🪐 "Strange New Worlds" Discussion 🪐

phoenixc

Ironically, the Gorn were originally supposed to be one of those "not as alien as they look" tropes where nothing is what it initially seems and despite what they look like and the difficulty with translators, they were supposed to be one of the more understandable and agreeable aliens once reliable communication was established and the context of the incident was discovered.

While they never joined the Federation (at least as far as DS9's timeframe anyway) they were friendly enough and there was at least one mention of a successful joint Federation-Gorn colony in DS9. Not exactly the greatest villain material to start off with unless there is something off about the ones in SNW and they are a kind of mutant offshoot or some kind of transformative virus like are so popular in horror movies and series, or whatever.

rattler2

The way I see it, the Gorn are still not really understood at this point. It won't be until the TOS episode that the Gorn gain any kind of respect for the Federation. Until then they're still pretty much the boogyman of space, probably think very little of mammalian species to the point of seeing them as nothing more than an annoyance and pretty much food. Then the encounter with Kirk happens, and... its a slap in the face. These Mammals aren't so bad after all.

So honestly it really doesn't take anything away.

angrytarg

It doesn't take much away because there wasn't much lore, that's true. But I always saw them like @phoenixc#0738 wrote and never, not once, understood why the slow, awkward rubber suit man was changed into Jurassic Park raptors by almost anyone who touched upon the subject. The point of the original episode was, paraphrasing here, 'it's alien but not entirely unlike me, a starship captain with a duty and desire to care for it's crew'. There was something to build on once communication was established. And in the whole franchise I never ever got the slightest impression that the same species we saw in 'The Arena' would be undetectable, invincible alien parasites who spit eggs that burn through the skin of victims and hatch after hours in Andorians and of which basically a single infant can take down the whole federation via insta-kill chain jumps. Even if those 'young' new Gorn grow into slow, bipedal adults (as I said, wait and see, they totally become Predators at that point), the whole set-up - to me - makes absolutely no sense.

This species concept would have worked better for a one-off boogeyman alien of the week for a good horror episode.

jonsills

The life cycle of the xenomorphs in "Alien" was taken from the life cycle of the Ixtl in A. E. van Vogt's classic Voyage of the Space Beagle. van Vogt won a small amount in a settlement; the size was reduced when it was pointed out that it's also basically the life cycle of spider wasps on Earth.

So yeah, the Gorn reproductive method exists in reality, not just other fictions.

As for why the rubber suit? In 1967, that was state of the art for such things. If they'd been able to do a CGI reptilian reminiscent of the raptors in Jurassic Park, rest assured that's what Kirk's opponent would have looked like. If you like, imagine that (like other life forms) the Gorn have many shapes they molt through on the way to their adult forms.

angrytarg

I didn't say a parasitic or semi-parasitic life cycle makes no sense. I said it doesn't make sense, to me, to apply it to the Gorn. I know there are myriads of justifications why this could be, that we only saw one Gorn, Gorn have subspecies, they come in a dozen forms, each "function department" designated by the way they body evolved (or was modified to), yes yes yes I know all of that.

To me, the step they took the way they took it simply is nonsensical. Minor canon issues I have is that Bones said Gorn can be pregnant (a C-section could have also been performed for the eggs, so I don't even say they birth live offspring) and they mate - or at least "marry" which doesn't have to be a mating bond that produces offspring mind you (example: In Warhammer 40k, warriros of the Tau people perform a bonding ritual amongst a number of individuals which was described as reminiscent of a marriage by human observers, with the objective to bond for battle), but it's a bit weird considering we now know they (the Gorn) reproduce asexually.​​

jonsills

We don't know they reproduce asexually. We know the eggs have to grow in a living host, but that says nothing about how they're fertilized - spider wasps generally use a mating flight to fertilize their eggs before stinging the prey into submission, for instance.

rattler2

I hate to say it, but it feels like it is partially implied when Hemmer gets infected by a relatively young Gorn.

Although... it could be that the Gorn have multiple methods as well. And at this point in time, due to their apparent disdain for mammalian life, they chose the more parasitic style.

We don't know.

There is still MUCH we don't know about the Gorn. But one of the reasons they play so well into the horror aspect is that they are so alien, and predatory, and perhaps we humans have a primal, ancestral fear of reptiles.

As Jonsils said, in the 1960s they HAD to use a man in a rubber suit that moved rather slow, because that is the best they had at the time. Just like how for the longest time, Godzilla movies had to rely on practical effects and costumes. Because that was the best they had available at that time.

qultuq

Rubber-suit monsters are still on TV in 2022 Tokyo, I can assure you. We like our rubber-suit monsters here I assure you. Certainly the modern Godzilla and Kamen Rider use a lot of digital effects too, but the whole genera is really about crazy monster suits at it’s core, I think.

angrytarg

> @qultuq said:
> Rubber-suit monsters are still on TV in 2022 Tokyo, I can assure you. We like our rubber-suit monsters here I assure you. Certainly the modern Godzilla and Kamen Rider use a lot of digital effects too, but the whole genera is really about crazy monster suits at it’s core, I think.

Exactly! Because yes they can do CGI Godzilla, and the US version tried that. But they still make the old Godzilla because at this point it’s not a budgetary reason, but about the whole style. Kamen Rider/Sentai/Power Rangers also don’t work if you remove the actors in suits.

Same in my opinion with the Gorn. It may be that Roddenberry or whoever would use a CGI Raptor if they did it today, but they hadn’t back then. The rubber suit Gorn is cult. Changing that is a grave mistake, Star Trek has to stop to be embarrassed by the old effects and embrace them. The exact same episode would have worked the same without using the name Gorn, because out of universe to us nothing about that is familiar in the slightest to the Gorn we know (and nobody told the Lower Decks people either 😉)

jonsills

There's another distinction, though - while adults may enjoy watching the Kamen Rider and various super sentai shows, they're still aimed at children. There's a strong nostalgia vibe there. Which is great when your intended audience is either children or people who were charmed by your product when they were children, but is lousy for growing the brand beyond its existing fanbase. It would be like expecting Doctor Who to still use cardboard sets and cheaply-constructed monster suits specifically because that's how it used to be.

rattler2

qultuq wrote: »

Rubber-suit monsters are still on TV in 2022 Tokyo, I can assure you. We like our rubber-suit monsters here I assure you. Certainly the modern Godzilla and Kamen Rider use a lot of digital effects too, but the whole genera is really about crazy monster suits at it’s core, I think.

There is a charm to having a practical set you can just destroy. Something you can't quite capture with CGI. But that is also Kaiju stuff. IMO the TOS Gorn is a different animal. That was just a product of the time. Also... we have to consider that we saw YOUNG Gorn. Not Adult Gorn. We have to consider that.

It does look like the SNW Gorn took some inspiration from the one appearance of an adult Gorn in Enterprise. And we did have what was supposed to be a Gorn skeleton in Discovery that looked more in line with the TOS suit body type. So considering how varied Earth reptiles are... we could have similar variation with the Gorn. After all in at least one Beta Canon source, the Gorn consist of like three different races that have a common ancestor (believe that was used in the old Starfleet Command games for lore).

angrytarg

I personally believe that this is the way SNW Gorn will develop - their young are these virtually undefeatable horror monsters, and the adults will resemble the classic one a bit more. I still think they will have many 'tributes' paid to Predators as the entire thing with the parasitic young, breeding planets, deadly competition, heat vision sequences, that's all stuff very familiar if you know the 'Alien vs. Predator' series. There is nothing wrong with paying tributes and the episodes themselves were good. Just a swing and a miss to stick it on the Gorn of all people.

And if that path is truly chosen, that's the best version they can have in my opinion. I really hate the subspecies thing, have one brainy-talky Gorn, one aggressive fighter Gorn and maybe add some other type to the mix. The young ones were already super OP, who would engage in diplomacy with them, given that one only needs to cough at you to basically bring down planets with their undetectable, immune to telepathy, super fast, insta-killing, reproducing and jumping murder babies - those are way too many skills to have, man.

jonsills

I figure they're different developmental phases. Aside from all the terrestrial examples, we can also look to the grogs in Niven's Known Space stories; descendants of the thrint, a race that ruled the galaxy a billion years earlier, they hatch from eggs, have a period of a few years during which they live as presapient predators (this is also when they reproduce), then eventually settle into a sessile form, developing sapience, finding a nice rock to attach to, and using a weakened form of the telepathic hypnosis their ancestors possessed to bring prey willingly into their mouths. The adults use their long, prehensile tongues as a substitute for hands.

Then there are the Protectors of the Unborn, in James White's Sector General (introduced in the novel Ambulance Ship), a species resembling a very tall crab. The Unborn, residing inside the parent before birth, are sapient and telepathic; the birth process damages the brain and removes both intellect and telepathy, as the sole function of the adult Protector is to battle constantly against the incredibly violent wildlife of their home planet. The Unborn have constructed spacecraft in collaboration with another sapient species; the ships are crowded with what appears to humans to be a cross between gym equipment and torture devices, as if the Protector is not constantly under attack its circulatory organs will begin to fail and both Protector and Unborn will die.

I could go on at length - in fact, before deleting way too many words here, I had.

There are a lot of precedents for this, in both fiction and reality.

annemarie30

well, lets face it. the Gorn are "the big bad" for now. TOS has the klinks and roms. TNG tried the Ferengi, and then had the Borg/

Now SNW wants to have a Big Biad familiar to TOS, and did not want to use the Roms, and Disco did the KDF. that leaves the Gorn and tholians, really, and the CGI budget would be much higher for tholians.. anyway, however they decided Gorn,
they also knew THIS


was not going to work as the scary big bad guy

phoenixc

The problem is that at least four people on Kirk's Enterprise have encountered the xenomorph Gorn already, and apparently none of them recognized the Gorn in Arena as Gorn. And the life-stages thing cannot explain that since they did not recognize any of the Gorn technology as being Gorn tech either. It is a rather serious continuity problem that indicates that either SNW/DSC and TOS are on separate timelines, or something else is going on.

An interesting possibility for that something else, if Goldsman is pulling one of his trademark twists, could go with the theme set in DSC about the Gorn being brilliant scientists and engineers but really bad when it comes to safety precautions (and probably common sense) and the SNW xenomorph Gorn could be disastrously botched augments. Enterprise could find they have some kind of queen or other McGuffin they depend on and destroy it without ever knowing that the real Gorn were fighting for their lives from their own creation on the opposite side of the xenomorph-taken territory or something like that.

In that scenario, the tech differences could be explained if the augments were meant as supersoldiers (that possibly went unexpectedly Jurassic Park and started reproducing) for a conflict with a more technologically advanced alien race, and that the tech comes from the defeated aliens instead of being native Gorn tech that the holdovers from Pike's crew would not have seen.

There are also a number of other possibilities of course, but that one is probably the easiest fit.

jonsills

They didn't recognize the Gorn in Arena because those big slow SOBs bear as much resemblance to the little zippers in SNW as a monarch butterfly does to a monarch caterpillar. As for the tech - at what point have Our Heroes seen Gorn technology up close and personal? They hid from some ships, but that's not exactly a technical readout of all their gear, now is it? (And that's presupposing that the ship at Cestus III was the same class as the ships at Finibus III. They did use the same tactic of using a colony as bait for a Starfleet ship...)

qultuq

> @angrytarg said:
> My complaint about the new Gorn isn't really about canon, although I do not at all see the dinosaur raptors as a logical continuation of the true TOS Gorn. My complaint is that it is really silly to begin with. It's not just Alien vibes, they are straight rip-offs. Throw in some Predator heat view sequences - squeal, I bet a hundred quatloos if we ever see an adult new-Gorn they're Predator rip-offs now, complete with tribal antics and armours.
>
> The horror episodes aren't even bad, I just don't get why they couldn't just make up something new. The show has so many creative ideas, their Gorn however are the low point of creativity as they're just imitations of something else.

I finally saw the episode. Actually I really liked it. The monster-vision camera was lame though, huh!

As you also say McCoy said he delivered a Gorn baby in Into Darkness. Although he said it was all “claws and teeth,” he conveniently left out how it burst through the chest cavity…

But really it is just that the contemporary writers don’t care and it is obvious:

“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.’”

https://www.filmsnewsfeed.com/article/strange-new-worlds-writer-explains-changing-star-treks-gorn-canon

Basical, whatever was said—whatever was onscreen can be interpreted however they want, and the writers shouldn’t be limited by previous “canon.”
So yeah we can think maybe they will eventually try to resolve the incongruities that they are creating, but they really don’t care as long as it sells. It is about milking the IP, not appreciating subtlety.

jonsills

I wouldn't take what they said in Into Darkness too seriously - I mean, they started off by claiming that "cold fusion" was a nuclear-fusion explosive device that somehow froze everything...

phoenixc

And also remember that Kurtzman was part of that "cold fusion freezes things" nonsense, and that kind of fractured science does make it into the new shows at times. So really, that line in Into Darkness is as valid any anything else in Trek since 2009.

jonsills

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

And also remember that Kurtzman was part of that "cold fusion freezes things" nonsense, and that kind of fractured science does make it into the new shows at times. So really, that line in Into Darkness is as valid any anything else in Trek since 2009.

In fact, I haven't found anything in the new shows that blatantly disregards existing physics like that - they at least have the courtesy to pull TNG-style treknobabble out of their orificies when they want to do something impossible (like warp drive ). The only exception I've found so far is that the ship's chronometers should have needed recalibration after close passage near a singularity (SNW:"Memento Mori"), and that might well have been handled automatically by the ship's own systems.

phoenixc

jonsills wrote: »

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

And also remember that Kurtzman was part of that "cold fusion freezes things" nonsense, and that kind of fractured science does make it into the new shows at times. So really, that line in Into Darkness is as valid any anything else in Trek since 2009.

In fact, I haven't found anything in the new shows that blatantly disregards existing physics like that - they at least have the courtesy to pull TNG-style treknobabble out of their orificies when they want to do something impossible (like warp drive ). The only exception I've found so far is that the ship's chronometers should have needed recalibration after close passage near a singularity (SNW:"Memento Mori"), and that might well have been handled automatically by the ship's own systems.

True, nothing quite so egregiously bad as that cold fusion nonsense, but they have come fairly close on lot of things such as the tardis-like inside-bigger-than-outside nonsense, the way the windows are depicted as acting exactly like building windows on earth so even when the outside view is darkish and blue-tinted light, what comes through the windows is bright, cheery golden noon-on-Earth light, and other gaffs.

Another window problem is that the frame details show they are around two feet thick in most places yet they use the CGI routines for thin plate glass when they get blown out, but that is more a case of nitpicking than an actual physics or other science problem. Just for reference, Alon (the commercial name for the "transparent aluminum" used as a plot device in The Voyage Home) tends to break up into little chunks (in slow motion it looks a bit like sand and very small rocks) instead of shattering into splinters and jagged sheets when damaged.

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised (now that I see them in high-def and in order without the chaos of a get-together) at some of the more esoteric TOS stuff that they did get right in NuTrek (though it does not make up for all the stuff they made incompatible for no reason). For instance, in one shot they showed a ball of distortion with the reflections/refractions of the stars stretched out along its surface that looked a lot like a photon torpedo at first, which then stretched out and tore into TNG style 'warp trails' as the ship dropped to sublight.

That is exactly what an 'outside' view of a ship in warp was supposed to look like in TOS when the computer could not identify the ship configuration for some reason to display on the screen. An example of that is the way the Orion Intruder was shown as just a ball of light in Journey to Babel, the sensors could not penetrate the very dense warp field (and probably some sort of ECM from the ship) so it just gave an "optical" view of it. So it actually is plausible that someone standing in the shuttle catwalk looking out the outer windows there would have seen the same sort of view as shown through the NuTrek windows instead of a classic "starbow".

The chronometer thing was actually addressed in technobabble back in TNG. It turns out the subspace relays put out time signatures in their networking signals that ships can use like GPS to find their position, or if their position is known to synchronize their clocks with the time standard. Also, they would listen to certain quasars which would give them a rough idea of the passage of time outside of the ship.

rattler2

On the bright side... the cold fusion stuff gave my TOS Cryomancer Sci a kit module. lol

crypticarmsman

jonsills wrote: »

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

And also remember that Kurtzman was part of that "cold fusion freezes things" nonsense, and that kind of fractured science does make it into the new shows at times. So really, that line in Into Darkness is as valid any anything else in Trek since 2009.

In fact, I haven't found anything in the new shows that blatantly disregards existing physics like that - they at least have the courtesy to pull TNG-style treknobabble out of their orificies when they want to do something impossible (like warp drive ). The only exception I've found so far is that the ship's chronometers should have needed recalibration after close passage near a singularity (SNW:"Memento Mori"), and that might well have been handled automatically by the ship's own systems.

TOS era chronometers are self calibrating and can detect in which direction time is going (See TOS S1 Tomorrow Is Yesterday)