The Gorn. Since debuting in the 1967 Star Trek episode “The Arena,” they’ve been called a lot of things. “Weird.” “Iconic.” “Weirdly iconic.” Thanks to their striking combination of Ferrigno-green slabs of thigh beef and Spirit Halloween-level facial features, the Gorn have taken up a special place in the hearts of Trekkies, representing a threat whose level of seriousness lay somewhere between tribbles and that Riker clone who disguised himself by wearing fake sideburns.
Like Daleks, Cruella De Vil, or any fictional monster with the staying power to stick around for six decades, the Gorn have gone through a fair few reimaginings. Here’s a quick rundown of every take on the Trek villains.
Part One: The Gorn Identity
Star Trek had only been a thing for four months when the Gorn made their first appearance. Episode 19 of the original series aired in January of 1967, spinning a yarn about a Federation outpost on an exotic world getting pretty well smooshed.
The smooshers, who follow up their smooshing by luring Kirk and company into a smoosh trap, are an unknown alien species — cold-blooded reptilians, according to sensor readings, but difficult to get a bead on. After a quick exchange of explosives, the aggressors and the Starfleet personnel make their way back to their respective ships, and a high-warp chase ensues.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Enterprise and the alien ship wind up driving through sort of a galactic speed trap. They’re forcibly pulled over by powerful space narcs called Metrons, who don’t cotton to gunplay and irresponsible starship maneuvers in their neck of the woods. The Metrons’ dim view of violence leads them to decide that Kirk and the captain of the alien vessel should get transported to a quiet spot where they can kill each other with primitive weapons. It’s kind of like when you were a kid and you’d fight with your brother, so your parents would give you both all of the ingredients to make gunpowder and then watch you shoot each other with cannons.
Materializing on the planet, Kirk and the audience get their first look at the Gorn. The tricorder readings from earlier got a few things right: The creature in front of Kirk is definitely reptilian. What they couldn’t have predicted, though, was just how much the alien captain would look like what would happen if Vince McMahon encouraged a Sleestak to start taking some injections to further his career.
The fight is one for the ages. The music is classic. The rocks are uncharacteristically bouncy. Kirk is faster than his sluggish opponent, but the Gorn captain is incredibly strong — not as strong as Khan from the second movie about Khan, but at least as strong as Khan from the first movie about Khan. On a related note, Star Trek is kind of a mess. That’ll be relevant in a minute.
When the Gorn captain finally communicates with Kirk, he’s high-octane arch. He offers to kill Kirk quickly if he stops moving around so much, then lets him know that the outpost he and his crew smooshed earlier was on a planet that the Gorn had called dibs on. This leads to Federation officers, perhaps for the first time, considering that maybe they can’t just park their stuff in people’s yards without asking.
Kirk wins the fight, pulls a classic hero move, and announces that he won’t kill a helpless super-strong lizard man with a taste for annihilation. Everyone goes their separate ways. Spock and Uhura don’t mention anything about having hung out around Gorn before, inadvertently dropping nerds in the future into a never-ending echo chamber filled with continuity errors, but again, we’ll get to that in a minute.
Part Two: Here today, Gorn tomorrow
It’s uncharacteristic for a species with such an iconic debut to go missing for long stretches of time, but the Gorn didn’t show up again through the rest of the original series. Aside from a cameo in Star Trek: The Animated Series and a deleted scene from Nemesis, the species fully ducks out of the franchise for just shy of 40 years.
The next time we see the Gorn is a full four series later in a 2005 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. “In a Mirror, Darkly, Pt II” introduces a fresh take on the Gorn — an ambitious new look, fueled by optimism and creativity and maybe a little bit too much faith in how far CGI could get you on a television budget the same year that Sharkboy and Lava Girl hit theaters.
This go-round, the evil counterpart to Captain Archer faces off against a Gorn in the Mirror Universe. This isn’t the sort of Gorn you remember. This guy is slinky and ceiling-crawly. The compound eyes of the creature seen in the original series are replaced by reptilian lizard peepers. This reimagining of the Gorn would look right at home in a video game cutscene made by a studio that’s been struggling for a while. Brought low by a targeted gravity beam, the defenseless lizardman gets a close look at how dark and gritty this timeline is when Archer pew-pews him full of special effects blasts. The only thing strong enough to kill CGI is CGI.
In point of fact, OG Gorn in their rubbery glory would only make one more appearance on screen, during an ad for 2013’s Star Trek: The Video Game. The commercial sees William Shatner and the Gorn he fought back in ‘67 arguing over their couch co-op sesh. 10 years later, it remains the only fondly remembered aspect of a game that made a whole generation ask, ”How big is anything supposed to be?”
Part Three: I Know Gorn When I See It
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a peculiar thing. While it mostly veers toward humanistic optimism about bright-eyed, hard-working explorers, it can’t always escape the black hole of dourness left by its Discovery parentage.
(As a quick, related side note: Captain Lorca had what sure looked like a Gorn skeleton in his office on Discovery. The producers said it was a Gorn, then realized that the Federation hadn’t made contact with the Gorn by that point in history, then walked it back and claimed that it wasn’t a Gorn at all. Discovery was a real mixed bag.)
Case in point: The even newer, even darker, even CGI-ier Gorn, alluded to and kept just offscreen for most of the first season before making their wet first appearance in the episode “All Those Who Wander.”
The new Gorn would have been unrecognizable to a Star Trek fan in the ‘60s, and suspiciously recognizable to anyone working on the movie Alien in the ‘70s. The days of lumbering were over. The bug eyes were kaput. Now, Gorn — albeit very young ones — looked like a cross between Gremlins and those guys from Dead Like Me that stuck people’s heads in revolving doors. Folks who’d encountered them were petrified of a second run-in, a detail that’s made up about a third of La’an’s dialogue throughout the series, and with good reason. The new Gorn had a habit of sneezing acidic propagation snot on their victims, impregnating their exposed skin with exploding sacks of smaller Gorn. Gorn gestation wound up being what took out fan-favorite Chief Engineer Hemmer, who sacrificed himself to stop the bloodthirsty buns in his oven from cooking. It was a tough pill to swallow, but it went down a little easier thanks to the fact that it gave Carol Kane’s Pelia a chance to join the crew.
The Gorn made one more appearance on SNW as the antagonists in the season two finale, “Hegemony.” Fully realized, fully terrifying, and for the first time since the series premiered, seemingly capable of escaping the trap of being to Strange New Worlds what the Ferengi were to the first year or two of Next Generation, the Gorn are finally primed to take their place as a Star Trek villain worth not laughing at hysterically.
Oh, shoot, speaking of which.
Part Four: Never Gorn-a Give You Up
Star Trek: Lower Decks is silly. It’s some of the best Star Trek in recent memory for fans of the old days who don’t mind treating a show about spaceships less than reverently, but also just hyper goofy. It’s Rick & Morty if Rick & Morty had been licensed by Paramount and the Roddenberry estate. It’s what everyone expected The Orville to be, but funnier.
So it can be easy to forget that it’s also canon. More than a wacky side project for Trek nerds, it’s a series of stories that take place in the wider Star Trek universe, the same way-too-serious place where those guys from Picard treated Borg victims like they were in a Hostel sequel, and where that lady from TNG died from melting into the floor. All of those stories are just as valid to Trek continuity as the time when the crew of the USS Cerritos was hunted by an anthropomorphic Starfleet insignia named Badgey. Either it all counts, or none of it does.
And so, there’s one last detail about the Gorn that we can pull from Star Trek lore. According to the Lower Decks episode “Veritas,” the Gorn have extravagant weddings. The brides wear white dresses, and the guests sit in uncomfortable-looking folding chairs, and the whole thing is eerily similar to the ceremony for your partner’s hayseed cousin that you got stuck at last summer, only with a flaming mouth-shaped cave instead of a bespoke apple orchard as a backdrop.
This franchise really went off the rails.