Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Reveals Grotesque New Details About The Gorn

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This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are mindful of "Star Trek" canon. They have to be, since this is a prequel series that must lead into "Star Trek: The Original Series." At the same time, Goldsman has admitted that "Strange New Worlds" sometimes looks at canon as more of a loose guideline. The writers aren't out to change too much, but "ultimately, story wins."

The loose canon is most apparent in how "Strange New Worlds" has been handling the aliens known as the Gorn. Introduced in classic "Star Trek" episode "Arena," the Gorn are an aggressive reptilian race that destroys a Federation outpost. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is forced into a one-on-one trial by combat with the Gorn ship's captain (Bill Blackburn & Bobby Clark, voice by Ted Cassidy).

In "Arena," the Enterprise crew were unfamiliar with the Gorn; the episode's events were inferred to be first contact. But "Strange New Worlds" retcons this. In this show, the Gorn are mostly isolationist but they are feared raiders, and Starfleet has sometimes run afoul of them. Admittedly, "Strange New Worlds" has been keeping actual contact between Starfleet and the Gorn to a minimum. In their first appearance this series, "Memento Mori," the Gorn themselves weren't seen, only their ships.

The Gorn are also reimagined as much more monstrous. They reproduce like Xenomorphs from "Alien," i.e. implanting larvae into living beings, which then erupt from and kill their live incubators from the inside out. This technically allows the arc of "Arena," in which Starfleet recognizes the Gorn as not monsters but another culture to understand, to still play out, but it is shaky.

The "Strange New Worlds" season 2 finale, "Hegemony," ended with several main characters — La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), Dr. Joseph M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), and Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte) — being abducted by the Gorn. The show may have been holding back on the Gorn so far, but the season 3 premiere, "Hegemony, Part II," was unavoidably going to have to show the inside of a Gorn ship ... and that look inside reveals something even more disgusting than reproduction by chestburster.

If you thought La'an and co. might be able to communicate with their Gorn captors and reach an understanding, think again. They're beamed directly into gelatinous pods and kept unconscious, though La'an (who was a Gorn captive as a child and lived to tell about it) manages to wake up and set the others free. Just in time, too, because these pods aren't mere holding cells.

It turns out that Gorn ships are partially organic. Beneath the misshapen but metallic exteriors, the inner walls are meaty, veiny, and slimy. The pods are the most horrifying and disgusting side of that; they exist to melt the bodies of the beings they hold down, and then feed the nutrients back into the ship to be "digested." The Gorn don't use deuterium to fuel their ships, but the bodies of their captives.

When La'an, M'Benga, Ortegas, and Kirk are freed, their armored uniforms all show signs of acidic decay and their skin is splotchy with burn marks. Ortegas has it the worst: Half of her right hand, including two fingers, has been completely dissolved. Fortunately, that's easily fixable with Starfleet's 23rd century medicine, but to get to that medicine, the crew is in for the fight of their lives. Most of the colonists from planet Parnassus Beta who the Gorn abducted last time are too far dissolved already, so the Enterprise crew has to leave them behind.

The organic technology and pods on the Gorn ship definitely evoke "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," but the first comparison that I made is to the alien Collectors in the "Mass Effect" space opera video game series. Without getting into spoilers for that series, the Collectors, like the Gorn, raid space colonies, take the natives captive, and stick them in pods to gruesomely melt their bodies down. "Mass Effect 2" shows the process in horrifying detail.

"Mass Effect" has been picked up for a TV series at Prime Video, so we'll see if that series can make the Collectors as gruesome as "Strange New Worlds" has made the Gorn.

The first two episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 3 are now streaming on Paramount+. The rest of the season will be rolled out weekly every Thursday.