Star Trek: Strange new worlds

[Al-1701]

But, again it defeats the purpose of the Gorn. The whole point of Arena is the Gorn is as much a sapient being, loyal to his crew and his nation, as Kirk. It's harder to buy Kirk calling him an intelligent being knowing he was born because his mother hocked a loogie on something and then killed his siblings.

If you want your version of xenomorphs, make a new race. Don't take the race with a premise that is the antithesis of what you're doing.

[CharlesPhipps]

yeah.

It's clear they want to massively up the nastiness of the Gorn to use them as SNW's main enemy.

[Al-1701]

The Gorn are nasty enough, though. Superhuman strength and durability, cunning, and can be quite ruthless in their methods. They're also territorial and aggressive in their defense of what they see as their space. That's plenty threatening to a Federation that is in an era of exploration and expansion as well as in a state of cold war with the Klingons and Romulans.

The space horror elements just come off as trying too hard or a lack of faith in the threat they present.

[Frustration]

More accurately, treating the Gorn as monsters represents a rejection of everything Star Trek was intended to stand for.

[clearspira]

It's like what Chuck once said though: Trek has an unbeaten track record of taking their coolest villains and making them either lame as f-k or flanderizing them to the point of being caricatures.

Enterprise already removed the Gorn's brain and turned it into a velociraptor. Now Strange New Worlds has removed any of its sympathetic traits. They are now every bit the monster that Kirk assumed it was. The obvious racism aesop is now gone - please someone update TVTropes.

[CharlesPhipps]

More accurately, treating the Gorn as monsters represents a rejection of everything Star Trek was intended to stand for.

Star Trek CAN do this and did this with the Borg.

The same way Doctor Who has the same values as Star Trek but has the Daleks.

"What DO you do when you are a progressive, loving, and kind person faced with someone who is genuinely irredeemably evil and cannot be negotiated with?"

But applying it to the Gorn is ridiculous. It seems like they should have made it a new race.

Reminds me a bit of how the Xindi should have been the Romulans.

[Mabus]

Episode 9:
For the first 10 minutes I thought that maybe this episode might be OK, but then it pretty much turned into a high budget Asylum movie. For this episode, the writers/producers decided to not only rip off Alien, oh no, they decided to also rip off Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Isolation, and sprinkle a bit of Predator and Terminator 2. It's like they set up their own "Enterprise Bingo", where they compete how many rip offs from other works can they cram into one episode.

Now, there's nothing wrong with taking elements from other works and incorporating in your own story, when it comes to being ripped off, the Alien franchise is probably only second to Star Wars in this category. And Trek has taken a page from Giger in the past (see the OG Borg). But by God, do something new with it, don't just throw in elements from the respective films just because they're easily recognizable by anyone. Derelict ship on a barren foggy planet, Newt, backbursters in a sickbay, tiny agile killing aliens, murderous alien POV chasing you, the final infected character falling to their death, the frozen alien being shattered to death, all these elements are just there because someone in the writing room actually thinks that when people want to watch Star Trek, they actually want to watch Alien. You know, just like when you want to watch a cartoon about the Titanic, in reality what you really want to see is talking mice and a rapping dog.

Also, is it possible to have Spock do anything else than lose his shit? They did that in Star Trek 2009, then again in Into Darkness, then kind of in Discovery, again the SNW pilot, and they do it again here. I don't think Spock lost control of his emotions that many times in the entirety of TOS.

The episode doesn't deserve more than 3/10, to me the biggest sin is how they killed off the only character than had the potential to actually bring something new and unique to the franchise.

[Frustration]

The Borg were introduced as monsters, and as a critique of the darker aspects of the Federation. The Gorn were introduced specifically to critique the idea of a vicious monster alien. Now they've been turned into that cliche.

[Mabus]

A couple of additional observations:
-In Into Darkness, McCoy says that he once helped giving birth to some Gorn:

MCCOY: Sweetheart, I once performed an emergency C-section on a pregnant Gorn. Octuplets. And let me tell you, those little bastards bite.

Given how lethal one Gorn newborn was shown to be in this very episode, I highly doubt that McCoy would have lived to tell the story. Moreso, when he was dealing with 8 of them! And it was a Gorn that carried the pregnancy. I know McCoy is many things, but I don't recall him being pathological liar. And Into Darkness was written by Kurtzman who is also involved in SNW, so you'd think he might remember the only Gorn joke he ever wrote in a Trek film. Unless of course it was Orci who wrote that.

-Gorn newborns will eat each other until only one remains. There is a similar behavior in some Earth animals, namely some species of sharks, where the first hatchling will eat its siblings. End result is that the shark only gives birth to one offspring. Since such a practice has a tendency to decrease population growth, due to evolution many sharks have developed double uteri, so that it will always give birth to more than two offsprings. The problem with the Gorn here is that if so many "hosts" are killed by a few Gorn newborns, which eventually end up killing each other, then the Gorn population should have never increased! Their own home planet should have run out of hosts long before they managed to reach space. And speaking of reaching space, in any species that resorts to sibling infanticide, evolution will select only the individuals that are more aggressive and bloodthirsty, regardless how many wombs a species develops. Sharks might be smart animals, but they're no way near the intelligence of say, dolphins. You just can't build a civilization with anti-social individuals, since they will never get along. Even the Klingons aren't like that, a good portion of their aggressiveness is based on their culture. At least the Magog (which the nuGorn seem to be based on) from "Andromeda" were created by an evil God, who only cares about destroying everyone, so there was no evolution involved there.

-In the ENT mirror episode, the Defiant was able to detect the Gorn saboteur. You could make the argument that in the next 8 years the Federation manages to update their sensors to detect Gorn biology and somehow they upgrade their entire fleet. Mirror Archer initially had issues detecting Slar because most of the internal sensors weren't working and there were plenty of blindspots in the ship due to being scraped. But if the Gorn can breed this easy (they just spit their eggs on someone else), why didn't Slar try to infect someone else to make more Gorn? There weren't more than a dozen survivors from the ISS Enterprise, surely if he infected a few of them, he won't have to fight the Terrans in a 1-10 disadvantage. There are no indications that the Empire knew enough of the Gorn to know how they breed so they couldn't have had any antidote for Gorn eggs. And speaking of breeding...

-Was the Gorn captain that fought Kirk at menopause or something? Why didn't it try to infect Kirk with his eggs during the fight? Do Gorn even have male/female distinction or are they all parasitic?

-Why do Gorn newborns and "young adults" have tails? Gorn never had tails before. Why would they lose their tails as they grow up? Tails can be useful, no need to lose them.

Yeah, the writers should have just created a new species.

[TGLS]

Well, I suppose it's possible the end result of all this is to eventually end with "that's just a small group of Gorn, not all Gorn are like that", but I am not hopeful.