at first when it premiered on Discovery, but I’ve come around to really liking it on SNW.

“ These are the Prime Universe characters, and this is the new look and feel for the universe.”

Yep, exactly. And that’s a REBOOT.

“This is the Gorn as we perceive them”

Ironic that the hyperlink then goes to wikipedia’s entry on Xenomorphs

Goldsmans’ take on the Gorn is beyond irritating.

1) It totally undermines a significant plot point of TOS’s “Arena” to make them “monsters.” 2) If you want to go this route, make them a new species. 3) If you keep them as just monsters, the Gorn are going to get boring without any added depth or nuance, since it’ll just be variations of people running for their lives every time they make an appearance.

For the people defending this by saying the Gorn were a blank slate and that “Arena” was just one appearance, so why does it matter if SNW changes their nature. Think of it this way: what if SNW were to reintroduce the Horta from TOS’s “The Devil in the Dark” but used them as “monsters” in the same way that they’re using the Gorn?

What if SNW were to say, no actually there are Horta on a lot of planets and everywhere the Pike-era Enterprise goes there are colonists being terrorized by silicon-carpet aliens that melt people and tunnel through rock?

It would totally undermine the message of “The Devil in the Dark” that the Horta’s actions in that episode were predicated on a misunderstanding to make the Horta into “monsters” in the same way Goldsmans’ viewpoint totally wrecks the point of “Arena.”

Again, making them ‘monsters’ in Arena creates the problem when you know the ‘monsters’ are in the same system but then shocked when monsters act like monsters. What did you expect then????

Forget the ‘message’ it just makes Starfleet look like bigger idiots setting up shop near these things but then want to play victim when monsters, yeah,act like monsters.

That was the entire point of the Voyager episode Scorpion when dealing with the Borg. They are not going to change and you would have to be an idiot to believe they will no matter what they say. This is literally the same situation with the Gorn now.

I don’t even understand what Goldsman is trying to get across then? So is it Starfleet’s fault for setting up a colony they knew could be attacked by these monsters? Why are you so surprised? You are the fools who set up the colony and should’ve known better then. Goldsman doesn’t seem to realize he’s making it worse, not better.

You have a very good point about the Horta as they were only one ep as well. I guess the only way I can answer that from my perspective is the way the 2 eps affected me. The way Kirk showed compassion by not just killing the Horta but healing her was truly heartfelt. And the Horta was a mother protecting her young, not a species protecting their territory. True neither are monsters but the Horta pulled on the heart strings a lot more for me. The Gorn went down in history as the guy in the plastic suit that the Big Bang Theory and other shows like to poke fun at.

I have always found ARENA to be among the most riveting and utterly rewatchable of episodes, especially the first half (before we see the thing in the uh flesh), while DEVIL, though very solid, is really slow going til Kirk & Spock get up close with the critter. In fact, I don’t remember ARENA coming in for any signficant scorn at all till Alex Winter starting peeing all over it during press for a BILL&TED movie over three decades back.

For me, the creature’s look in ARENA is not any more of a stumbling block than the way San Fran is portrayed in most old westerns (i.e., streets as clean and dry as every other western town.) It wasn’t till Shat’s short-lived BARBARY COAST series that I recall seeing oldSF as perpetually muddy streets, which given the weather in the bay area, would have been an obvious given. But I don’t reject all that programming on this basis, anymore than I reject BONANZA for its indoor exteriors. (tho the indoor exteriors on AIRWOLF always looked very ripe, given what you would expect from programming decades later.)

His interpretation of the Gorn sucks! It’s just stupid!

The unfortunately reality about this show’s premise is that they setup all these great characters, but you know it will all be short-lived for most of them and the end goal is either death or departure. That’s feels strangely ominous to me, that this show is destined to be a tragedy. It’s starting to weight on me the more they introduce the TOS crew.

Yeah, because that all never happens in real life.

I dunno. The only one that is really certain to have a trajic path is Pike. I mean just because # 1 et all won’t serve on Kirk’s ship doesn’t mean they must meet their final tragic fate. Except maybe La’an

I rewatched “New Eden” the other day. It is jarring how Pike was shown as a serious, capable leader.

It’s tonally the polar opposite of the lackadaisical incompetence we’re seeing depicted — nay, *celebrated* from Captain Neelix in SNW.

Say what you will about other seasons of DISCOVERY, but we were sold on SNW on the basis of what we saw of PIke’s superb command in season two. It’s become clear that we were sold counterfeit goods.

Also a line of dialogue in Discovery season 3 that the Gorn were one of the species working on a replacement for the warp drive problems.

Edit: solution for the warp drive problems

So right, Michael. I’m already preparing for the show’s funeral.<sigh>

Well said! Death or departure…<sigh>

Haven’t chipped in here for ages, but this whole Gorn fiasco just confirms that it’s best for me to just look on Strange New Worlds as merely a wildly differing ‘re-interpretation’ of ‘Star Trek’ to the original show’s characters and settings altogether, rather than any sort of meaningful ‘prequel’ to it which it purports to be.

Same goes for the likes of Discovery – whether it was over-powered ‘spore drive’ antics or non-Klingon-looking Klingons, the makers and writers might have well have been designing an alternate timeline/universe along the lines of J.J.’s ‘Kelvin Timeline’ shenanigans.

Sure, there were quite a few episodes of the now retro-tastic, classic Star Trek and TNG shows that were ludicrous amongst the many gems, but I just omit them altogether now whenever I have a rewatch every few years, and just curate my own collection of (production order) favourites.

So yeah, even though I’m partial to a good song and dance number, I’ll pass on taking this seriously as a show that’s meant to lead into the events of TOS, thanks. It’s just an ‘alternate timeline/universe’ to the ‘Prime Timeline’ that happens to have produced ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ movie too! ;)

I really like SNW but this quote: “We’re always doing the thing that we do best, which is secretly just a lot of relationship stories in space.“ gives me pause

Good, I’m not the only one.

What I don’t understand the most is how this is supposed to be the show closest to the concept of TOS and yet it’s the farthest from Roddenberry’s vision.

Well, I think the first episode of Season 1 captured the feel of TOS, but after that things started to go downhill, and by mid-season it was an avalanche out of control. Can’t really comment on Season 2, so I’ll return to this topic in December [you won’t distract me that easily!!!)

That’s pretty much describes every successful sci-fi show in television history. I don’t know what you’re going on about.

On a personal level, I’m concerned that SNW will accomplish what The Mandalorian season 3 did for me: lose interest in a franchise I’ve been a lifelong fan of.

Yet that is the lesson learned they took TMP, and is thus what they got back to in WOK.

TOS ran for 3 seasons on TV. Fans grew to love the characters AND the sci-fi storylines each week. TMP comes out, and it’s like welcoming your family back home, but then it turns into a very long, slow, and boring get together that you can’t wait to end. Then TWOK brings the family back for a fun evening of Guess Who and Battleship. But without the games, it would have been another boring evening.

The truth is, the “relationship stories in space” would have gotten old in TWOK just as much as some feel it has in SNW if there wasn’t a good story to drive it. There was a lot of season 2 that I didn’t care much for, but I actually enjoyed a good amount of the finale because there was a STORY that was more important than the relationships. The same can be said about TWOK. The story of Kahn getting revenge was more interesting than Kirk discovering he has a son or contemplating how old he is getting. But those stories are still interesting in context of the bigger story, and the bigger story drives the plot.

When you only have relationships driving the story, it can get boring or it at least falls in a different genre than what we’ve come to expect in Star Trek. It’s the reason my Mom could watch hundreds of hours of soap operas while I was growing up, but I could barely make it through one hour to get to the afternoon cartoon block.

I agree with this. On a recent rewatch of season 1 of Discovery (which I liked a lot more this time around – first time I’ve seen it since 2017/18), the times I found my mind wondering off were mainly when the sci-fi story had filtered out, and it was just the relationship side of things left. For the most part, DISC S1 seems to get a balance, but from memory, the latter end of DISC S2, the sci-fi story either filters out or is very weak, and I remember struggling with it big time. Soap is the right word. And S2 of SNW felt like it was creeping further in that direction to me. That’s just a great example with the soap opera, I couldn’t have put it better myself. And that’s why Trek held my attention (and kept it) and I couldn’t care less about soap opera XYZ. Perhaps though, this is why, the general audience are loving it wholeheartedly? If people are coming from a casual fan or general TV soap/drama fan angle, it would make sense.

TMP has aged extremely well. Each time I see it, I think more of it. It was a serious character study of Spock and his decision to embrace his human side, unlike the Sam-and-Diane hijinks of SNW.

TWOK was a serious character study of Kirk, the nature of aging, the struggle to remain relevant, the lust for revenge, etc. It wasn’t “who is hooking up with who,” which was one of the flaws of season two of ENT (which you purport to hate).

The two are not remotely comparable.

You just made my point for me. Thank you!

By the way, I love the motion picture. But it’s not character relationship driven Star Trek. It’s more like Arthur C. Clark meets Star Trek.

TMP is for me more like Trek as seen through a very different lens, that of a police procedural (much like Wise handled ANDROMEDA STRAIN, psuedo-doc feel at times.) That approach doesn’t quite jive with the way the VFX are handled, since you don’t spend huge stretches looking out the windshield of a squad car.

The attempt to do Kirk is a more mature fashion is hitNmiss, but the exchange that concludes with ‘I stand corrected’ is actually pretty good character drama even if it doesn’t feel like ‘trek.’

Yeah all I hear with that line is more CW based stories unfortunately.

I definitely paused on that line as well. Then again I on the record as feeling like they spent too much time on romantic relationships this season that didn’t work or me. Some of the other episodes exploring the human condition worked a lot better.

Yeah I really hate the Spock and Christine relationship. Besides the fact it makes zero sense in canon, it’s just written in such an adolescent way. Reading some of my comments on this board I think I’m giving people the idea I don’t like this show lol. I actually like it a lot and it’s doing more good than bad IMO. But I guess the stuff I don’t like I REALLY don’t like and the romance stuff is a big part of it. Again, not because I’m a Star Trek geek who think romance is ‘icky’, I actually like a lot of the relationships on the other shows, Worf and Dax is still my favorite bar none. But on this show I just don’t like the way they been written so far although I will say the finale finally got me to care about Pike and Betal’s relationship. So progress I guess.

Besides the fact it makes zero sense in canon, it’s just written in such an adolescent way. 

SAY THAT AGAIN. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Hell, we didn’t even see them have a relationship. He broke up with T’Pring (who was portrayed as a casual hookup partner and Bridezilla, not a mysterious, never-before-seen counterparty in an alien arranged marriage), and two episodes later he was breaking up with Chapel.

What’s so disappointing about this is that the fan serious STAR TREK CONTINUES showed us a very similar idea — Spock having a tragic relationship with a human woman, which ultimately led him to embrace Kohlinar and pure logic. And it did so with grace, nuance, and poignancy. It was utterly believable.

The supposedly professional writers couldn’t outshine an (admittedly excellent) fan series. What a waste.

*fan series. Can’t edit my typo.

But yeah, ambition will taper off only when we can’t figure out a thing to do we haven’t done before.

The ambition tapering off and them returning to give us TOS-type stories could not happen soon enough for this fan.

….No more musical eps, and no more interjecting embarrassing sitcom characters into the show please.

As far as the Gorns go, I want to see a ton more, and keep doing what are doing, because I am loving the fan hypocrisy of so many whining about the Gorn changes while drooling over the song and dance numbers and middle school-level cartoon character BS…lol

What has hypocrisy got to do with it? They’re two totally different things. You can hate the Gorn for whatever reason and like the musical for totally unrelated reasons. Hypocrisy doesn’t apply. FYI I do like the Gorn, except not what Goldsman says about them being monsters. They can be monstrous without being monsters. This opens the way to a change of perception from a greater understanding but to him there’s no understanding the Gorn… I also liked the musical, in a way. You really have to take yourself out of the box and take it for what it is. If you’re expecting serious intellectual Star Trek (like you always do) then you’ll hate it (same with LDS). You gotta be a kid again. The musical is like the sun coming out after a week of rain! But no, it’s not Star Trek per we.

That’s per se, not per we…

no need to point typos, especially when the site is known to be having errors with the editing of existing posts.

I don’t usually do this, but there’s a need when my typo can make my sentence unclear. And not everyone knows the site is having problems.

When you criticize one element a sizable group considers is dumb, while gushing over another element that a sizeable group considers is dumb, sure, that is hypocrisy.

I think you just don’t like this because by this definition it makes you one…lol

Hypocrisy would be if someone were to publicly say they hate the SNW musical for being a musical, while secretly loving it, or vice versa.

Having different issues with different subjects can’t be hypocrisy, as there requires some common thread, some direct opposite of one another. Now if there was a Gorn musical episode where they sing about their lizardly love for lettuce and that person said they loved it while hating the other SNW musical, then that might be hypocrisy.

Lol, riiiiiight!

First of all they can be two distinct sizeable groups. Secondly the two elements have nothing to do with each other. This is not what hypocrisy means even if you keep using this twisted logic every time.

I just think you’re being passive-aggressive because you can’t get over your failure at English comprehension class and you had to take it in Summer school, missing the best months of surfing in SoCal…

Or instead of that convoluted lengthy essay on why I’m wrong, perhaps the answer is that you could just be being a hypocrite here.

Occam’s Razor, my friend

No, it’s just that you don’t know what the word means.

Assuming, of course, that the groups making the accusations consist of the same people.

I have no problem with the *visual* reboot of the Gorn; the lizard suit belongs in the same room as the styrofoam rocks from the 1960s. But the lesson of “Arena,” about perception and misperception in international crises, and about decisionmakers mitaking tragedy for evil, is forever timely. Serious academic work has been written about it.

Now we’re being told it really is about evil after all.

That’s not hypocrisy, it’s…taste?

Hypocrisy is you whining in every Picard story about season 3 being a Star Wars ripoff, while at the same time gushing over this which is a Alien/Predator ripoff.

I will admit that.

That’s the difference between us — I’ll admit when I’m being a hypocrite here

That’s…also not hypocrisy (necessarily.)

Sorry, I thought from your above comments regard TWOK that you thought many of Goldsman’s points were valid? Apologies if I misinterpreted, as a wrote a short rebuttal on that basis!

No worries, I figured that knowing your view. Like you, I love the motion picture

I hear ya’. Agree 100%.

“Genre-hopping” comes dangerously close to flirting with “gimmicky”.

That was basically the musical lol. It couldn’t feel anymore gimmicky. Now I’m starting to wonder if they have something crazier than that in season 3?

Where do you go after an animated crossover and a musical episode? Cross over with Yellowstone or Halo?

My concern is that they’re starting to lose focus.

The Enterprise crossing over with Harrison Ford in 1923 would be EPIC! lol

there was a fun Star Wars one-shot where the Falcon was flung across time and space, crash-landed on Earth and Indiana Jones came across the wreckage

Actually, it would…

The crew are turned into bunnies obviously, as presaged by La’an.

Just beating a dead-horse here, but they’re already crossing the line to gimmicky. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not the first time in Star Trek history. But when you only have 10 EPISODES I just don’t think you can get away with it and not expect it to get old. With 20+ episodes, a couple gimmicks like “Trials & Tribbleations” or “Bride of Choaotica” or “In A Mirror Darkly” can be enjoyed or excused and just move on. SNW season 2, in my opinion, had 3 out of 10 gimmicky episodes (Charades, Those Old Scientists & Subspace Rhapsody), leaving only 7 options to try and do solid Star Trek. And of those 7, I’m not sure more than 2 or 3 really delivered.

2 or 3 delivered? Honestly, I think you’re being too kind to what was essentially a pale parody of Season 1.

“Genre-hopping” comes dangerously close to flirting with “gimmicky”.

“Dangerously close”? They’re practically exchanging DNA!

<g> Where’s a smiley face when you need one.

Hopefully the writers and producers wont continue to thumb down the original TOS like they have done to Spock and Pike. I know Pike is just starting to get fleshed out in Trek lore, but no need to make him less the decisive and unsure of him self. I know Spock is being Spock from those “old” days of him starting out, but I hardly think he would be an idiot. Yes I know todays culture likes to feature woman and ethics as being superior, but what happened to making them equals across the board? Wasn’t that the point of Star Trek from the beginning? I mean they already started the thumb down with Scotty as being a less then average student. Hints at things to come with him I’m afraid. I’m afraid what they will do with McCoy, Sulu and Chekov at this point.

The Pelia storyline about grading people is wearing thin. There are bound to be better lines for her than constantly having her discuss grades. It’s almost like they know they’re supposed to have an engineer character which is why she exists. However, they don’t know what to do with her. When they do figure it out she is mostly serving as a support to the main character’s idea. Rather than it being solely hers.

I am curious about the comment about men and women being equal in the show. Do you feel the male characters are being written too “weak?” Or not being given enough “voice?” I only ask because I personally think some of the women characters aren’t that well written. So for me it’s less of a men vs women thing and more of a creative issue.

As a woman, I like strong female characters, but too many is just that — too many! Uhura and Ortegas; those two would have been plenty.

Scotty and the rest would be cool. I think the characters I want to see the most are the ones that die early. Give me Gary Mitchell and Doctor Elizabeth Dehner and Garth of Izar. Let’s flesh out these blank slates.

or Kodos. You could have long term arc with either Kodos or Garth. Not necessarily Picard 10 episode movie arc but a small thread weaving through all the episodes.

Kodos would have happened long ago, well before the cloud creature, let alone any of this stuff.

Alternatively, how about no more lousy prequels and giving us something fresh?

Fresh…now *there’s* a concept I can embrace, although I confess I loved S1 of SNW. Fresh characters with great personalities…oh, wait, they’re dumping all that for re-hashes of the old gang. What a pity.

Funny how Goldsman is sticking to his guns on reinterpreting the Gorn.

They tried this with the Klingons in Discovery and it was a dismal failure. A) Because the writers wrote bad stories with unlikeable characters and B) the Klingons were deeply entrenched in Trek lore in all series and many movies. It was an uphill battle they were never going to win, no matter how hard they tried.

With SNW, despite stubbornly wanting to reimagine aanother legacy alien villian, Goldsman was much smarter. A) They chose a more obscure alien that appeared only once in TOS and in the mirror universe on Enterprise. B) They hired a talented writers room that wrote good stories and the characters are genuinely likeable. Therefore fans are likely to be more forgiving, simply because the show is good and the ratings are good.

Just my two cents worth.

my two cents is I disagree with every word of this:

“ A) They chose a more obscure alien that appeared only once in TOS and in the mirror universe on Enterprise. B) They hired a talented writers room that wrote good stories and the characters are genuinely likeable.”

now we have four cents which still don’t really add up to much lol

Agreed on the DSC / kling part, cannot possibly disagree more about SNW. The writing is, I’m sad to say, excement.

Instead of characters evincing cool professionalism that frays at times but maintains, we have 902-10-forward in Space.

exc r ement, sorry. Lots of letters dropping out of posts lately, is it my keyboard or the site?

Hey, I re-read all my own stuff a dozen times, but those insidious little typos still ambush my thoughts. We’ll figure out what you mean…<g>

Uh, I guess I’m too old to understand your numerical reference, but I agree SNW is getting a bit “woke”. However, it’s still not as horrible as DIS, where the characters pause before every decision to examine their “feelings” about it. IMO (which I’m guessing is a minority based on its longevity) that show should have vanished years ago; as Trek, it’s drek!

Original ideas, well written …four simple words the SNW ptb can’t seem to comprehend.

I’m 100% in support of them showing their interpretation. But it is certainly a reinterpretation and not consistent with what has gone before. Changing what’s gone before isn’t inherently wrong, but for something important to many people, you hopefully have good reasons. That remains to be seen. Seems though like they could have created “new” monsters if all they are is trying to show the bleak reality of monsters.

It seems smart to me not to procrastinate too much over the introduction of the TOS characters if that’s where they want their story to end, since they don’t know how long they’ll get to set things up.

That said, we really, really need more stories for this to grow and develop – ten episodes a season every now and again is going to make that difficult.

Yeah, ten episode “seasons”. Bunch o’ wusses. I’m old enough to remember when a season was 34 1-hour episodes (with fewer commercials, too), and just a few years ago the number was 22. If they want to save some $$$, they could demote some of the dozen or so “producers” on their staff. Isn’t there an old saying about “too many cooks spoiling the broth”? Too may producers result in self-replicating bobble heads. Somebody…somebody help the Captain, or at least have someone with a creative bone in his body steering the creative ship! An idea that worked for Mork and Mindy isn’t going to work here!

I thought the scene where Scotty is re-introduced to Pelia clutching the appliance that he’s built was in some ways one of the best gags of the series. The situation was *dire*, but it was also just intrinsically funny that this brilliant engineer apparently cannot do anything simple or orthodox – it wasn’t the characters getting sidetracked from their predicament.

In general I thought that ‘Hegemony’ did a better job of incorporating side talk etc between characters than the previous episodes, even when Pike is praising Ortegas on the shuttle it feels organic rather than a diversion at a crucial moment.

It did all feel quite organic, that’s a great thing to point out.

I want to see Enterprise characters cameo in S3. So I guess T’Pol or maybe Phlox (I don’t think they established Denobulan lifespans)

I quite like to see a Xindi featured or a story about them, just to see where they are at in 23rd century. Denobulans have appeared in both Lower Decks and SNW, which was nice to see. I don’t remember their lifespan being established, either.

*I’d (ahh the slow down glitch got me too)

I am really worried about Goldsman’s Gorn-related comments as it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Star Trek. Star Trek fundamentally has always put out the message that there aren’t monsters. Maybe sometimes individuals who have really gone bad, bu Regen the Borg had their point of view and Star Trek made it clear that genocide wasn’t an option with them. I also get that the Gorn are very alien to us, but part of Star Trek’s optimism is showing us that we can ultimately always overcome this alien-ness and always find some common ground.

So far, I think the SNW/Disco casting of legacy characters is very, very good with some exceptions. Even though no one asked for it, I’m going to compare the SNW/Disco casting to the JJ casting and state which is better, IMHO:

Pike: SNW/Disco Jim Kirk: JJ Spock: SNW/Disco Uhura: SNW Scotty: SNW

For me, only Chris Pine’s Kirk is better than the SNW Kirk, but I prefer the SNW casting over JJ for the rest. Zach Quinto does a good Spock, but Peck’s is more nuanced and just, better. And this new Scotty kid REALLY sells being an engineer much better than Simon Pegg. I really like him.

I hope to see this new Scotty next season. He could be promoted to Chief Engineer quickly, even though he is only a junior grade LT. There is precedence in Trek: Geordi was LTJG during TNG’s first season, and got promoted to full LT and Chief Engineer season 2 (he did not rank up to LCDR until the following season).

I absolutely hated Pine’s Kirk until the third film, BEYOND. Could not stand him in the first 2 films. He played Kirk as a buffoon.

Yeah I hated Kirk in the first movie, he just came off like an arrogant whiny brat and why promoting him to captain in such a ridiculous way made it more eye rollling. I will say I liked him more in STID but he still came off as a kid doing very dumb things like taking your star ship under water, seriously??? I’m trying to imagine the original Kirk, Picard or Janeway taking their ships under water and in a pre-warp society at that. Sigh

But by Beyond he at least felt like an adult and came off more like a captain.

And also like the new Scotty as well. Pegg’s Scotty was OK, but they turned him into a clown most of the time. The original Scotty certainly came off comedic at times but not ALL the time either.

Completely agree. I just found that the way the portrayed the characters in the JJ films were off. They finally got it in BEYOND. And that story was more Star Trek to me as well.

I think that is why I love the casting and the way the actors portray the characters. I find that Paul Wesley’s version of Jim Kirk is more on par with what we know. And I think the depth that they are giving the characters, such as Chapel, to be wonderfully done.

Completely agreed. BEYOND was easily the best Kelvin film, and the only one that did justice to its source material. In fairness, I don’t think the Kirk-as-buffoon was an acting decision by Pine; it was probably more a problem with the writers, who are basically still around and writing NuTrek.

@ Tiger2 – Indeed. I found Pine himself to be very watchable in the ‘Kirk’ role. It’s just that after a highly effective introduction to him being born while his father experienced a noble demise, things then went downhill overall as J.J. and co. were content to dumb down their big-budget TOS-inspired 2009 movie and follow-up with juvenile dialogue and ridiculous antics in too many scenes, which made certain characters act very unlike their ‘Prime Timeline’ TOS personas. ‘And ‘revenge’ storylines didn’t hold my interest enough to allow for the new ‘characterizations’.

I was mainly concerned about Pegg’s casting before the 2009 movie came out, as I feared his ‘Scotty’ was going to be be turned into more of a ‘comedy’ role overall than what Doohan portrayed during the TOS episodes. And so it turned out…as he then proceeded to be ridiculously sucked through various water tubes at some point. And don’t even get me started on his moments with his oyster-faced ‘Keenser’ sidekick.

Yes, J.J. can certainly churn out some glossy-looking visuals and set-pieces at times, but it’s mainly ‘fast-food’ entertainment with little in the way of satisfying substance overall. And yes, after his underwater shenanigans with the Enterprise, it didn’t surprise me one bit when he showed a buried fleet of Stardestroyers emerge from the ground during his ludicrous Star Wars saga finale. I bet all those Stardestroyer Admirals and crewmembers really enjoyed their extended spell underground beforehand….

And just for the record, my own ‘Star Wars saga’ re-watch will only ever consist of the ‘Despecialized’ versions of the original trilogy, period. ;)

Not that this excuses it, but the Crazy Scotsman has been a Hollywood trope for a while (e.g., Fat Bastard in Austin Powers). I blame the SNL “if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” skit, which was funny in and of itself, for launching this stereotype.

Yeah, third time was the charm for me as well. I think a lot of it may have been due to Lin wanting callbacks to TOS, like the CORBOMITE speech this kirk echoes as they fly into the problem area, and of course the Kirk/McCoy birthday.

Based on the sum total of each of their careers, I have no problem putting that on Abrams and not Pine.

I will say that despite my other issues with S3, they nailed it with the casting of Scotty.

I’m glad we finally got a Scotsman playing the role; that helped. And somehow, they resisted the urge to portray him as a Zany Scot (TM), in the mould of “if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!”.

I’m starting to get a sour taste at times when I hear Akiva Goldsman talk (read what he says). I still remember how he mangled Picard season 2 when Terry left to start on season 3. And that same sort of ‘arrogance’ is showing up in SNW now.

I absolutely loved season 1 (of SNW), so I thought, well maybe this is a better fit for him than Picard was, but after having seen season 2 (of SNW) I’m getting the same “I’ll do whatever I want, whether it makes sense or not” vibe again.

I wish they would let go of that obsession of having to do big swings and ‘just’ make good Trek, resulting in a more cohesive season of episodes, focussing more on the captain than a rather pushed-onto-us Kirk. Still not feeling him, party because of the way they have been forcing him on us.

Granted, he CAN do whatever he wants, but it wouldn’t hurt the show to listen to the fans once in a while. I feel that’s not happening with him.

Yes I agree. I think they’re going for the big swings because they don’t have better ideas for “good Trek”, either because the writers lack the ability or experience to write good sci-fi or they simply don’t have adequate Trek knowledge or understanding.

I actually had no issue with Season 2. I thought it was a very solid season and well done. Anyway, that is what THIS fan thinks. And I have been a fan of all versions of Trek.

This fan had no issue with season 2 either. Well maybe one issue. It wasn’t long enough.

I actually didn’t say I didn’t like season 2. I loved a lot of the episodes. But on the whole I liked 1 better. By ‘more cohesive’ I mean in season 2, at times, the contrasts between episodes were just too big imo. It felt like achieving ‘big swings’ was more important than other aspects of creating a solid season of storytelling.

Considering that SNW is episodic like everyone wanted. Remember the demands of people fed up with season long plot arcs?? With episodic, they are able to carry a season long underlying theme but have stand alone episodes where they can try new things. I found that each episode was strong in terms of character development and story telling. Letting each character shine. Since Anson Mount and his wife have a new born and wanted to spend more time with family, this was the perfect way to focus on the rest of the crew instead of being background characters like in TOS and early seasons of TNG. For me, season 2 had a great variety of episodes and storytelling.

Considering that SNW is episodic like everyone wanted….

Who’s this “everyone”?

Go back and read comments from Discovery… and Picard. For the posts here from “fans” tired of season long arcs and wanting to go back to episodic.

Ah, but episodic plots take creativity…a plot has to unfold in 42 minutes or thereabouts…an arc can be slow, giving the writers time to figure out just what sort of corners they’ve written themselves into. Wasn’t one of the Dallas arcs just a bad dream (for the writers as well as the viewers!)? Continuing threads can help maintain continuity in a season, but they should never be the main impetus. Clearly, SNW ran out of ideas early on, thus the TOS re-boot.

I’d argue that it actually is more serialized than it is episodic. That’s mostly because they remain more character focused than plot focused. It’s more soap opera than sci-fi/action/adventure. This is what you get when you have a Showrunner that’s past work is not action or sci-fi, but more young adult.

I think it started a lot more episodic in season 1 but then they really fell more in the serialized mentality this year. When the final episode includes a quip by Pike about being glad he’s not singing his thoughts anymore, I don’t see how anyone could watch that as a stand alone episode and not be completely confused if you hadn’t seen Subspace Rhapsody. And with the relationships playing a huge role this season, it would be hard not to watch in order – especially the La’an storyline with Kirk or the Spock and Christine love affair.

Arrgh! Spock and Chapel, the besotted lovers. Cringe-worthy horror show!

The physical depiction of the Gorn doesn’t bother me, it’s just this bent that they need to all out monsters. That’s not very Star Trek. Klingons, Romulans, Jem’Hadar, Founders, Species 8472, Cardassians, Borg, Xindi Insectoids, Hirogen… they’ve all been given moments where we saw glimpses of their complicated nature, times when we could see how humanity could find common ground with them and connect. The only time that didn’t really happen with a Big Bad was the Xindi Reptilians (is this a pattern with hating on lizard aliens?).

So to take the position of, “The Gorn get less monstrous later, so we can make them quasi xenomorphs now” doesn’t really sit well with me. If there’s no plan to give them any depth and shades of grey, it’s just not great writing or great Star Trek.

Haven’t read all the comments but I’m thinking the reason they brought back the Gorn is because they ran out of ideas, got a bit lazy and were trying to tie SNW to TOS. Same as the reboot with Chris Pine bringing back Khan, an English white guy. Lack of imagination or lazy writing instead of developing a new species. But that’s my opinion.

Yep, fresh and exciting characters, but for the writers to run out of ideas so early in Season 2 just shows a lack of imagination. Oh, and TOT, anyone know why the Hemmer character was killed off? After Pike and Ortegas, he was the best thing in the show. I hope it was the actor’s choice (all that makeup!) because he was a wonderful counterpoint to the other characters, much as I like a few of them. The show has become an all-girl band, and while I like a *few* strong female characters, I’d also like my own fair share of manly eye candy, please! I may come to view SNW as a 1-season series unless the absurdly copious number of “ producers ” can agree on an approach.

Do you remember that time when everyone on trekmovie.com kept making typos that couldn’t be fixed due to an editing glitch?

Picard: “Those were the days” :)

Season 2 was inconsistent. The musical and lower desks crossover were a waste of two episodes.

To each their own. Those two episodes were my favorites of the season, maybe the series.

I mean, I agree the season was inconsistent, but…yeah, both of those episodes were at least very good (and I don’t care for either Lower Decks or musical episodes of non-musicals).

To be honest I thought they were so awful, most of the season was just bang average writing. They weren’t the poorest episodes for me me of SNW. The Spock body swap the Spock becomes human. Though the awful pop music in the musical where Spock sings about being the EX is so f’ing bad. This is crap and I am sorry, they can do better. Just go to Apple as a streaming service the sci fi shows there are superb.

“Just go to Apple as a streaming service the sci fi shows there are superb.”

I’m good. My time’s not infinite, nor is my money.

Agree about the Spock body swap…that episode is perhaps the most cringe-worthy of an overall bad season. Personally, I think having 20 or more “producers” is just a way to portion out the blame; no show needs more than one person to schmooze the money folk and another one or two to keep the show on course. With so many opinions in the mix, the whole thing is just a jumble of second-rate, re-hashed ideas, each bad proposal having an origin point and then a whole chorus of “Oh, and then they could…” and, “we could build on that by adding a purple unicorn…” until even mediocrity looks creative. Too many back-slapping, chattering people building themselves a tower made of fog…it’s gonna collapse, and then each one can happily blame someone else for the fall.

Yep, we each have our favorites. One of mine, previously unmentioned, is the episode where the child’s book characters come to life. Everyone had such a good time with it (especially Anson Mount) that I had a good time, too. I wouldn’t want to see this sort of diversion all the time, but as a one-off, I thought it was pretty dang amazing.

Wasn’t the whole concept of this show to be different each week?

But not just different in a bad way each week.

This is why I prefer Disco. An awesome new story arc every season.

Arc is an interesting word, isn’t it? Suggesting a sub -orbital trajectory, like the first two Mercury spaceflights. Not so much a full mission as a stunt flight.

kmart: 10 words is all it took to describe SNW so eloquently. I salute you!

What constitutes a waste of an episode? If one thinks a story is godawful, then that’s that, but every season of every Trek show is at least a little uneven. To each their own.

But from the POV of fulfilling SNW’s mission statement, these were unique inventive standalone outings which forwarded ongoing character arcs. The musical episode memorably sits alongside dozens of anomaly of the week episodes, and the Lower Decks episode fostered the kind of franchise interconnectedness which has served us well oh so many times, including before Marvel made it mainstream. I see no waste on SNW beyond certain characters getting the short shrift.

From a purely personal standpoint, another problem I have with the series is its poor sound. I admit I’m getting on in years, but I haven’t found another show where it’s just so difficult for me to understand the characters. Anson Mount, my favorite among the cast, whispers low and intensely…and rapidly, at times, and he’s not the only one. Even the gal playing La’An mumbles her way through some scenes, as if she has marbles in her mouth, and she’s usually understandable. It’s as if the director says “this scene has to be told in 53.2 seconds, and you’ve got 3 minutes of dialogue to deliver, so step it up folks!” Most of the characters seem to suffer from this occasionally, although I can understand the characters of Hemmer and Uhura just fine all the time.

Just rewatched the crossover, only one I bothered to do so with this season. Still really liked it, but when I tried to watch LOWER DECKS afterward ( third try!), still couldn’t get into it. Can’t say I didn’t make an effort, though.

Although I’ve never seen Lower Decks (and don’t plan to), I thought the episode was kind of cute, certainly better than other offerings in the season. Agree about the musical…it was just a waste. The great ensemble cast of interesting and original characters is what makes the show work for me, although some of the lame plots of S2 just turned me off. Considering how dreadful S2 was, I have no expectation for anything original to occur in S3, and turning it into TOS: The Younger Generation is just pitiful.

I hope SNW talks about Scotty’s drinking problem. Scotty obviously had a drinking problem in TOS.

You mean he’s just Scottish.

Really? Because he got purposefully drunk in one episode? Or because he enjoys scotch? Stop trolling for attention. Get a dog.

Scotty has problems. Don’t be an enabler.

Ok drama Queen.

He also got plastered in that TNG episode.

Honestly, the “familiar characters” I would really most like to see pop up in “Strange New Worlds” are (former) Yeoman Colt, Jose Tyler, and Dr. Boyce. It’s too bad this series just missed on the opportunity to have Laurel Goodwin make some type of a guest appearance on this program.

“Talk with the Gorn in 10 years time”. I suppose Kirk sort of talks with them…

Screen Rant

Strange new worlds writer explains changing star trek’s gorn canon.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds writer Davy Perez explains the thinking behind the series' major change to the classic Star Trek alien race the Gorn.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds writer Davy Perez explains a major canon change involving the Gorn. Star Trek: The Original Series introduced the alien race known as the Gorn in the classic episode “Arena,” which saw Captain Kirk battling one of their number on a barren planet at the behest of a powerful alien race called the Metrons. Since that introduction however, the lizard-like Gorn species hasn’t been heard from much in the Trek franchise (at least on the live-action side).

But this lack of Gorn in Star Trek has now been remedied in a big way with the arrival of the new Paramount+ series Strange New Worlds . Though the mysterious race has yet to be physically seen on the show, their presence was felt right away through the backstory of Lieutenant La'an Noonien-Singh, who was revealed to be the survivor of a Gorn prison camp. The Gorn then figured even more heavily in Strange New Worlds  season 1 episode "Memento Mori,” which saw the antagonistic aliens attacking and damaging the Enterprise. By episode's end, not only had the Gorn made their presence known to the Federation, their physical appearance was also revealed to Spock when he mind-melded with La'an and shared in her memories of being imprisoned by the them. But as some  Star Trek fans have pointed out, Spock must have forgotten whatever he knew about the Gorn after this, as he seems to have no knowledge of them in the TOS episode "Arena" (which of course takes place after the events of SNW ). Indeed Kirk and company's encounter with the Gorn in that episode is recorded in Trek lore as official first contact between the Federation and the lizard-like race, but now it seems it wasn't first contact after all.

Related:  Strange New Worlds Just Hinted At Major Star Trek Canon Changes

This seeming inconsistency is of course just one more example of how new Star Trek has played fast-and-loose with the franchise's long-established lore, sometimes to the chagrin of long-time fans. But speaking to Inverse , writer Perez gave some insight into why he felt it was OK to play around with the Gorn and the Federation's knowledge of them. He said:

"Kirk’s idea of the Gorn is different from what he is being told by the Metrons. The Gorn he’s meeting in ‘Arena,’ doesn’t sync with his expectations of them. It was a personal choice I made in my own headcanon that allowed me to have fun with the writing. Viewing it that way creates more possibilities for Gorn stories to continue. … Maybe Kirk has never seen them, he could even be one of those people who still doubts the stories, or maybe even he has seen them and they don’t look the same. I think the safest thing to say is we have no idea what the Gorn are really like.”

Lopez's remarks here seem almost to suggest that the Gorn are a shape-shifting race, or possess some other attribute that makes it incredibly difficult to pin them down. It's a matter of opinion of course whether his explanation really squares the seemingly large issue of Kirk knowing nothing about the species at the beginning of "Arena." Indeed it's possible that Kirk himself never encountered a Gorn before having to fight one to the death on Cestus III. But the Federation and particularly Spock surely knew about them, as Strange New Worlds has now made clear.

But again such canon inconsistencies as these are obviously becoming common in Star Trek , and are indeed unavoidable as new writers take on the task of creating stories set in the Trek universe. The important thing with the Gorn is that they’re something casual Star Trek fans have heard of before and might be interested in seeing, therefore making them worthy of being taken out of mothballs, even if some retconning is required to square things. It will now be interesting to see what new things are revealed about the Gorn  - only to apparently be forgotten - as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds weaves them further into the fabric of the Trek Universe.

More:  Strange New Worlds Episode 8 Exemplifies What Star Trek's Been Missing

Source: Inverse

Star Trek legend calls his Strange New Worlds season 3 murder-mystery “the best episode of television I’ve ever done"

Season 3 is expected to drop in 2025

Star Trek actor and director Jonathan Frakes has some high praise for Strange New Worlds season 3.

"[It's] the best episode of television I’ve ever done," Frakes told Variety , referring to a Hollywood murder-mystery episode he directed. The actor-director starred as Captain William Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation and began directing episodes during the show's third season. He went on to helm Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and episodes of almost every subsequent live-action Star Trek TV show including Voyager, Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds.

Strange New Worlds follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the starship Enterprise as they embark on intergalactic adventures that take place in the 23rd century. Oscar-nominated screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and Ugly Betty writer Henry Alonso Myers serve as showrunners. The cast includes Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Jess Bush, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, and Rebecca Romijn.

The series premiered in on Paramount Plus, the home for all things Star Trek, in 2022 and became the most-watched original Star Trek series on the network. Season 2 was greenlit in January 2022 and aired in June 2023. Season 3 was announced in March of last year, but production was delayed due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 does not yet have a release date, but is expected to hit Paramount Plus sometime in 2025. For more, check out our list of the best new TV shows coming your way in 2024 and beyond.

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Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ currently based in the Midwest. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent's Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Teases A Muppets Episode, And We Hope They're Not Joking

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" might be considered the most lighthearted show in the vast canon of "Trek." It's a series that returned to an episodic structure, allowing its stories to conclude at the end of an hour, rather than stretching them across an entire season -- and sometimes well past their breaking point. The old-world structure has allowed the showrunners to experiment with genre in ways not previously tried on "Star Trek." One episode may be a body-swap comedy, while the next is a terse horror tale. There are a few steely, soul-crushing wartime dramas sprinkled throughout, but their headiness is leavened by lightweight time-travel stories, party-animated crossovers, and an episode in which Spock becomes a human and eats too much bacon . The most notorious "Strange New Worlds" episode is likely "Subspace Rhapsody," a full-on musical . 

Trekkies who prefer more professional, mature characters may bristle a little at the constant levity of "Strange New Worlds," but the writing is slick enough on the show to offset any legitimate concerns. The characters are strong, the nostalgia is wielded correctly ("Strange New Worlds" features mostly legacy characters), and the plots are classically "Trek," no matter the genre. 

In a profile on the current state of "Star Trek" printed in Variety , the current regime of showrunners said that they're not done experimenting. "Strange New Worlds" is currently between its second and third seasons, and ideas are being floated for what might lie ahead. Director Jonathan Frakes noted that he's working on a murder mystery episode. And, although it was only a joke, executive producer Akiva Goldsman floated the idea of a Muppet episode. "As long as we're in storytelling that is cogent and sure handed, I'm not sure there is," Goldsman said with an impish smile. "Could it do Muppets? Sure. Could it do black and white, silent, slapstick? Maybe!"

Given the tone of "Strange New Worlds," there's no reason this couldn't happen.

Read more: Every Star Trek Show And Movie In Chronological Order

Pigs In Spaaaaaace!

I'm sure Goldsman meant felt puppet characters on "Star Trek," and not literally the Disney-owned Muppet characters. My deepest apologies to those who wanted to see Captain Pike (Anson Mount) converse with Kermit the Frog, or Spock (Ethan Peck) butting heads with Sam the Eagle. Plus, the Muppets already had their own sci-fi segment via their "Pigs in Space" shorts that date back to the original "Muppet Show." The ship on "Pigs in Space" was called the Swine Trek, so the two franchises are already somewhat chummy. 

There was also precedent for a Muppet episode of a mainstream sci-fi/fantasy show in an "Angel" episode called "Smile Time" from 2004. In that episode, the titular vampire (David Boreanaz) is transformed into a living Muppet-like puppet creature by an eerie magical egg. As a puppet, Angel and his compatriots must do battle with the makers of a demonic children's show. Don't worry: Puppet Angel returns to normal after a few days. "Angel" is a show about vampires and spells, so turning a character into a puppet is more narratively organic than whatever situation might arise for it to potentially happen on a science-based program like "Star Trek." 

But then, if "Star Trek" can orchestrate technobabble to explain a musical episode, a puppet episode wouldn't be too far behind. The tone of "Strange New Worlds" matches the whimsical lightness of "Angel" anyway, so the showrunners have every excuse to make good on Goldsman's little joke. 

And, yes, Trekkies would love to see a silent episode. But a quick reminder: "Star Trek: Voyager" already did a few black and white episodes.

Read the original article on SlashFilm

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Deadline also reports Julianne Hough has joined the cast of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein movie—now titled “ The Bride! ” with an exclamation point. Though details on her character are currently under wraps, a new synopsis states the film “sees a lonely Frankenstein travel to 1930s Chicago to seek the aide of a Dr. Euphronius in creating a companion for himself. The two reinvigorate a murdered young woman and the Bride is born. She is beyond what either of them intended, igniting a combustible romance, the attention of the police and a wild and radical social movement.”

Primitive War

Deadline additionally reports Jeremy Piven, Tricia Helfer, Ryan Kwanten, Nick Wechsler, Anthony Ingruber, Aaron Glenane, Carlos Sanson Jr, Ana Thu Nguyen, Adolphus Waylee, Richard Brancatisano, Marcus Johnson and Jake Ryan will star in Primitive War , an adaptation of Ethan Pettus’ military sci-fi/horror novel from director Luke Sparke. The story concerns “an elite recon unit known as the Vulture Squad, who, in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War that is sent to an isolated jungle valley to uncover the fate of a missing Green Beret platoon. They soon discover they are not alone. Dinosaurs have been let loose in the jungles.”

World Breaker

Deadline also has word Milla Jovovich, Luke Evans and Billie Boullet are attached to star in World Breaker , a sci-fi survival thriller from director Brad Anderson set in which “a tear in the fabric of reality brought creatures to our world from an alternate dimension bent on our destruction. A father hides his daughter on an island to keep her safe while he prepares her for survival and the battles to come. But when the world is about to break, no place is safe.”

According to Deadline , Screen Gems has acquired Wolf Night , a pitch package from Platinum Dunes concerning werewolves. Though details on the plot are currently under wraps, the script hails from Will Honley and April Maguire. Jonathan Liebesman ( Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ) is attached to direct.

Bloody-Disgusting reports the Nicolas Cage monster movie, Arcadian , has been rated “R” for “bloody images.”

Elsewhere, Kathryn Newton shows off a swimming pool full of bodies in a new set video from Abigail.  

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

Meanwhile, a teenage vampire has qualms about sucking the blood of innocents in the trailer for Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person .

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

During a recent interview with Variety , Jonathan Frakes described an upcoming episode of Strange New Worlds “framed as a Hollywood murder mystery” as “the best episode of television [he’s] ever done.”

Invincible battles a sea monster in the trailer for tomorrow’s new episode .

Fright Krewe

Finally, Belial sends the Kooshma to terrorize Soleil in a clip from the second season of Fright Krewe , available to stream on Peacock and Hulu this Friday.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel , Star Wars , and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV , and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who .