Reimagining the Gorn:
Writer 1: remember the Gorn?
Writer 2: are you talking about the guy in the lizard costume?
Writer 1: yup.
Writer 2: that was so stupid.
Writer 1: …
Writer 1: okay. But what if we redid the Gorn and made them scary?
Writer 2: scary?
Writer 1: sure. Like … remember the movie ‘Alien’?
Writer 2: of course.
Writer 1: let’s do that.
Writer 2: do what?
Writer 1: let’s do Alien.
Writer 2: I’m not sure that I underst-
Writer 1 scribbling furiously: shut up! We’re doing Alien.
This sounds like a conversation Boimler and Mariner from Lower Decks would have
Yeah, I liked the gorn episode, but it kinda came out of left field. I mean, it didn’t help that in my head every time they would talk about the gorn in earlier episodes I would think of the dude in the green lizard suit, so I had this comical picture in my head of all these people being terrified of a guy in a silly outfit and was not mentally prepared for an alien remake…
I guess I was lucky to have first experienced the Gorn in Enterprise. They were treated as scary and dangerous in a way TOS would never have been able to.
Xenomorphs with a whole ass technological civilization are another level of scary
And interesting too! Like … actually “alien”.
Exactly, actually alien aliens have been pretty rare in Trek. Usually they’re stand ins for some human culture or ideology. Even the horta had pretty familiar and understandable motivations. These gorn are pequenino tier alienness.
Great article. They did an outstanding job with the Gorn in season 2, episode 10. I was really hoping to see an adult gorn and it was a great fulfillment of what I was hoping for.
Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks have been so enjoyable. I know I will enjoy the other new Star Trek shows, but they seem more intense and I don’t have the mental fortitude at this time.
I love SNW and greatly dislike Lower Decks, so it was pretty enjoyable for me when the crossover episode happened and the crew of the SNW all looked at the Lower Decks crew with expressions on their faces in the same way I thought of them, throughout the entire episode
Very interesting, thank you!
I didn’t follow TOS and can’t follow what’s going on with the Gorn in SNW.
It seems really strange because every SNW episode has been episodic and they’ve been such great episodes, that now they’ve gone back between episode 1 and episode 10 with this Gorn arc, it’s souring the show for me.
Like maybe if this made more sense to me, fine, but can we go back to Spock and Chapel and T’Pring all dealing with their we-can’t-do-this relationship and Erica wanting to get out of the pilot’s seat for a while, and La’an dealing with a past and a relationship she’s forbidden to talk about, and M’Benga trying to deal with a dark past, and Uhura learning she’s more than she thinks she is… all that great stuff one episode at a time and then why not an episode perfectly mixed in with a musical as the penultimate episode to the season finale.
Oh, and by the way the Gorn are back so I guess there’s a new big uninteresting threat that Pike and the crew have to deal with to finish things off… OK. But why?
That’s always been the way Trek has done things, at least pre Discovery. A series of random of episodes maybe sometimes calling back to the ongoing plot, then big canon episodes for the finale and premier of the new series.
I could give many labels to the Gorn arc but “uninteresting” is definitely not one of them!
Eh, TOS featured multiple episodes with The Klingons. I wouldn’t look too deeply into it.
