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The Gorn
paradox
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I don't know where to begin with this race, SNW's chest buster Gorn already contradicts the LD's Female Gorn, so are the females now obsolete, since both shows can't both be canon and contradict eachother, the only way it makes sense and works in canon is if the males are impregnating the females and then the females are laying eggs in people's bodies which is still weird AF.
also don't get me started on JJ's Kelvinuniverse Fake Gorn.
also don't get me started on JJ's Kelvinuniverse Fake Gorn.
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Also as one of the classic races that never got expanded upon in the past... who knows. In one Beta Canon source it did say that there were three distinct species of Gorn, All with a common ancestor. Perhaps we're looking at something similar here?
And the Kelvin Gorn are kinda out there, apparently being conquerors from another galaxy entirely. I played that game. Wasn't too bad, and the Gorn did come across as alien. But as this is concerning the Gorn in the Prime Universe... not exactly applicable here.
> The Gorn seen in Lower Decks are from a rather colorful rendition of events told by Rutherford under duress. So that is likely suspect in accuracy already.
>
This is exactly what I mean about Lower Decks causing continuity crises. If we accept Lower Decks as cannonical Trek in the same way previous serious series are, you will constantly butt into problems that require rationalization to explain. Was Rutherford gnawed on as a Gorn wedding guest? Is that how Gorn actually celebrate their weddings? It was a one-off joke that was not intended to hold up to any level of scrutiny, but because it is Trek—we will scrutinize it anyway.
Lower Decks must logically be some lower-order canon, because as soon there are contradictions, the serious Trek will likely take precedent. Because Strange New Worlds is at least theoretically written with continuity and accuracy in mind.
That being said, plenty of non-mammalian species lay eggs. In cases like Sea Horses males give birth to the young. So there is actually no contradiction between having a female gender and chest-bursting. But then again the Gorn youth seemed to have reproduced asexually when he infected Hemmer. Unless the youth was a female and like a Tribble was born pregnant…
No, you’re right, it makes no sense…
As for reconciling canon issues with the Gorn... WHAT CANON ISSUES?! Before LD and SNW the Gorn had only been seen in ONE SINGLE EPISODE that really didn't establish much in the way of culture and identity! Just one individual that was a "monster of the week" for Kirk to fight, then show compassion to. They were expanded upon in beta canon, but that went in like 50 different directions, one of which I mentioned with the three races of Gorn. In alpha canon we know next to nothing of the Gorn other than they're a technologically advanced, reptilian race, and Kirk fought a Captain with a bamboo cannon.
Aside From TOS both ENT and TAS also had Gorn, SNW is like their 5th appearance.
We had a single Gorn in Ent. TAS was back and forth canon and non canon so no idea where that stands.
As far as I know of it is still where it settled out sometime in the late '90s or early aughts, considered to be canon except where it is directly contradicted by live action.
The art director for TAS was colorblind, so color is a bit iffy, but the balloon thing was a different matter. The computer had it made especially for the prank by the automated fabricators and probably was not very thick, so it is not unreasonable for it to have been rolled or folded up and sent to the shuttlebay via the turbolift tubes.
The Germans actually made decoys to fool arial reconnaissance and whatnot in WWII, though unlike the balloon in TAS they were not very practical and were rather heavy rubber and other materials and had to be towed behind the subs they were masquerading as. That is probably where the writer got the idea for the TAS one.
True, though they were in the vicinity of a very active nebula at the time, and the inflatable decoy could easily have had ECM generators to help fool the sensors which could have made a difference. Also, it only had to work for a few seconds to serve its purpose, and even if it didn't fool them at all, the whimsical nonsense was likely to baffle the relatively humor-deficient Klingons and get them to hesitate for the critical second or two while they tried to make sense of what they were seeing (and of course such a trick would only work once).
Also, during TOS and TAS it was assumed that the Klingon sensors were not as good as Federation sensors, an allegory to the slight but sometimes significant tech differences on either side of the Iron Curtain in the real world such as US radar being somewhat better than the Soviet equivalent in the '60s and whatnot that went with the whole coldwar analogy the show had for the Fed/Klingon situation.
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It would have been a holographic decoy back then too if they wanted it to be something serious instead of a practical joke, TAS made use of holographics several times (including an alien ship with a holographic disguise). The point was that the balloon was (mildly) funny and so off the wall that it never occurred to the Klingons that anyone would do it.
As for the Klingon tech thing, that was behind the scenes and I wasn't trying to say it was canon then and forever, just that it was how it was discussed at the time in memos and whatnot in the TOS era which gives some insight (and therefore context) to their thinking and actions at the time. I admit, I probably should have made that clearer, I have a bad habit of not taking into account that most people are not old-school Trekkies when dashing down quick comments like that.
Anyway, you can actually see some the "soviet allegory" thinking as late as TMP in the closeups of the K't'inga class with it having a kind of brutally pragmatic and slightly archaic "cold iron"/vacuum tube era art deco look to the details, a look similar in feel to most Soviet ships had at the time.
It was all part of the "Mongol Horde in space" motif the writers had for them in TOS, a kind of "travel light" and "whatever works" mentality, not so much that they lacked the technical sophistication of the Federation, just that they were focused on the mission/hunt and only bothered installing what they thought necessary for their mission profile instead of the eclectic kitchen-sink/all-the-cool-new-toys approach the Federation has.
So did the Allies - they set up an entire fake paratrooper and inflatable tank army at a coastal port close to an opposing port in Pas de Calais, France to disguise the real landing zone at Normandy they eventually ended up using.
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