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4thofelevenIn which here there be monsters.
One of my favourite episodes of the original series is “Arena”. And a big part of what I like about it is related to its history. The basic plot – Kirk and an alien warrior are forced into a battle to the death by a third party – is a pretty basic science fiction plot; there's an Outer Limits episode with a very similar story, and I'm sure there's other examples. In fact, the story is so common that after the script had been completed, it was realised that it could be seen as plagiarising Fredric Brown's 1944 short story “The Arena”. To avoid a potential lawsuit, Brown was contacted and given a 'story' credit on the final episode.
What's interesting, though, is that the episode isn't a straight adaptation or copy of the Brown short story. It diverges significantly in its ending. In the Brown short story, the human combatant tries to communicate with his alien opponent, but his enemy seems only able to respond with blind hatred. In the end, through his cunning, the human is victorious, and the 'Entity' who arranged this scenario annihilates the loser's ships.
In the Star Trek episode, however, the Gorn and Kirk are able to communicate. The Gorn argues that humans were intruding into Gorn space, that the attack on the outpost was a response to that provocation. It's not just an alien monster driven by hate, but one with its own point of view. And, when the fight reaches its inevitable climax, Kirk acknowledges that and refuses to kill his helpless opponent, telling the 'Metron' that fight is over. When the Metron appears, it is surprised but gratified to see Kirk showing mercy to his opponent, and Kirk says they will try and reach an agreement with the Gorn.
In other words, the episode isn't a straight adaptation to the short story but a response to it, a reaction to its story of an alien and a human trapped in a kill-or-be-killed scenario. It questions the assumption behind Brown's story and concludes that war or conflict cannot be scaled down to just two combatants in a fight to the death – that the enemy has its own goals, its own perspective, and that its wrong to view them simply as a monster to be eliminated. It questions the morality of an 'advanced' culture that would create such a scenario, with Kirk defying them and telling them “You'll have to get your entertainment somewhere else!”
(I do wish they'd kept the line from the original script, where the Metron admits at the end that they intended to destroy the victor of the fight, since they would have proven themselves the greater threat.)
In short, it takes a classic story and puts a Star Trek spin on it, one where understanding and compassion play as much of a role as cunning and intelligence, and where it's consistently wrong to identify any being as a 'monster' to be eliminated. The Gorn, sadly, never appeared again, outside of a few cameos in the animated series and a pretty ugly CGI version in Enterprise – but DS9 mentioned a colony on Cestus III, implying that the Gorn and Federation worked out their differences, and I like to imagine it's a joint venture... and that the baseball team there that Cassidy Yates mentions has Gorn players on its roster.
Anyway, what's that got to do with this week's Strange New Worlds?
Well, while we get the return of the Gorn, it's not a story like Arena. It owes far more to “Balance of Terror” or “Wrath of Khan”; a submarine movie in space, with each side carefully manoeuvring to lure the other into a trap. And it's a good episode; it's tense, it's engaging, there's a real sense of constant menace from the Gorn ships. It feels exhausting, and there's a real sense of relief when the Enterprise can finally warp to safety.
And yet.
We don't ever see the Gorn in the flesh. We don't ever get anything from their point of view. They're purely monsters in the darkness, preying on innocent colonists, leaving only death in their wake. They're terrifying – and completely inhuman. Rather than making any effort to communicate, we get a speech from La'an about them that feels more like Quint's speech about sharks from “Jaws” - telling us that they're monsters, pure evil, and that any attempt to empathise with them is a mistake. And this is understandable, given La'an's background – but it's noticeable that not once within the episode is this assessment ever contradicted. Indeed, the episode supports it; the Gorn are shown as utterly ruthless, sacrificing one of their own ships to lure out the Enterprise, destroying another when they're tricked into believing it's been captured. Their only goal, it seems, is to kill humans or to capture them for further torture. Like the alien from Brown's short story, they seem driven purely by hate. Strange New Worlds has produced a story about alien monsters that would be far more at home in a 1940s pulp magazine than it would have been in the original series.
And, sure, maybe this is to set up a longer story arc, that we're eventually going to meet the Gorn and La'an's prejudice will be shown to be in error. But that doesn't change that, on its own, this episode is a monster story, one where our brave frontier heroes are menaced by 'savages' from beyond the frontier, where there is no possibility of accommodation or peace. In writing a 'retro' themed show, it seems that Strange New Worlds has fallen back into a retro style of storytelling, where the colonial assumptions behind ideas like 'the final frontier' are expressed unironically rather than being challenged or discussed.
I can't help but feel that the problem is the desire to be consistent with canon and the challenges of a prequel – La'an and Pike can't recognise the Gorn as people because Kirk has to still initially see them as monsters eight years from now according to a story from fifty-five years ago. The story can't resolve in its own series because its conclusion has already been written, and so we're left with this – a story that feels regressive today out of a misguided belief that the characters can't be as empathetic as characters from half a century ago lest it violate 'canon'.
One of my favourite episodes of the original series is “Arena”. And a big part of what I like about it is related to its history. The basic plot – Kirk and an alien warrior are forced into a battle to the death by a third party – is a pretty basic science fiction plot; there's an Outer Limits episode with a very similar story, and I'm sure there's other examples. In fact, the story is so common that after the script had been completed, it was realised that it could be seen as plagiarising Fredric Brown's 1944 short story “The Arena”. To avoid a potential lawsuit, Brown was contacted and given a 'story' credit on the final episode.
What's interesting, though, is that the episode isn't a straight adaptation or copy of the Brown short story. It diverges significantly in its ending. In the Brown short story, the human combatant tries to communicate with his alien opponent, but his enemy seems only able to respond with blind hatred. In the end, through his cunning, the human is victorious, and the 'Entity' who arranged this scenario annihilates the loser's ships.
In the Star Trek episode, however, the Gorn and Kirk are able to communicate. The Gorn argues that humans were intruding into Gorn space, that the attack on the outpost was a response to that provocation. It's not just an alien monster driven by hate, but one with its own point of view. And, when the fight reaches its inevitable climax, Kirk acknowledges that and refuses to kill his helpless opponent, telling the 'Metron' that fight is over. When the Metron appears, it is surprised but gratified to see Kirk showing mercy to his opponent, and Kirk says they will try and reach an agreement with the Gorn.
In other words, the episode isn't a straight adaptation to the short story but a response to it, a reaction to its story of an alien and a human trapped in a kill-or-be-killed scenario. It questions the assumption behind Brown's story and concludes that war or conflict cannot be scaled down to just two combatants in a fight to the death – that the enemy has its own goals, its own perspective, and that its wrong to view them simply as a monster to be eliminated. It questions the morality of an 'advanced' culture that would create such a scenario, with Kirk defying them and telling them “You'll have to get your entertainment somewhere else!”
(I do wish they'd kept the line from the original script, where the Metron admits at the end that they intended to destroy the victor of the fight, since they would have proven themselves the greater threat.)
In short, it takes a classic story and puts a Star Trek spin on it, one where understanding and compassion play as much of a role as cunning and intelligence, and where it's consistently wrong to identify any being as a 'monster' to be eliminated. The Gorn, sadly, never appeared again, outside of a few cameos in the animated series and a pretty ugly CGI version in Enterprise – but DS9 mentioned a colony on Cestus III, implying that the Gorn and Federation worked out their differences, and I like to imagine it's a joint venture... and that the baseball team there that Cassidy Yates mentions has Gorn players on its roster.
Anyway, what's that got to do with this week's Strange New Worlds?
Well, while we get the return of the Gorn, it's not a story like Arena. It owes far more to “Balance of Terror” or “Wrath of Khan”; a submarine movie in space, with each side carefully manoeuvring to lure the other into a trap. And it's a good episode; it's tense, it's engaging, there's a real sense of constant menace from the Gorn ships. It feels exhausting, and there's a real sense of relief when the Enterprise can finally warp to safety.
And yet.
We don't ever see the Gorn in the flesh. We don't ever get anything from their point of view. They're purely monsters in the darkness, preying on innocent colonists, leaving only death in their wake. They're terrifying – and completely inhuman. Rather than making any effort to communicate, we get a speech from La'an about them that feels more like Quint's speech about sharks from “Jaws” - telling us that they're monsters, pure evil, and that any attempt to empathise with them is a mistake. And this is understandable, given La'an's background – but it's noticeable that not once within the episode is this assessment ever contradicted. Indeed, the episode supports it; the Gorn are shown as utterly ruthless, sacrificing one of their own ships to lure out the Enterprise, destroying another when they're tricked into believing it's been captured. Their only goal, it seems, is to kill humans or to capture them for further torture. Like the alien from Brown's short story, they seem driven purely by hate. Strange New Worlds has produced a story about alien monsters that would be far more at home in a 1940s pulp magazine than it would have been in the original series.
And, sure, maybe this is to set up a longer story arc, that we're eventually going to meet the Gorn and La'an's prejudice will be shown to be in error. But that doesn't change that, on its own, this episode is a monster story, one where our brave frontier heroes are menaced by 'savages' from beyond the frontier, where there is no possibility of accommodation or peace. In writing a 'retro' themed show, it seems that Strange New Worlds has fallen back into a retro style of storytelling, where the colonial assumptions behind ideas like 'the final frontier' are expressed unironically rather than being challenged or discussed.
I can't help but feel that the problem is the desire to be consistent with canon and the challenges of a prequel – La'an and Pike can't recognise the Gorn as people because Kirk has to still initially see them as monsters eight years from now according to a story from fifty-five years ago. The story can't resolve in its own series because its conclusion has already been written, and so we're left with this – a story that feels regressive today out of a misguided belief that the characters can't be as empathetic as characters from half a century ago lest it violate 'canon'.
no subject
on 2022-06-05 06:45 pm (UTC)I also thought one of the best parts of "Arena" was the bridge crew watching the whole thing on the viewscreen with Spock providing audience stand-in commentary. ("Ooh! Jim, you can mix those to make black powder! Come on, Jim!") It always made me imagine he did the same at their equivalent of movie night on the Enterprise.
"It is illogical for the party to split up in an unknown location with non-functional lights and no means of communication."
"That's how horror movies work, Spock."
"But why do they not simply--"
"Shhh!"