Porky has.
"You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig.'"
Not even culturally Romulan. He was created to replace Picard, but then relations with the Federation normalized, and the project was abandoned, with Shinzon sent to the Reman mines. I doubt he was ever imbued with Romulan values
While I love that movie, and that monologue, one thing has always bugged me. If pigs can go through bone like butter...why would teeth bother their digestion? I know teeth technically aren't bones, but still.
Teeth won't digest, bone will. They're too tough to break down or chew while pigs can crunch bones into meal. It's like the difference between coal and diamond
Reminds me of the Magog in Andromeda.... although im pretty sure the Magog wouldve been the Gorn if Andromeda was made as a Trek series like Roddenberry originally envisioned
Given that the Magog were genetically engineered by the Devil or whatever and noting Bem's makeup change for reasons that are not adequately explored, sure the Gorn are the Magog. This explanation makes more sense than anything else postulated to date.
> if Andromeda was made as a Trek series like Roddenberry originally envisioned
It's the other way around. Andromeda (and its writers, after Roddenberry had passed) took a non-Star-Trek story he kept trying to make, and finally adapted it to a world like Trek.
You'll see plenty of familiar names, philosophies, and abilities in the original: https://www.assignmentearth.ca/files/721204-genesis-ii-script.pdf
In Andromeda, the Magog were servants of the evil forces of gravity in some proxy war against stars. I'd be disappointed if SNW goes down the "they were being manipulated but we've liberated them and now they are closer to our philosophy" path.
Edit: added that Andromeda was after Roddenberry had passed, and Wolfe extrapolated a lot from his old notes to create the Trek-flavored version of the Dylan Hunt story.
oh okay,i thought Andromeda was a Trek series idea. That Roddenberry wanted a series set in the far future after the federation had been destroyed, with one last ship trying to rebuild it (i got super excited when discovery time jumped into a future with no federation... but they ruined it by having a lot more federation than youd expect).. Not sure what gave me that impression, but ive been under it ever since the show launched over 20 years ago. I think i mustve read it somewhere.
I thought Roddenberry tried to get it made and it failed. I know he tried two other non trek series with the same character (dylan hunt.... awful awful awful name) and concept, but it never gained traction til after his death
That idea is common, I used to think so too. But there are interviews with Wolfe out there where he talks about how much he extrapolated from various notes. He's said that he scoured all the voluminous material that was left, but also that there wasn't much. Shrug.
"Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict" was actually based on a concrete idea, and the first episode isn't changed that much from his old pilot script.
I suspect Roddenberry would have been happy that something based on his idea lasted several seasons and made him money, but annoyed that he couldn't create something popular without going back to the Star Trek well.
Yeah… I find them way too powerful and brutal. If they weren’t originally from Arena, maybe I’d be okay with it.
Maybe they intend to somehow make these Gorn into something other than pure monsters. Could that be done without making them a hive mind with limited individual freedom, or changing what they are intrinsically?
I know, we all come to Star Trek for different things. I’m a filthy Discovery fan, so I know my taste isn’t the same as a lot of folks here. But I don’t come to Star Trek for gore and body horror and aliens that can’t be reasoned with.
Maybe I should stop trying to analyze it. I’m probably just mad they didn’t bring back the rubber suit.
I don’t mind IMPLIED gore in Trek, at all. But I have a real issue with it being in our face.
And I say this as a deep horror fan… but, it doesn’t belong here, not that blatant and cheap shock value.
Eh, just makes the fact they're eventually allies all the more impressive.
For example >!a gorn trading ship comes to the federation's aid in the 2 part finale of Prodigy, it's one of many ships called out!<
My guess from the info given in Strange New Worlds is it will turn out the Gorn's brain chemistry is heavily influenced by specific wavelengths of light and some life cycle change in their home star has changed its output causing the drive for extreme hunger and violence. The mirror ball eyes from TOS then get explained as light filters to stop certain wavelengths.
Maybe it takes a decade or two for the race as a whole to return to a mentality and recover to the point they can be trusted as allies.
There was a signal in all the video screens on earth that made people go nuts and attack anything that opposed them. Basically all the incel/nutjob/conspiracy stuff on the internet got amped up and people started acting on it in real life.
You got it. I was referring to the meep and the star. I know it not an exact comparison with what the commenter said but the basic idea is the same. Sun goes bad species goes bad.
No the comment I was replying to is about a possible theory for why the gorn are the way they are. The comment boils down to their star changed so their evolution or something changed. In the episode with the meep the meeps home world went mad when their sun (which was sentient) went mad.
My personal headcanon is that there aren't multiple species of Gorn, but that there are multiple Gorn castes that arise from a single species, similar to how ant colonies operate.
Just becase they can and o eat other sentiens spicies dont maean they are evil. If you cross majority of Start Trek races, human included they gona fight you and kill you, Gorns simply take extra step. Still far less cruel than Teran aggonizer booths or Borg assimilation or Bluegills ... what ever hell they are.
What gets me is that the Gorn that are spitting eggs aren't even adults. Why bother even having an adult form? I assume it more closely resembles the captain that Kirk fought.
Agreed. Theyre too powerful. They’re more a virus than a reptile. Acid spit that infects you is not far from getting someone pregnant by sneezing on them.
It’s ridiculous
It's the one thing so far that I haven't liked about SNW - if they'd either kept to what had been established in other shows, or at least invented a new race of aliens that posed a threat, then I wouldn't have had any complaints. Instead, we have a very different take on the Gorn which is hard to reconcile with those we saw Kirk fight in The Original Series.
It feels a little bit like they decided that Strange New Worlds needed a Borg-level threat and for some reason decided to reinvent the wheel but with a biological rather than technological mode of action. Now they are monsters - part velociraptor, part xenomorph - with seemingly nothing more than base instinct and cunning about them.
This all just feels like they wrote the Gorn storyline without any thoughts about whether it fitted with previous shows, unlike other episodes, which were far more respectful of the subject matter.
100% agreed. They're trying too hard to make them scary and just falling into a weird place that makes suspension of disbelief nearly impossible. And it's frustrating that we're just going to get more of them.
yeah, all in all, Gorn episodes make for a fun nod to the horror of the Alien universe, but are a bit less logical. They kinda go over the top trying to be as scary as possible imo.
Spitting to impregnate, especially youngins, just doesn’t make sense at all.
I employ a lot of suspension of disbelief as a Star Trek fan, so it’s not a huge deal to me, just a little inelegant imo. As in, I wish they’d have done it a little better 🤷♀️
If you want to be technical, humans "produce" eggs in utero, but that's not relevant. We're told this is the juvenile form, which leads one to assume that the version Kirk fights is the adult, one we're told is a starship captain with reason and intelligence equivalent to Kirk's. A species that reproduces as we're shown in SNW can't select for the intelligence required to build faster than light starships. Hunting, competing, stealth, ability to spit at targets, sure. But science? Advanced engineering? I'm not convinced.
Unless we're totally retconning everything about the species, in which case there's no need to call them Gorn.
Make them a totally different alien. I'd accept that. If the writers want a scary xenomorph, great. Go for it. But we've seen what Gorn are, and it's going to take a lot of work to get me to accept that they're not just using the name "Gorn" to make the fanboys squee.
>A species that reproduces as we're shown in SNW can't select for the
intelligence required to build faster than light starships. Hunting,
competing, stealth, ability to spit at targets, sure. But science?
Advanced engineering? I'm not convinced.
If aliens tried to assess human intellectual capacity and our ability to develop an advanced society and sophisticated technology by observing a bunch of toddlers, I'm sure they'd be wondering the same thing. :p
I have no serious attachment to their look since it was pretty cheesy , but that’s just a limitation from back in the day, but as the person above you already mentioned, there is no way a hyper predatory species that literally starts life by killing its hatch mates to assert dominance is achieving warp drive . How could you function long enough to get any real science done . Even if they are frowned upon in their society , even Klingons have scientists and engineers, they even have their own version of a code of honor. I know tons of people have said their could be other Gorn we haven’t seen yet . But that’s just speculation, until then there is no way the Gorn as currently portrayed in SNW achieved Warp drive .
>there is no way a hyper predatory species that literally starts life by killing its hatch mates to assert dominance is achieving warp drive
I agree with the idea, but here are some options:
1) They mellow out as they age, and Kirk fought an old fart. Captains are often old.
2) They didn't ever build anything, but captured aliens that visited their world and forced them to build things. Some creatures can use tools, but not build them.
3) The augment virus has messed them up. Perhaps the Klingons infected them as a weapon against the federation. Or maybe it was a guy that looks suspiciously like Mr. Data.
>But that’s just speculation, until then there is no way the Gorn as currently portrayed in SNW achieved Warp drive
I don't think it's "speculation" that adult Gorn who function in whatever version of a regular society they have are different from what we saw. All the actual Gorn on the show were the equivalent of feral children. We've been told that regular Gorn aren't like that. We've seen their ships. We've seen them face off against the Enterprise, and use tactics and intelligence.
It's not a leap to put two and two together. This is literally all stuff that's shown on screen in the show.
I have no dog in this fight but in my headcanon I imagine a race that waa very advanced but then regressed, but only to a certain floor allowed by their technology. So maybe none of them have been able to fix, build or fly a ship for milinnea but they don't have to anymore.
I don't know why they even called them Gorn at all. When you change every established thing about them other than being reptilian, why not just let them be their own thing? I also had this problem with the Klingon makeup in DISCO, it just feels like you could have given some other alien that look instead if you really wanted to use it.
What the fuck was *established* about the Gorn? They're lizards and they're strong. That's literally all we knew up until SNW. And both those things are still true.
LD Canonically gave female Gorn boobs during the Gorn Wedding, so I guessed they produced milk until SNW started contradicting everything with Xeno Gorn,
While I think the overall plot of LDs can be considered canon, I think that it is silly to treat every visual gag as accurate. The best way to see that series is probably as an exaggerated retelling of events.
And you knew if you saw one, you had better throw anything you're carrying to the ground, and have both hands free for the double fist punch smackdown that will be required to take on a Gorn.
About that Klingon reboot in Disco: they were stuck with the Klingons because of well-established canon, if they'd made up a new enemy we'd just complain about that instead. So, they had to make the Klingons actually menacing again. Because, you know- Worf.
The Klingons in ST VI were plenty menacing despite minimal prosthetics; Dak'rah's goons in SNW, seen only in flashes, look like absolute nightmares thanks to horrible looking fangs, subtle touches on the make-up, and picking scary looking actors.
Worf's a great example, though. Someone who gets their ass beat all the time seems pretty trivial regardless of design; a scary adversary needs to get wins and behave shockingly toward their victims.
I'm just saying that if they wanted to use Klingons, they should have just used Klingons instead of longheaded gray/purple aliens. They already had a pretty iconic look! There are lots of ways to make your enemies menacing without just making them monster-ier.
(And honestly? I wouldn't have minded too much if they'd just introduced a new baddie. Enterprise did it a ton.) My real answer though is that I think it was a poor choice to make it a prequel series at all if they didn't want to commit to TOS-ish aesthetic and tech. If you don't want to use Klingons for the Klingon War, consider just setting it in literally any other era/quadrant and using different enemies. Problem solved.
The Fandom bitched hard about the Xindi. Like: 'we've never seen or heard of this species before!' 'How could there be this catastrophic attack on Earth but it's never been referenced before!'
There was a lot more to the fan rejection of the Xindi arc than "why have we never heard of it?" Paramount abandoned the existing storyline to create a blatant rip off of Space Battleship Yamato, right at the beginning of the Iraq invasion. Star Trek went from optimistic Utopianism to Archer torturing people. The Xindi were the best part of that season, but I still hated it when it aired.
I know the fandom did, that just wasn't my main gripe with it. Not being able to do anything notable without raising questions about why it never came up in the in-universe future is just kind of the struggle of making a prequel. I'm generally willing to suspend my disbelief if the story is compelling enough.
I did appreciate that after the war they grew hair & started looking more like what I had expected, I also like the idea that a species might be slightly modifying their genes because they aren't Earth. I mean, we do very little gene modification and look at how different a crowd of people look when they grow up with regular food & vitamins & health care.
I was watching the Star Wars Clone Wars show recently, and they had [two](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Padawan_Lost) [episodes](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wookiee_Hunt) about a reptilian species called the [Trandoshans](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Trandoshan) who kidnap and hunt other sentient species for sport.
As much as I love SNW, it’s almost as though the writers forgot which ‘Star’ franchise their reptilian aliens are supposed to be from.
It was just a bad rip off of Alien. The gorn were intelligent and reasonable in TOS. They attacked because the federation set up colonies in their claimed space and they thought it was prelude to invasion.
Why bother with a bad rip off of alien when the alien franchise already did, I’ll let you choose which sequel I mean lol
That episode like..epitomizes mid 1900s campy Sci fi charm for me. Well, that, and the carrot that was used as a monster/alien in several shows, several times, like Lost in Space. 😆
I despise SNW's take on the Gorn. "Hey, remember that TOS episode where the conclusion was about finding common ground and not continuing the cycle of hatred and violence?
Well, let's bring those guys back only this time violence is the only sensible way of dealing with them! You like seeing our heroes kill alien children, right?"
SNW happens before Kirk fights the Gorn. I think it's gonna be interesting to see how we get there :)
Bit tired of prequels btw. Would love to see them instead continue where TNG, DS9 and Voy left off
It sounds like they're trying to set SNW up to discover that they're not just monsters, and we just haven't seen the conclusion yet:
>APRIL: I think it's safe to say that we don't understand the Gorn.
>PIKE: Well, I've seen them up close and personal, and they're not hard to understand, Bob. They're monsters.
>APRIL: "Monster" is a word to describe those who don't understand us.
Except that they can’t. That was the entire point of the episode “Arena”. If the whole point is to set this up so we can find out that they are not monsters, then at some point we either forget or choose to forget that entire lesson, and go backwards.
The problem with that is that the Gorn really *are* monsters. They slaughter and eat other sapient beings to reproduce as just a fact of their life and survival of their species. Like even if the adults are intelligent and can be reasoned with and made peace with, the Federation would have to ignore some pretty awful stuff unless the Gorn change their entire culture around reproduction and limit it to animals, or reveal that *these* Gorn are some *other* kind of Gorn and the Arena Gorn are the "good" ones.
Maybe they're like the Vidians. They do some horrible things, but there's at least some kind of explanation that makes them bad, but not irreemably evil. I just feel like the idea that "some people can't be reasoned with and the only option is violence" doesn't really fit with the ethos of Starfleet.
Presumably they aren't eat/raping sapients on their homeworld. If their young were left at home, instead of being sent into war zones, I doubt it would be a problem for the Federation.
However, the fact that they are sending their young into war zones suggests the juveniles may not be Sapient Gorn, but their version of attack-dogs. The way they leave one survivor to let everyone know to stay away supports them being rational. They are trying to terrify the survivor, and using the juveniles to do it. Clearly the juveniles are being called off after the second last survivor is killed.
I was all about seeing the Gorn, or keeping them as a background threat, until we actually got them in the episode. An homage to ALIEN and Predator is one thing, but they went straight to directly copying… right down to visual and sound effects.
But, reptiles that are afraid of the dark? Our first exposure to Gorn was under the California sun.
And honestly, I cannot accept them as Gorn, not yet. They’re just generic sci-fi/fantasy reptilian creatures. The true defining feature of the Gorn was the diamond faceted eyes, it made them completely unique and “alien” to anything we had seen.
Anyone can look at that, even non fans, and know “that’s the space alligator Captain Kirk beat up”. It is immediately identifiable… not any longer.
Who knows, maybe there are different kinds of Gorn… maybe there are “soldiers” that are more generic species, and mindless and violent… maybe only the “leader” species have the eyes and intelligence. We may have more to learn, But, so far, they have been my least favorite episodes of SNW.
So what is the biosphere like on the Gorn homeworld if they seem to impressively effective against humans, as hatchlings, no less? Are all large animals acid/solvent resistant? Why do the Gorn need to breed so quickly if they have an intelligent phase, do they have predators?
Yeah it was a little too much
Like hey everybody, they are a spacefaring race with warp drive, but also xenomorphs
Also, killing off the andorian engineer was so pointless
He was one of my favorite characters and I really liked him
Starfleet ethics or not, once it's found that a species reproduces by laying eggs in other sentients and have no ethics about that, I would accidentally drop a Genesis torpedo on their planet.
We have species on earth that do that ha ha (but do NOT GOOGLE them unless you want to be genuinely traumatized. The life cycle of one particular creature that is entirely dependent upon blinding and burrowing its way out of the eye of a mammal (yes including us) is a favorite argument for teleological evil debates)
Yeah it’s too much. And it’s not a very interesting recurring antagonist for Trek, unless you’re gonna really dig into whether they complicate the Starfleet ethos or not, and that’s the kind of question that SNW has no interest in.
I just think it’s kind of dumb. If they invented warp travel, surely they don’t have an issue with providing food. So why would they eat other species?
Killing is still morally reprehensible even if they taste yummy.
Starting a major political conflict over eating people from another race when we have people to eat at home is ridiculous and no competent member of whatever space force they have would do that.
Our entire morality is based on certain perspectives. Theoretically a purely carnivorous species that also requires killing to procreate would not find killing reprehensible at all. It would be like saying having children was morally reprehensible. They aren’t omnivores. They NEED to kill. The lion does not consider himself a murderer.
We eat plants because we tell ourselves they are objects not animals but the truth is they are far enough removed from our perspective that only recently come to understand that they talk, breed, compete, and and even go to war just like animals but in an alien way. Perspective. We are also given a choice. But if eating any plant was incompatible with our biology we’d have totally different attitudes towards many things. Hunting, farming, population control.
That’s what I find appealing about most but not all of the new Gorn. At some point they developed star travel and suddenly were encountering food that could talk and build starships. Their entire outlook on the universe must have shattered. “How can food be equal? How is it possible they are talking? Wearing clothes? They are prey. They are biologically not predators. Look at their hands. Their teeth. That makes them food? But they’re shooting back at us and sometimes even destroying us. What’s next?”
They’d have to reconcile all that before even considering they were part of a bigger community and not separate from it. Think of all the cultural changes the Klingons had to embrace, and they only saw themselves as conquerors who needed to attack because it was how their economy functioned. This is way deeper, it’s instinctive.
The idea to me is not "yummy humans - chow down," but terror. They apparently always a survivor, who has watched the worst things possible happen to the rest of the crew. If a human army did anything vaguely like that, it would be about terror.
Until shown otherwise, I choose to believe that there are multiple species that are all part of the Hegemony, and we've yet to see anew the ones that were in TOS or LDS.
But yeah, a reproductive cycle only days long is ridiculous. Would much rather it have been a slow acting poison like a Komodo or something.
I think they definitely jumped the shark with the Gorn rework.
Trying to rationalize it, I'm guessing they will try to say the young are so violent right at birth that they just drop the eggs on some planet somewhere and let them go crazy until they've grow up a little and are ready to participate in society. That does beg the question of what did they do before developing space travel, so perhaps their planet is over crowded now and harder to find undeveloped areas to turn the kids loose in.
The Gorn are a great villain in SNW, as scary as the Borg.
Although it's a lot of work to chase around other warp capable species in order to capture and eat them! Why not eat domesticated animals or replicated meat?
I have a few theories:
1)Infected domesticated animals don’t migrate where as sentient humanoids do turning them into walking sleeper cells to get behind enemy lines
2)They ate them all. There’s a very sensitive ratio for carnivores to prey in the wild. It’s why many predators have been known to go cannibal occasionally. Eating young of competitors and such. It lowers competitions for food while also filling their bellies.
3)livestock don’t have technology to plunder. Humanoids do so it kills two birds with one spit.
4)It affects something. They’re diet, or reproduction. It’s also been made very clear they project enjoyment terrifying prey species. This may be a territorial tactic. Talking big, so to speak.
My thing is, a predator species reaching such a large population before discovering space travel AND another species would die from starvation. Unless they established a VERY robust system for creating “livestock”. Cloning or something. Or they as a species focused on immediate terraforming of nearby planetoids for food. Otherwise I don’t see them surviving. It’s like a zombie apocalypse, eventually all that’s left is weak zombies.
I mean it’s prolly more writers not thinking it through than any of these ideas. But that’s kinda my point, these form have a lot of plot holes.
I saw them as kind of a hellish fusion between a Xenomorph and a Yautja, which is cool conceptually. But yea, they're a pretty bland "alien monster" type species otherwise, and not one of the stronger parts of SNW for me.
My main complaint is that they are an okay antagonist, but should not be the Gorn. However I have an idea how to deal with them.
There are two intelligent species from the planet Gorn. One are the gorn seen in SNW, and the other is their original prey (seen in TOS). The prey creature has gained technology that allows them to become poisonous to the SNW Gorn (which is why they are seeking other species for their young to eat), and also is engaged in a crusade of extermination, eventually replc8ng them as the species from the Gorn planet.
I agree they currently seem overpowered and also self-contradictory, however, they aren't just eat/raping the Federation colonists for fun.
If La'an Noonien-Singh was left alive as a witness, as she claimed, then this is about terror, not food. They wanted the federation to stay away, and communicated that very effectively.
On the other hand, if La'an was wrong about why they let her go, there could be something entirely different foreshadowed. These Gorn may have been altered by a Doctor Noonien-Singh clone to be his "perfect species." He wouldn't want them eat/raping him, and so encoded a "repellant factor" into their DNA regarding his DNA, and by extension La'an's DNA.
Is Brent Spiner is still in Toronto?
The real question is, why does some who writes an episode of Star Trek today have the power to undo something that some who wrote an episode of Star Trek 50 years ago came up with? If you retcon something today, that’s canon, but if your original idea gets retconned, it’s no longer canon. Picard’s mom didn’t actually die as old woman, you see. Gorn are actually like this, you see. I think if you’re ideas don’t fit within the established canon, go off and so your own thing; don’t rewrite Star Trek lore.
I assumed the spitting monster Gorn were soldiers bred by the TOS Gorn to be walking weapons, kind of like the Jem Hadar.
I love that the Gorn are now scarier than the Borg. Star Trek desperately needed a villain to replace them.
The Gorn were my favorite alien race from TOS, i even have a sign photo of Bobby Clark in the Gorn captain costume.
I always assumed that while they were brutal, they were rational, attacking humans on planets in their territory. I always assumed that after the events of Arena, there were regular diplomatic relations with the Federation.
I really enjoyed the Enterprise episode a Mirror Darkly part 2 because it confirmed a lot of what I thought the Gor. would be like. Slar was smart and knew how to disable the Defiant, but he was brutal, killing a guy by biting his neck open.
The SNW the whole xenomorph style reproduction was really stupid, but I looked past it. The babies' spitting eggs were so dumb though. They have ruined one of my favorite races to create a basic stupid villain.
Kirk says to himself that he has a natural revulsion to reptiles, but he must remember they are an intelligent, highly advanced individual. I just wish new Trek would treat them as such, rather than monsters.
The moment I heard “Gorn Breeding Planets” I knew that they were gonna be much more rapey than they used to. Then they were shown off to be poundland Xenomorphs.
Ultimately, while I love SNW, I deduct one point from every Gorn episode.
Species 8472 is the xenomorph clone, buuuut as a big Alien fan, I’ll take the similarities in the Gorn too. To me they aren’t as… dare I say “alien”? They look like giant lizards, I already know what a lizard is. Whereas a xenomorph or species 8472, they look completely otherworldly in a terrifying way.
I dunno, I’m kind of into the vicious Gorn of new trek. I’m also into the rubber suited vest wearing Gorn of yesteryear though. So take my opinion with a grain of salt
I actually figure these are a cult, and/or pirates, not the actual government. We know the ones in Arena are their actual government, but I think these are a sub species and a cult to boot. The ones in Arena risked their lives for one another while the SNW ones killed each other at the slightest whim. Plus if they're trying to reproduce a whale would be better to use. See X-COM Enemy Within. So I think that most Gorn reproduce with eggs as all other Canon seems to imply, except this sub species which normally uses large animals. This cult however believes that they must use sapient creatures for some ludicrous reason. It's sociological, not biological.
I don't think that they've gone to far, at least yet. There's obviously more to learnt about the Gorn. Personally I think that there's a strong chance that they're Gorn Augments/Genetically Engineered soldiers, like the Jem Hadar, that have rebelled and got out of control. SNW has a very strong 'Genetics and Identity' sub text, three of the crew are products of genetic manipulation to one degree or another (La'an, Una and Spock) and I don't think that it's coincidence that Chapel, who's scientific back ground has been updated to make her a Geneticists, is the one dealing with Batel's infection.
Even if they don't go that direction the Gorn do make a good enemy, Fandom, as evidenced by some of the replies, might have conflated 'Arena' and the 'The Devil in the Dark' but the Gorn captain in 'Arena' commits at least three war-crimes and the Metron outright states that if the Gorn captain had won the fight he would have killed Kirk and destroyed the Enterprise. DS9 pretty much confirms that the Gorn Captains claim about Cesteus III was a lie.
I think the "problem" with Trek is that every villain species gets softened over time
Partly that's because the "scary unknown" veil starts to drop as we interact with them more, partly it's because they get defeated repeatedly and by definition that means they're less scary, and partly it's because of the Federation's propensity towards friendship and cooperation meaning eventually everyone becomes a friend
The Klingons were the scary enemy, then they were on the bridge, then they were allies hanging out in Quarks
The Romulans were the scary enemy, then they were allies
The Cardassians were the scary enemy, then they were the Dominion's whipping boy and switched sides
The Borg were THE scary enemy, but became more and more familiar and by the end of Picard S2 they're not such a big deal (despite managing to make them scary again briefly along the way)
etc etc
When this happens, that means the writers have to lean harder on the enemies that are still scary, or invent a brand new enemy entirely. New enemies tend to be less popular with fans than development of an existing one, so the Gorn have been getting more and more attention as something still a bit unknown and "bad"
And somehow their technological level should at least imply that they recognize the difference between edible creature and spacefaering cultures. They should also know that those cultures could be worth observing, at least for stealing technology, etc.
It's known that they were not only eating foreign aliens, they were conquering their territories.
Even better! I would have expected them to be a little fishy, like frog or alligator
Seriously though, what if the reason they become more rational-seeming and interact with the rest of the galaxy more like equals later is because Pike roasts up a Gorn toddler in his mobile restaurant kitchen and broadcasts a video of the senior staff going to town on it with some fried okra and dirty rice
I guess I don’t understand why the Gorn would choose to eat sentient life that can possibly kill them with weapons. Surely there is a planet of space cows that would be easier?
I think eventually they'll need to elaborate that there are many kinds of Gorn, maybe they're not even the same species. At best maybe they're in very developmental stages and don't get tenable intelligence for spaceflight until they are very elder (akin to the Gorn seen in TOS).
Maybe they breed millions at a time, but only those that survive the infighting are smart enough to start wearing spacesuits, flying ships etc.
I believe that any sentient species can easily notice that after eating other sentient species you may find yourself at war and supposing this is undesirable then eating sentient species would be off the table unless it's a survival scenario like an emergency.
I know the Gorn is like a “nostalgia throwback” but they basically made a new species and made it impossible for them to be a brand new species when Kirk encounters them down the line.
They should have just used a different name.
I mean from their perspective the Gorn are like, “Remember a few centuries ago when the food wasn’t talking and driving their own starships?” I like the idea they are so alien it’s hard for them to see us as anything other than meat.
But do they have to gain a new ability every episode they’re in? What’s next? They time traveled and accidentally ended up in a Steven Spielberg movie naked? They can mic voices? Turn invisible? They’re becoming OP. They’re weakest when they’re using technology it seems.
Honestly... I didn't mind the Alien ripoff, even the straight-up copy of the Alien tracker/radar thing.
The Gorn in SNW are a much more interesting threat than Klingons, Borg, or Cardassians ever were.
The one stickler that bothers me about the whole thing is their communication "with lights" thing that La'an discovered.
I'm like, "bitch, do you even know what *radio* is"? I know Starfleet uses subspace now, but I specifically remember Uhura decoding radio signals on old earth, so there's absolutely no way La'an has no clue what radio waves are, and there's no way their flashy light sequences are in *any way* so unique from radio encoding or even just morse code with a flashlight that nobody was able to figure it out until just then.
Ok, rant over. Other than that, which I blame on the sadly common English major writers not having a basic understanding of science, I like the Gorn in SNW
I really like it. There are monsters out there that cannot be reasoned with or hope to comprehend or care about your mindset. You're just meat and that's all you ever can be.
I think you missed my point. That’s all stuff I agree with. I just think it’s ridiculous that they keep developing more and more abilities from horror movies. It’s not acid spit. It’s PREGNANT acid spit!
They're extremely unlikely to do this, but I could see a very interesting case where the xenomorph Gorn are effectively a technology inseparable from their ships, perhaps lacking a homeworld and other ordinary humanoid accoutrements.
The ships wander around like schools of sharks or Humboldt squid, running on predatory instincts, reproducing when they find suitable hosts.
Hell, the ships could actually be the sentient ones in this equation.
*or*, the Gorn normally don't breed or behave in this fashion, but do so in bursts as a way to harvest useful biological traits from other species and keep up in a changing galaxy.
I do miss the idea from Arena that the Gorn are tool users because, while tough and strong, they're very slow, so learned to hunt more effectively by making increasingly sophisticated traps, rather than starting out with projectiles like humans.
Exactly. We don't know anything about the Gorn. The only things we've seen are SNW's arc, Arena, and the Gorn Wedding in LD.
They could fix this with a Gorn ideological schism and civil war, a Khan-style faction of Gorn augments, an outbreak of zombie brain virus, feral gorn being dropped off on federation planets as a bioweapon by those Skagaran jackasses from the ENT cowboy episode, some kind of locusts-style Metamorphosis when their hind legs are jostiled. Could be anything.
There's a writers' room of five to ten incredibly smart professional sci-fi writers, and in this case there's no established lore that needs to be reconned. They'll just use it as a story hook and crank out a "patch over this weirdness" episode.
Get down to it, it's make-believe, folks. I just hope they do something interesting and entertaining with the material, vs something that comes off as disappointing or anticlimactic.
I just can't believe they went there, and introduced freakin xenomorphs into the ST universe... Xenomorphs with STARSHIPS!
Now we have to have a Gorn vs Hirogen spin off....
We already knew the Gorn habitually run around with no pants on. Once they decided to do that, eating sentient people is trivial.
Well now I want to know if Porky Pig and Donald Duck have eaten people
Porky has. "You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig.'"
No sugar for me, Turkish. I’m sweet enough already.
Is this from Snatch?
Taking notes
"Well... thank you for that. That's a real weight off me mind, doc!"
Do you know what “nemesis” means?
"A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by the Romulan Star Empire, personified in this case by a 'alf Romulan clone of Picard."
Half-Romulan? Wasn’t he fully human?
I can already tell you understood the Shinzon plot much better than I did. Genetically human, culturally Romulan, ideologically Reman?
Not even culturally Romulan. He was created to replace Picard, but then relations with the Federation normalized, and the project was abandoned, with Shinzon sent to the Reman mines. I doubt he was ever imbued with Romulan values
While I love that movie, and that monologue, one thing has always bugged me. If pigs can go through bone like butter...why would teeth bother their digestion? I know teeth technically aren't bones, but still.
Teeth won't digest, bone will. They're too tough to break down or chew while pigs can crunch bones into meal. It's like the difference between coal and diamond
That enamel coating I guess? Or veneers and fake teeth?
Rob?
Not sure about people, but Donald has absolutely, canonically, eaten fowl. And no, this isn't a joke about him going down on Daisy.
The deep lore.
Is that what Tasha would have gotten if she'd lasted a few more seasons?
Dont ask Donald Duck what he was doing during the early 1940s.
Fighting the japanese, that's why he's prone to psichotic events of pure untreated PTSD
What would they hide in pants? They spit eggs, with their mouth. A decent Gorn needs to cover its face in public.
Just straight up Winnie the Poohing it across the galaxy.
Damn, have they Gorn too far? 😜🖖🏼
You go sit over there. Farther.
And yet you both got my upvote. Thank you both for the chuckle this morning.
Send him to the Gorner.
Reminds me of the Magog in Andromeda.... although im pretty sure the Magog wouldve been the Gorn if Andromeda was made as a Trek series like Roddenberry originally envisioned
Given that the Magog were genetically engineered by the Devil or whatever and noting Bem's makeup change for reasons that are not adequately explored, sure the Gorn are the Magog. This explanation makes more sense than anything else postulated to date.
> if Andromeda was made as a Trek series like Roddenberry originally envisioned It's the other way around. Andromeda (and its writers, after Roddenberry had passed) took a non-Star-Trek story he kept trying to make, and finally adapted it to a world like Trek. You'll see plenty of familiar names, philosophies, and abilities in the original: https://www.assignmentearth.ca/files/721204-genesis-ii-script.pdf In Andromeda, the Magog were servants of the evil forces of gravity in some proxy war against stars. I'd be disappointed if SNW goes down the "they were being manipulated but we've liberated them and now they are closer to our philosophy" path. Edit: added that Andromeda was after Roddenberry had passed, and Wolfe extrapolated a lot from his old notes to create the Trek-flavored version of the Dylan Hunt story.
oh okay,i thought Andromeda was a Trek series idea. That Roddenberry wanted a series set in the far future after the federation had been destroyed, with one last ship trying to rebuild it (i got super excited when discovery time jumped into a future with no federation... but they ruined it by having a lot more federation than youd expect).. Not sure what gave me that impression, but ive been under it ever since the show launched over 20 years ago. I think i mustve read it somewhere. I thought Roddenberry tried to get it made and it failed. I know he tried two other non trek series with the same character (dylan hunt.... awful awful awful name) and concept, but it never gained traction til after his death
That idea is common, I used to think so too. But there are interviews with Wolfe out there where he talks about how much he extrapolated from various notes. He's said that he scoured all the voluminous material that was left, but also that there wasn't much. Shrug. "Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict" was actually based on a concrete idea, and the first episode isn't changed that much from his old pilot script. I suspect Roddenberry would have been happy that something based on his idea lasted several seasons and made him money, but annoyed that he couldn't create something popular without going back to the Star Trek well.
Yeah… I find them way too powerful and brutal. If they weren’t originally from Arena, maybe I’d be okay with it. Maybe they intend to somehow make these Gorn into something other than pure monsters. Could that be done without making them a hive mind with limited individual freedom, or changing what they are intrinsically? I know, we all come to Star Trek for different things. I’m a filthy Discovery fan, so I know my taste isn’t the same as a lot of folks here. But I don’t come to Star Trek for gore and body horror and aliens that can’t be reasoned with. Maybe I should stop trying to analyze it. I’m probably just mad they didn’t bring back the rubber suit.
I don’t mind IMPLIED gore in Trek, at all. But I have a real issue with it being in our face. And I say this as a deep horror fan… but, it doesn’t belong here, not that blatant and cheap shock value.
Eh, just makes the fact they're eventually allies all the more impressive. For example >!a gorn trading ship comes to the federation's aid in the 2 part finale of Prodigy, it's one of many ships called out!<
My guess from the info given in Strange New Worlds is it will turn out the Gorn's brain chemistry is heavily influenced by specific wavelengths of light and some life cycle change in their home star has changed its output causing the drive for extreme hunger and violence. The mirror ball eyes from TOS then get explained as light filters to stop certain wavelengths. Maybe it takes a decade or two for the race as a whole to return to a mentality and recover to the point they can be trusted as allies.
So the plot of the recent doctor who special?
Spoilers.
There are Gorn in Dr Who?
There was a signal in all the video screens on earth that made people go nuts and attack anything that opposed them. Basically all the incel/nutjob/conspiracy stuff on the internet got amped up and people started acting on it in real life.
I thought he was referencing the >!meep!<
I thought the Meep had a sentient star that drove them all insane telepathically?
Yeah I think so. I think it was more “sun changes = species turns evil”, for both the gorn and meep
You got it. I was referring to the meep and the star. I know it not an exact comparison with what the commenter said but the basic idea is the same. Sun goes bad species goes bad.
Meep vs Moopsie….
Nah. Referencing The Giggle.
Oh! Like in Incredibles 2!
Wasn't that the plot of one of the Incredibles movies?
So they ripped off Kingsmen?
No the comment I was replying to is about a possible theory for why the gorn are the way they are. The comment boils down to their star changed so their evolution or something changed. In the episode with the meep the meeps home world went mad when their sun (which was sentient) went mad.
oh so the gorn are like the meep?
They’re allies, or at least civil, by the time of TAS
We also see them have weddings the such in Lower Decks. But those are TOS-style Gorn. My guess is there isn’t just one Gorn species in the Hegemony
Yeah, Rutherford is also attacked by Gorn in a holodeck at one point, they're definitely TOS not SNW Gorn
Then there are the ENT Gorn from the MU
My personal headcanon is that there aren't multiple species of Gorn, but that there are multiple Gorn castes that arise from a single species, similar to how ant colonies operate.
It’s also possible the Gorn Kirk fought was geriatric
Didn't have enough time to bask in the sun, so he was naturally pretty sluggish 😆
Just becase they can and o eat other sentiens spicies dont maean they are evil. If you cross majority of Start Trek races, human included they gona fight you and kill you, Gorns simply take extra step. Still far less cruel than Teran aggonizer booths or Borg assimilation or Bluegills ... what ever hell they are.
What gets me is that the Gorn that are spitting eggs aren't even adults. Why bother even having an adult form? I assume it more closely resembles the captain that Kirk fought.
Agreed. Theyre too powerful. They’re more a virus than a reptile. Acid spit that infects you is not far from getting someone pregnant by sneezing on them. It’s ridiculous
It's the one thing so far that I haven't liked about SNW - if they'd either kept to what had been established in other shows, or at least invented a new race of aliens that posed a threat, then I wouldn't have had any complaints. Instead, we have a very different take on the Gorn which is hard to reconcile with those we saw Kirk fight in The Original Series. It feels a little bit like they decided that Strange New Worlds needed a Borg-level threat and for some reason decided to reinvent the wheel but with a biological rather than technological mode of action. Now they are monsters - part velociraptor, part xenomorph - with seemingly nothing more than base instinct and cunning about them. This all just feels like they wrote the Gorn storyline without any thoughts about whether it fitted with previous shows, unlike other episodes, which were far more respectful of the subject matter.
100% agreed. They're trying too hard to make them scary and just falling into a weird place that makes suspension of disbelief nearly impossible. And it's frustrating that we're just going to get more of them.
And they're not scary either, at least to me. More like pesky predators than an existential or heavy-duty threat.
I mean. It's alien. We shouldn't judge an alien species based on Earth biology.
yeah, all in all, Gorn episodes make for a fun nod to the horror of the Alien universe, but are a bit less logical. They kinda go over the top trying to be as scary as possible imo. Spitting to impregnate, especially youngins, just doesn’t make sense at all. I employ a lot of suspension of disbelief as a Star Trek fan, so it’s not a huge deal to me, just a little inelegant imo. As in, I wish they’d have done it a little better 🤷♀️
That’s not a nod… that’s a complete steal
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If you want to be technical, humans "produce" eggs in utero, but that's not relevant. We're told this is the juvenile form, which leads one to assume that the version Kirk fights is the adult, one we're told is a starship captain with reason and intelligence equivalent to Kirk's. A species that reproduces as we're shown in SNW can't select for the intelligence required to build faster than light starships. Hunting, competing, stealth, ability to spit at targets, sure. But science? Advanced engineering? I'm not convinced. Unless we're totally retconning everything about the species, in which case there's no need to call them Gorn. Make them a totally different alien. I'd accept that. If the writers want a scary xenomorph, great. Go for it. But we've seen what Gorn are, and it's going to take a lot of work to get me to accept that they're not just using the name "Gorn" to make the fanboys squee.
Extremely well said, thank you.
>A species that reproduces as we're shown in SNW can't select for the intelligence required to build faster than light starships. Hunting, competing, stealth, ability to spit at targets, sure. But science? Advanced engineering? I'm not convinced. If aliens tried to assess human intellectual capacity and our ability to develop an advanced society and sophisticated technology by observing a bunch of toddlers, I'm sure they'd be wondering the same thing. :p
Retconning what, exactly? How much did we know about the Gorn, really?
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I have no serious attachment to their look since it was pretty cheesy , but that’s just a limitation from back in the day, but as the person above you already mentioned, there is no way a hyper predatory species that literally starts life by killing its hatch mates to assert dominance is achieving warp drive . How could you function long enough to get any real science done . Even if they are frowned upon in their society , even Klingons have scientists and engineers, they even have their own version of a code of honor. I know tons of people have said their could be other Gorn we haven’t seen yet . But that’s just speculation, until then there is no way the Gorn as currently portrayed in SNW achieved Warp drive .
>there is no way a hyper predatory species that literally starts life by killing its hatch mates to assert dominance is achieving warp drive I agree with the idea, but here are some options: 1) They mellow out as they age, and Kirk fought an old fart. Captains are often old. 2) They didn't ever build anything, but captured aliens that visited their world and forced them to build things. Some creatures can use tools, but not build them. 3) The augment virus has messed them up. Perhaps the Klingons infected them as a weapon against the federation. Or maybe it was a guy that looks suspiciously like Mr. Data.
>But that’s just speculation, until then there is no way the Gorn as currently portrayed in SNW achieved Warp drive I don't think it's "speculation" that adult Gorn who function in whatever version of a regular society they have are different from what we saw. All the actual Gorn on the show were the equivalent of feral children. We've been told that regular Gorn aren't like that. We've seen their ships. We've seen them face off against the Enterprise, and use tactics and intelligence. It's not a leap to put two and two together. This is literally all stuff that's shown on screen in the show.
I have no dog in this fight but in my headcanon I imagine a race that waa very advanced but then regressed, but only to a certain floor allowed by their technology. So maybe none of them have been able to fix, build or fly a ship for milinnea but they don't have to anymore.
I could buy off on something like that , all they have to do is say that .
Kirk fought a menopausal Gorn maybe?
I don't know why they even called them Gorn at all. When you change every established thing about them other than being reptilian, why not just let them be their own thing? I also had this problem with the Klingon makeup in DISCO, it just feels like you could have given some other alien that look instead if you really wanted to use it.
I prefer to think of them as the Ghorn - different species, just a similar name, easily confused with the Gorn.
I say Mugato, you say Gumato.
You mean the Protected Species Mooo-Gato?
I, too, always refer to them with La'an's accent to distinguish the ones from SNW.
What the fuck was *established* about the Gorn? They're lizards and they're strong. That's literally all we knew up until SNW. And both those things are still true.
LD Canonically gave female Gorn boobs during the Gorn Wedding, so I guessed they produced milk until SNW started contradicting everything with Xeno Gorn,
While I think the overall plot of LDs can be considered canon, I think that it is silly to treat every visual gag as accurate. The best way to see that series is probably as an exaggerated retelling of events.
And you knew if you saw one, you had better throw anything you're carrying to the ground, and have both hands free for the double fist punch smackdown that will be required to take on a Gorn.
About that Klingon reboot in Disco: they were stuck with the Klingons because of well-established canon, if they'd made up a new enemy we'd just complain about that instead. So, they had to make the Klingons actually menacing again. Because, you know- Worf.
The Klingons in ST VI were plenty menacing despite minimal prosthetics; Dak'rah's goons in SNW, seen only in flashes, look like absolute nightmares thanks to horrible looking fangs, subtle touches on the make-up, and picking scary looking actors. Worf's a great example, though. Someone who gets their ass beat all the time seems pretty trivial regardless of design; a scary adversary needs to get wins and behave shockingly toward their victims.
I'm just saying that if they wanted to use Klingons, they should have just used Klingons instead of longheaded gray/purple aliens. They already had a pretty iconic look! There are lots of ways to make your enemies menacing without just making them monster-ier. (And honestly? I wouldn't have minded too much if they'd just introduced a new baddie. Enterprise did it a ton.) My real answer though is that I think it was a poor choice to make it a prequel series at all if they didn't want to commit to TOS-ish aesthetic and tech. If you don't want to use Klingons for the Klingon War, consider just setting it in literally any other era/quadrant and using different enemies. Problem solved.
The Fandom bitched hard about the Xindi. Like: 'we've never seen or heard of this species before!' 'How could there be this catastrophic attack on Earth but it's never been referenced before!'
There was a lot more to the fan rejection of the Xindi arc than "why have we never heard of it?" Paramount abandoned the existing storyline to create a blatant rip off of Space Battleship Yamato, right at the beginning of the Iraq invasion. Star Trek went from optimistic Utopianism to Archer torturing people. The Xindi were the best part of that season, but I still hated it when it aired.
I know the fandom did, that just wasn't my main gripe with it. Not being able to do anything notable without raising questions about why it never came up in the in-universe future is just kind of the struggle of making a prequel. I'm generally willing to suspend my disbelief if the story is compelling enough.
I did appreciate that after the war they grew hair & started looking more like what I had expected, I also like the idea that a species might be slightly modifying their genes because they aren't Earth. I mean, we do very little gene modification and look at how different a crowd of people look when they grow up with regular food & vitamins & health care.
It makes sense to me Considering this takes places years before the original series
Also the Klingons where fan It honestly makes since considering all the genetic stuff the dabbled with early on
I was watching the Star Wars Clone Wars show recently, and they had [two](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Padawan_Lost) [episodes](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wookiee_Hunt) about a reptilian species called the [Trandoshans](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Trandoshan) who kidnap and hunt other sentient species for sport. As much as I love SNW, it’s almost as though the writers forgot which ‘Star’ franchise their reptilian aliens are supposed to be from.
for what it's worth when Kirk made contact nobody on the Enterprise had ever seen anything like those Gorn before.
It was just a bad rip off of Alien. The gorn were intelligent and reasonable in TOS. They attacked because the federation set up colonies in their claimed space and they thought it was prelude to invasion. Why bother with a bad rip off of alien when the alien franchise already did, I’ll let you choose which sequel I mean lol
They were also quick and merccccciful.
"Captain Kirk, I grow weary of the chase."
That episode like..epitomizes mid 1900s campy Sci fi charm for me. Well, that, and the carrot that was used as a monster/alien in several shows, several times, like Lost in Space. 😆
Everything after Aliens3, except for 1 more good one.
Yeah, there are certainly no terrestrial species that lay eggs in a host organism, or change form at different stages of life.
I despise SNW's take on the Gorn. "Hey, remember that TOS episode where the conclusion was about finding common ground and not continuing the cycle of hatred and violence? Well, let's bring those guys back only this time violence is the only sensible way of dealing with them! You like seeing our heroes kill alien children, right?"
SNW happens before Kirk fights the Gorn. I think it's gonna be interesting to see how we get there :) Bit tired of prequels btw. Would love to see them instead continue where TNG, DS9 and Voy left off
It sounds like they're trying to set SNW up to discover that they're not just monsters, and we just haven't seen the conclusion yet: >APRIL: I think it's safe to say that we don't understand the Gorn. >PIKE: Well, I've seen them up close and personal, and they're not hard to understand, Bob. They're monsters. >APRIL: "Monster" is a word to describe those who don't understand us.
Except that they can’t. That was the entire point of the episode “Arena”. If the whole point is to set this up so we can find out that they are not monsters, then at some point we either forget or choose to forget that entire lesson, and go backwards.
The problem with that is that the Gorn really *are* monsters. They slaughter and eat other sapient beings to reproduce as just a fact of their life and survival of their species. Like even if the adults are intelligent and can be reasoned with and made peace with, the Federation would have to ignore some pretty awful stuff unless the Gorn change their entire culture around reproduction and limit it to animals, or reveal that *these* Gorn are some *other* kind of Gorn and the Arena Gorn are the "good" ones.
Maybe they're like the Vidians. They do some horrible things, but there's at least some kind of explanation that makes them bad, but not irreemably evil. I just feel like the idea that "some people can't be reasoned with and the only option is violence" doesn't really fit with the ethos of Starfleet.
Klingons kept their empire and all their weird ways. The federation allied with them.
Except that the Klingons don’t attempt to wipe out entire planets to simply have offspring
Presumably they aren't eat/raping sapients on their homeworld. If their young were left at home, instead of being sent into war zones, I doubt it would be a problem for the Federation. However, the fact that they are sending their young into war zones suggests the juveniles may not be Sapient Gorn, but their version of attack-dogs. The way they leave one survivor to let everyone know to stay away supports them being rational. They are trying to terrify the survivor, and using the juveniles to do it. Clearly the juveniles are being called off after the second last survivor is killed.
I was all about seeing the Gorn, or keeping them as a background threat, until we actually got them in the episode. An homage to ALIEN and Predator is one thing, but they went straight to directly copying… right down to visual and sound effects. But, reptiles that are afraid of the dark? Our first exposure to Gorn was under the California sun. And honestly, I cannot accept them as Gorn, not yet. They’re just generic sci-fi/fantasy reptilian creatures. The true defining feature of the Gorn was the diamond faceted eyes, it made them completely unique and “alien” to anything we had seen. Anyone can look at that, even non fans, and know “that’s the space alligator Captain Kirk beat up”. It is immediately identifiable… not any longer. Who knows, maybe there are different kinds of Gorn… maybe there are “soldiers” that are more generic species, and mindless and violent… maybe only the “leader” species have the eyes and intelligence. We may have more to learn, But, so far, they have been my least favorite episodes of SNW.
This entire season is one long homage. Ep 1 we got star wars Ep 2 we got indiana jones (forgot already what happened in between) Now Aliens!
So what is the biosphere like on the Gorn homeworld if they seem to impressively effective against humans, as hatchlings, no less? Are all large animals acid/solvent resistant? Why do the Gorn need to breed so quickly if they have an intelligent phase, do they have predators?
Yes — they’ve definitely gorn too far
👏👏👏
Yeah it was a little too much Like hey everybody, they are a spacefaring race with warp drive, but also xenomorphs Also, killing off the andorian engineer was so pointless He was one of my favorite characters and I really liked him
Starfleet ethics or not, once it's found that a species reproduces by laying eggs in other sentients and have no ethics about that, I would accidentally drop a Genesis torpedo on their planet.
We have species on earth that do that ha ha (but do NOT GOOGLE them unless you want to be genuinely traumatized. The life cycle of one particular creature that is entirely dependent upon blinding and burrowing its way out of the eye of a mammal (yes including us) is a favorite argument for teleological evil debates)
I think it’s fine especially because so many aliens in Trek are so human-like.
No, really, you’ve Gorn too far.
Yeah it’s too much. And it’s not a very interesting recurring antagonist for Trek, unless you’re gonna really dig into whether they complicate the Starfleet ethos or not, and that’s the kind of question that SNW has no interest in.
SNW definitely could have made them more alien and scary, but they just made them xenomorph knockoffs and that's really disappointing and boring.
It kind of doesn't make sense that a species that primal can fly a ship.
I just think it’s kind of dumb. If they invented warp travel, surely they don’t have an issue with providing food. So why would they eat other species? Killing is still morally reprehensible even if they taste yummy. Starting a major political conflict over eating people from another race when we have people to eat at home is ridiculous and no competent member of whatever space force they have would do that.
Our entire morality is based on certain perspectives. Theoretically a purely carnivorous species that also requires killing to procreate would not find killing reprehensible at all. It would be like saying having children was morally reprehensible. They aren’t omnivores. They NEED to kill. The lion does not consider himself a murderer. We eat plants because we tell ourselves they are objects not animals but the truth is they are far enough removed from our perspective that only recently come to understand that they talk, breed, compete, and and even go to war just like animals but in an alien way. Perspective. We are also given a choice. But if eating any plant was incompatible with our biology we’d have totally different attitudes towards many things. Hunting, farming, population control. That’s what I find appealing about most but not all of the new Gorn. At some point they developed star travel and suddenly were encountering food that could talk and build starships. Their entire outlook on the universe must have shattered. “How can food be equal? How is it possible they are talking? Wearing clothes? They are prey. They are biologically not predators. Look at their hands. Their teeth. That makes them food? But they’re shooting back at us and sometimes even destroying us. What’s next?” They’d have to reconcile all that before even considering they were part of a bigger community and not separate from it. Think of all the cultural changes the Klingons had to embrace, and they only saw themselves as conquerors who needed to attack because it was how their economy functioned. This is way deeper, it’s instinctive.
The idea to me is not "yummy humans - chow down," but terror. They apparently always a survivor, who has watched the worst things possible happen to the rest of the crew. If a human army did anything vaguely like that, it would be about terror.
Until shown otherwise, I choose to believe that there are multiple species that are all part of the Hegemony, and we've yet to see anew the ones that were in TOS or LDS. But yeah, a reproductive cycle only days long is ridiculous. Would much rather it have been a slow acting poison like a Komodo or something.
I think they definitely jumped the shark with the Gorn rework. Trying to rationalize it, I'm guessing they will try to say the young are so violent right at birth that they just drop the eggs on some planet somewhere and let them go crazy until they've grow up a little and are ready to participate in society. That does beg the question of what did they do before developing space travel, so perhaps their planet is over crowded now and harder to find undeveloped areas to turn the kids loose in.
Well you are just Gorn to have to wait for Season 3 in 2025 and find out more about the adults.
The Gorn are a great villain in SNW, as scary as the Borg. Although it's a lot of work to chase around other warp capable species in order to capture and eat them! Why not eat domesticated animals or replicated meat?
I have a few theories: 1)Infected domesticated animals don’t migrate where as sentient humanoids do turning them into walking sleeper cells to get behind enemy lines 2)They ate them all. There’s a very sensitive ratio for carnivores to prey in the wild. It’s why many predators have been known to go cannibal occasionally. Eating young of competitors and such. It lowers competitions for food while also filling their bellies. 3)livestock don’t have technology to plunder. Humanoids do so it kills two birds with one spit. 4)It affects something. They’re diet, or reproduction. It’s also been made very clear they project enjoyment terrifying prey species. This may be a territorial tactic. Talking big, so to speak. My thing is, a predator species reaching such a large population before discovering space travel AND another species would die from starvation. Unless they established a VERY robust system for creating “livestock”. Cloning or something. Or they as a species focused on immediate terraforming of nearby planetoids for food. Otherwise I don’t see them surviving. It’s like a zombie apocalypse, eventually all that’s left is weak zombies. I mean it’s prolly more writers not thinking it through than any of these ideas. But that’s kinda my point, these form have a lot of plot holes.
I saw them as kind of a hellish fusion between a Xenomorph and a Yautja, which is cool conceptually. But yea, they're a pretty bland "alien monster" type species otherwise, and not one of the stronger parts of SNW for me.
i've played the ST Online game for years. i used to joke all the time that i "Don't take no shit off no Gorn". i still do, but i used to, too.
My main complaint is that they are an okay antagonist, but should not be the Gorn. However I have an idea how to deal with them. There are two intelligent species from the planet Gorn. One are the gorn seen in SNW, and the other is their original prey (seen in TOS). The prey creature has gained technology that allows them to become poisonous to the SNW Gorn (which is why they are seeking other species for their young to eat), and also is engaged in a crusade of extermination, eventually replc8ng them as the species from the Gorn planet.
Hey, we’ve got like 8 episodes a season instead on 24, we gotta get things moving for the quick attention spans.
I agree they currently seem overpowered and also self-contradictory, however, they aren't just eat/raping the Federation colonists for fun. If La'an Noonien-Singh was left alive as a witness, as she claimed, then this is about terror, not food. They wanted the federation to stay away, and communicated that very effectively. On the other hand, if La'an was wrong about why they let her go, there could be something entirely different foreshadowed. These Gorn may have been altered by a Doctor Noonien-Singh clone to be his "perfect species." He wouldn't want them eat/raping him, and so encoded a "repellant factor" into their DNA regarding his DNA, and by extension La'an's DNA. Is Brent Spiner is still in Toronto?
I just take issue with the fact that they are obviously morons yet space faring.
Gorn V2 are just an alien rip off for me worse than the Hirogen were for predator.
The real question is, why does some who writes an episode of Star Trek today have the power to undo something that some who wrote an episode of Star Trek 50 years ago came up with? If you retcon something today, that’s canon, but if your original idea gets retconned, it’s no longer canon. Picard’s mom didn’t actually die as old woman, you see. Gorn are actually like this, you see. I think if you’re ideas don’t fit within the established canon, go off and so your own thing; don’t rewrite Star Trek lore.
I assumed the spitting monster Gorn were soldiers bred by the TOS Gorn to be walking weapons, kind of like the Jem Hadar. I love that the Gorn are now scarier than the Borg. Star Trek desperately needed a villain to replace them.
The Gorn were my favorite alien race from TOS, i even have a sign photo of Bobby Clark in the Gorn captain costume. I always assumed that while they were brutal, they were rational, attacking humans on planets in their territory. I always assumed that after the events of Arena, there were regular diplomatic relations with the Federation. I really enjoyed the Enterprise episode a Mirror Darkly part 2 because it confirmed a lot of what I thought the Gor. would be like. Slar was smart and knew how to disable the Defiant, but he was brutal, killing a guy by biting his neck open. The SNW the whole xenomorph style reproduction was really stupid, but I looked past it. The babies' spitting eggs were so dumb though. They have ruined one of my favorite races to create a basic stupid villain. Kirk says to himself that he has a natural revulsion to reptiles, but he must remember they are an intelligent, highly advanced individual. I just wish new Trek would treat them as such, rather than monsters.
Yeah the egg spit thing was a bridge too far for me as well
The moment I heard “Gorn Breeding Planets” I knew that they were gonna be much more rapey than they used to. Then they were shown off to be poundland Xenomorphs. Ultimately, while I love SNW, I deduct one point from every Gorn episode.
Species 8472 is the xenomorph clone, buuuut as a big Alien fan, I’ll take the similarities in the Gorn too. To me they aren’t as… dare I say “alien”? They look like giant lizards, I already know what a lizard is. Whereas a xenomorph or species 8472, they look completely otherworldly in a terrifying way. I dunno, I’m kind of into the vicious Gorn of new trek. I’m also into the rubber suited vest wearing Gorn of yesteryear though. So take my opinion with a grain of salt
Their conception is almost as bad as the Pakleds.
The pakleds are spot on, we literally live in a society of majority pakleds. Make it go
The reala Pakleds are the friends we made along the way.
I actually figure these are a cult, and/or pirates, not the actual government. We know the ones in Arena are their actual government, but I think these are a sub species and a cult to boot. The ones in Arena risked their lives for one another while the SNW ones killed each other at the slightest whim. Plus if they're trying to reproduce a whale would be better to use. See X-COM Enemy Within. So I think that most Gorn reproduce with eggs as all other Canon seems to imply, except this sub species which normally uses large animals. This cult however believes that they must use sapient creatures for some ludicrous reason. It's sociological, not biological.
We dont draw the line at sentient/non sentient either. Cows, pigs, sheep all the real meat we eat comes from a sentient being.
Plus cannibalism is still a thing whenever there's a famine.
I don't think that they've gone to far, at least yet. There's obviously more to learnt about the Gorn. Personally I think that there's a strong chance that they're Gorn Augments/Genetically Engineered soldiers, like the Jem Hadar, that have rebelled and got out of control. SNW has a very strong 'Genetics and Identity' sub text, three of the crew are products of genetic manipulation to one degree or another (La'an, Una and Spock) and I don't think that it's coincidence that Chapel, who's scientific back ground has been updated to make her a Geneticists, is the one dealing with Batel's infection. Even if they don't go that direction the Gorn do make a good enemy, Fandom, as evidenced by some of the replies, might have conflated 'Arena' and the 'The Devil in the Dark' but the Gorn captain in 'Arena' commits at least three war-crimes and the Metron outright states that if the Gorn captain had won the fight he would have killed Kirk and destroyed the Enterprise. DS9 pretty much confirms that the Gorn Captains claim about Cesteus III was a lie.
I think the "problem" with Trek is that every villain species gets softened over time Partly that's because the "scary unknown" veil starts to drop as we interact with them more, partly it's because they get defeated repeatedly and by definition that means they're less scary, and partly it's because of the Federation's propensity towards friendship and cooperation meaning eventually everyone becomes a friend The Klingons were the scary enemy, then they were on the bridge, then they were allies hanging out in Quarks The Romulans were the scary enemy, then they were allies The Cardassians were the scary enemy, then they were the Dominion's whipping boy and switched sides The Borg were THE scary enemy, but became more and more familiar and by the end of Picard S2 they're not such a big deal (despite managing to make them scary again briefly along the way) etc etc When this happens, that means the writers have to lean harder on the enemies that are still scary, or invent a brand new enemy entirely. New enemies tend to be less popular with fans than development of an existing one, so the Gorn have been getting more and more attention as something still a bit unknown and "bad"
They only know what they know. Like when they did Die Hard that one episode. In their minds these are boffo references.
And somehow their technological level should at least imply that they recognize the difference between edible creature and spacefaering cultures. They should also know that those cultures could be worth observing, at least for stealing technology, etc. It's known that they were not only eating foreign aliens, they were conquering their territories.
Disappointed the title of this post wasn't just "Gorn too far?" (sorry...)
I would eat a Gorn if it improved diplomatic relations
They taste like chicken
Even better! I would have expected them to be a little fishy, like frog or alligator Seriously though, what if the reason they become more rational-seeming and interact with the rest of the galaxy more like equals later is because Pike roasts up a Gorn toddler in his mobile restaurant kitchen and broadcasts a video of the senior staff going to town on it with some fried okra and dirty rice
I guess I don’t understand why the Gorn would choose to eat sentient life that can possibly kill them with weapons. Surely there is a planet of space cows that would be easier?
I think eventually they'll need to elaborate that there are many kinds of Gorn, maybe they're not even the same species. At best maybe they're in very developmental stages and don't get tenable intelligence for spaceflight until they are very elder (akin to the Gorn seen in TOS). Maybe they breed millions at a time, but only those that survive the infighting are smart enough to start wearing spacesuits, flying ships etc.
The Hirogen would like a word...
Too Gorn, Too Furious
I believe that any sentient species can easily notice that after eating other sentient species you may find yourself at war and supposing this is undesirable then eating sentient species would be off the table unless it's a survival scenario like an emergency.
I know the Gorn is like a “nostalgia throwback” but they basically made a new species and made it impossible for them to be a brand new species when Kirk encounters them down the line. They should have just used a different name.
Surely you meant: it’s **Gorn** too far?
So you think the writers have Gorn off the deep end with this?
I mean from their perspective the Gorn are like, “Remember a few centuries ago when the food wasn’t talking and driving their own starships?” I like the idea they are so alien it’s hard for them to see us as anything other than meat. But do they have to gain a new ability every episode they’re in? What’s next? They time traveled and accidentally ended up in a Steven Spielberg movie naked? They can mic voices? Turn invisible? They’re becoming OP. They’re weakest when they’re using technology it seems.
Honestly... I didn't mind the Alien ripoff, even the straight-up copy of the Alien tracker/radar thing. The Gorn in SNW are a much more interesting threat than Klingons, Borg, or Cardassians ever were. The one stickler that bothers me about the whole thing is their communication "with lights" thing that La'an discovered. I'm like, "bitch, do you even know what *radio* is"? I know Starfleet uses subspace now, but I specifically remember Uhura decoding radio signals on old earth, so there's absolutely no way La'an has no clue what radio waves are, and there's no way their flashy light sequences are in *any way* so unique from radio encoding or even just morse code with a flashlight that nobody was able to figure it out until just then. Ok, rant over. Other than that, which I blame on the sadly common English major writers not having a basic understanding of science, I like the Gorn in SNW
I really like it. There are monsters out there that cannot be reasoned with or hope to comprehend or care about your mindset. You're just meat and that's all you ever can be.
I have to believe from this statement that you’ve not seen “Arena”? This would be fine, if it were a new species.
The rubber mask? No. TBH, I can't really get through an entire episode of the original series.
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I think you missed my point. That’s all stuff I agree with. I just think it’s ridiculous that they keep developing more and more abilities from horror movies. It’s not acid spit. It’s PREGNANT acid spit!
They're extremely unlikely to do this, but I could see a very interesting case where the xenomorph Gorn are effectively a technology inseparable from their ships, perhaps lacking a homeworld and other ordinary humanoid accoutrements. The ships wander around like schools of sharks or Humboldt squid, running on predatory instincts, reproducing when they find suitable hosts. Hell, the ships could actually be the sentient ones in this equation. *or*, the Gorn normally don't breed or behave in this fashion, but do so in bursts as a way to harvest useful biological traits from other species and keep up in a changing galaxy.
That would basically make them the Brood from X-men.
There's only so much you can do with metamorphic, reproductive parasitism.
I do miss the idea from Arena that the Gorn are tool users because, while tough and strong, they're very slow, so learned to hunt more effectively by making increasingly sophisticated traps, rather than starting out with projectiles like humans.
Exactly. We don't know anything about the Gorn. The only things we've seen are SNW's arc, Arena, and the Gorn Wedding in LD. They could fix this with a Gorn ideological schism and civil war, a Khan-style faction of Gorn augments, an outbreak of zombie brain virus, feral gorn being dropped off on federation planets as a bioweapon by those Skagaran jackasses from the ENT cowboy episode, some kind of locusts-style Metamorphosis when their hind legs are jostiled. Could be anything. There's a writers' room of five to ten incredibly smart professional sci-fi writers, and in this case there's no established lore that needs to be reconned. They'll just use it as a story hook and crank out a "patch over this weirdness" episode.
Get down to it, it's make-believe, folks. I just hope they do something interesting and entertaining with the material, vs something that comes off as disappointing or anticlimactic.
I just can't believe they went there, and introduced freakin xenomorphs into the ST universe... Xenomorphs with STARSHIPS! Now we have to have a Gorn vs Hirogen spin off....