Why I Don't Think the Gorn Were Honorable as a People, and Why Kirk Needed Them to Be

Watch the end of Arena, season 1 episode 18 of the original series, and you come away with a certain idea about the Gorn. Kirk spares one, decides it was probably just defending its territory, and for a lot of people the Gorn graduate from monster to misunderstood. Kirk would sign off on that reading. I don't think the rest of the record does.

Every time the Gorn act as a people, you get ambushes, infestations, and abductions. The way I read it, Kirk judged one captain, and the verdict stuck to the whole species.

Arena opens like a monster movie, and Cestus III was bait

Arena even opens like a monster movie, and for most of its runtime it follows the rules. The Enterprise arrives at Cestus III expecting a welcome and a warm meal. In a monster film, an invitation to a remote outpost is how the second act starts losing cast members. The landing party materializes in rubble, and the shelling starts almost immediately, before anyone understands what's going on. Whoever is out there is able to make Spock's tricorder explode, which Spock, being Spock, finds ingenious.

Then they find a survivor. That survivor says the attackers beamed down and started killing with weapons that outclassed anything the outpost had. The attack began with a ship approaching like a friendly vessel, which then destroyed the outpost's phaser batteries at close range. According to the same survivor, the colonists tried to surrender and told the attackers they had women and children, and the attackers didn't stop. The messages that brought the Enterprise to Cestus III were sent after everyone at the outpost was either dead or dying. The invitation was bait. A creature that doesn't negotiate is the first rule of the genre, and Arena honors it right up until the last act. This is how Kirk met the Gorn. Starfleet had met them before, and I'll come back to that.

Kirk swings between two extremes and skips the evidence

Arena wants to be a story about overcoming prejudice, and that's a worthwhile thing for a story to want. The moral is right. In my view, the application is where it comes apart, because to deliver that moral the episode moves Kirk between two extremes and skips the part where he weighs the evidence. After Cestus III, Kirk is certain. As far as he's concerned, whoever did this are butchers (that's my word, not his), and they need to be stopped before they do it again. Spock suggests there may be explanations they haven't considered. Kirk has the facts of Cestus III. What he doesn't have is anything about who did it or why, and on that question I'd argue Spock is the reasonable one in the room.

Then the Metrons drop Kirk and the Gorn captain onto a planet and tell them to settle it themselves. The Gorn is stronger, Kirk is more agile, and both are moving at the top speed of a 1967 rubber suit. The Gorn offers terms: if Kirk gives up, the Gorn promises to be merciful and quick. Kirk answers, like you were at Cestus III. Mercy from the Gorn means a faster death, and Kirk hears that clearly. Back on the bridge, McCoy asks whether that could be true, and Spock's ringing endorsement is that it may well be possible. As far as the episode shows, that's the entire evidentiary record for what comes next. Kirk gets the upper hand, throws the dagger aside, and says, "No, I won't kill him. Do you hear? You'll have to get your entertainment someplace else." He reasons that maybe the Gorn thought it was protecting itself.

A border grievance doesn't explain the massacre at Cestus III

At the start, as far as I can tell, Kirk thinks the Gorn are butchers, and the evidence backs him. By the end, he thinks they were defending their territory. By my count, he's about half right, and it's the less important half. The Gorn's claim deserves to be taken seriously. From their side of the border, a Federation outpost appeared where it had no business being. To me, wanting it gone is completely reasonable. A warning, an ultimatum, even a strike on the outpost's defenses would all fit that grievance.

The Gorn did hit the defenses, since the phaser batteries went first. Then they kept going. Nothing on screen shows a warning or a demand to leave. The outpost had real military targets: the batteries and the weapons Kirk later pulls from the outpost to fight back. The Gorn could have stopped at those. As I see it, a border grievance explains why you'd want an outpost gone. It doesn't explain the false approach, the lure, or the massacre.

Kirk walks into the arena with no empathy for the Gorn and walks out with nothing but empathy. The first position came from the ruins of Cestus III. The second didn't come from new evidence. It came from the word of the captain of the ship Kirk had chased away from that colony. Notice when the Gorn finally become understandable: it's one Gorn alone in a fight it didn't choose, talking to the man it's trying to kill. Read this way, Arena sets a pattern the rest of the Gorn record keeps following. They become sympathetic one at a time. Kirk didn't find that empathy on the planet. I'd argue he brought it with him, through the Federation's empathy doctrine.

Strange New Worlds made the Gorn a horror species in Memento Mori

When Strange New Worlds brought the Gorn back, it didn't soften them. In my view, it made them a horror species, even when the episode around them wasn't a horror episode. Showrunner Akiva Goldsman has said he wanted a monster that neither diplomacy nor military force could beat. The honorable Gorn was always a reading of Arena, and outside of one stranded Gorn in Terrarium, I don't think the record supports it.

To me, Memento Mori plays more like a war movie, a submarine chase with the Enterprise blind and hunted. But it opens on a horror image: a colony built for more than 100 people, left a ruin, with the people gone and blood trails dragged to a single point. That's horrifying, and I think important because it's part of a pattern. A lot of the time, the victims of a Gorn attack aren't simply killed, they're taken: the Puget Sound passengers to a breeding planet, the colonists in Memento Mori to one spot. The show never explains why. The pattern suggests a collection point where people are gathered to be processed, whether as food or as hosts. That's my reading. The episode does tell us the Gorn take colonists as food for their hatchlings, and that they hunt day and night.

Then the Enterprise is ambushed, and the whole situation turns out to be a Gorn trap. Pike's crew learns exactly what a Gorn ship looks like, yet a few years later Kirk's Enterprise can't match the same species' ship to any known configuration. The Gorn sacrifice one of their own ships just to locate the Enterprise, and when the Enterprise hides inside an anomaly, a Gorn ship follows and implodes. Pike's verdict is that the Gorn are relentless and won't stop, even if it kills them. Persistence is usually a virtue. The Gorn treat it as a cause of death.

La'an's memory exposes how the Gorn treat their own

The Gorn talk to each other with light, and that becomes the key to the episode. Security Chief La'an Noonien-Singh survived the Gorn as a child, but trauma has left gaps in her memory, and the attack visibly shakes her. Spock melds with her, and inside the memory she finds her brother handing her a guide to the Gorn light signals. La'an uses it to send a false message: Starfleet officers have boarded one of their ships and taken it over.

From the Gorn perspective, that ship has been compromised, but it isn't firing on anyone. It's just sitting there. As I see it, they could try to retake it or at least find out whether the message is true. They don't. They destroy their own ship, crew and all. La'an's explanation, paraphrased, is that the Gorn cull the weak to save the strong. As a personal policy, that's sufficient. As a code of honor, I'd struggle to see it.

All Those Who Wander makes Gorn biology the horror

All Those Who Wander is where, in my view, the show stops gesturing at horror and commits to it. Some of what makes the Gorn horrifying isn't a choice at all; it's biology. They reproduce by implanting eggs in other species with venom. The USS Peregrine rescues refugees from a breeding planet, and two of them are carrying Gorn eggs. The eggs and hatchlings hide from sensors. The hatchlings eat their way out of their host, then fight each other to the death until one remains, eating whatever is nearby. The survivors shelter in the coldest part of the ship, because the cold is the only thing that keeps them alive. Before you get a clear look at a hatchling, you often get shadows. The monster you don't see is the oldest trick in horror, and it works because the crew can't see it either. Then Hemmer, the ship's engineer, discovers he's been implanted, and he walks out into the cold to make sure the eggs die with him.

If this feels like a different franchise, it's meant to. Writer Davy Perez has said Alien inspired him many times, and this episode especially. I'd argue a species that feeds and breeds this way can't be honorable by human standards no matter what it chooses. The usual defense is that the hatchlings are feral and the adults are civilized. The hatchlings are certainly feral, but the adults ran the breeding planet, set the trap in Memento Mori, emptied that colony and massacred Cestus III. If the adults are the civilized ones, it's by the margin a sniper is more civilized than a bear.

La'an and at least six officers carry the same Gorn scar

Every monster movie needs a final girl, and Strange New Worlds starts La'an's story after she's already survived. As a child, she was aboard the SS Puget Sound when the Gorn captured it. Its passengers were left on a breeding planet, eaten or used as hosts. La'an watched her parents and her brother die. When she was the last one left, the Gorn put her on a life raft and sent her into space. I've never really understood why. It may have been a ritual, but whatever it was, a child surviving her whole family because the Gorn allowed it isn't something I'd call honor.

All Those Who Wander leaves four more officers marked by what happened on that ship. When Terrarium opens, helmsman Erica Ortegas is haunted by a past Gorn encounter badly enough that she's taken off duty or at least reprimanded. That's at least six Starfleet officers carrying the same scar. For every one of them, surviving the Gorn was the easy part.

Terrarium gives us the most sympathetic Gorn, and it still proves the rule

Terrarium is the closest Star Trek has come to remaking Arena, and in my view it does the job better. Ortegas is pulled through a sudden wormhole and stranded on a hostile planet with a Gorn. Neither can survive alone, so at the start they cooperate because the alternative is both of them dying. It's a buddy movie where one buddy has been studying the other for a war. The Gorn already speaks Ortegas's language because the Gorn study their enemy, arguably the same intelligence that rigged Spock's tricorder. That's a flattering trait in a pen pal and an alarming one in a neighbor. The episode later complicates its early reaching out: the Gorn was badly hurt and needed her.

What it doesn't complicate is what happens next. The Gorn saves Ortegas's life more than once. They work through the planet's trials, play games, and joke, and by the end they call each other friends, and the episode means it. Of every episode I've covered, this is the most sympathetic Gorn on screen, and to me it deserves full credit. Then the Gorn explains why it won't go home: it's been hurt, and its own people would see it as weak and kill it. The way I read it, two episodes show the same rule, which means the best Gorn on record is one its own society would execute. Ortegas offers to take it home to the Federation. We'll never know if that would have worked. When the Enterprise team arrives, she falls, the Gorn moves toward her, and La'an kills it on sight. La'an's history certainly loads the trigger; every Gorn she has ever met would have meant that as an attack. In my view, this time she's wrong.

A capacity is not a culture

To me, Terrarium proves a Gorn as an individual can be a real friend. What I don't think it proves is that the Gorn as a people practice honor. On one side are two Gorn, each alone and each cornered. On the other is almost everything the Gorn have done as a people: Cestus III, the Puget Sound, the breeding planets, the colony and trap in Memento Mori, and the Peregrine. The Gorn may be able to become what Kirk saw in that arena. Nothing on screen suggests they ever have, or that their own society would let them.

Go back to Arena with Terrarium in mind, and I'd argue the same logic applies to Kirk. He met one Gorn, alone and cornered, and on the strength of that meeting decided what the Gorn were. The ship that fired on Cestus III, the crew that killed people trying to surrender, and the species that sent them all got folded into his read of one captain. In my view, he never established that the one he met was honorable in the first place.

What Kirk actually knew in Arena was almost nothing

The Enterprise sensors pick up a life form they can't identify. The ship matches no known configuration. It's the Metrons who tell Kirk he's facing a Gorn, and the fleeing ship heads into a region Starfleet knows only from rumors. Yet by this point, Starfleet has met the Gorn repeatedly: Pike's Enterprise in Memento Mori, the Peregrine, the Puget Sound, and an unconfirmed first contact report in La'an's personal file. Maybe it was a new class of ship, or that space was never charted as Gorn. In my view this is a retcon, and that's fine; prequels make them. My argument doesn't depend on Strange New Worlds, since Arena alone shows the false approach, the ignored surrender, and the lure.

The gap cuts the same way however you read it. Either Kirk had no record of the Gorn and judged a species from one encounter, or the record existed and he set it aside. Either way, I don't think it's a great look. Davy Perez has said Arena leaves wiggle room on what Kirk knew, and that Kirk might even have doubted the stories. That's generous to me, but doubting the stories isn't the same as having evidence for the opposite. At the end of Terrarium, it's possible Ortegas's memory of the Metrons is removed while her memory of the Gorn stays, and it's even mentioned they may remove her memory later.

Gorn honor, if it exists, isn't human honor

This next part is my own theory, so treat it as such. A species that injects eggs into others, feeds its young on them, and produces hatchlings that fight to the death has probably never thought of any of this as wrong. If the Gorn have honor, it's Gorn honor, and it would look nothing like human or Vulcan honor. By their own standard, they may not be doing anything wrong at all. Honorable was always a human standard, and it fits the Gorn for exactly one episode because Kirk needed it to.

That brings me back to Cestus III, whose colonists are never answered for. The Gorn's position is that the outpost was in their territory. Fair enough, but even granting that, I don't think owning territory comes with the right to massacre everyone in it. To be fair to Kirk, the Metrons controlled the outcome. I'm not saying he should have killed the captain; in my view, the mercy was right. The problem is his verdict. He accepted self protection as the explanation for slaughtering people who surrendered, and the case was closed. No later original series episode returns to it. Davy Perez has said La'an's feelings about the Gorn were written with Kirk's choice in mind. One of them met one Gorn. The other met the rest of them.

Should Kirk's mercy in Arena shape how the Gorn are judged as a species?