Reimagined Gorn

[HOoftheKinshaya]

Do you like them?

I wasn't very impressed. The Gorn Champion was the only part that felt right. For that point it felt like Kirk fighting the Gorn Captain on TOS.

The part that irked me the most was that they were an galaxy dominating species without any other motive. The JJ Abramverse worked fine in the movie because it uses a time paradox device but essentially remains canonical. The Gorn being from another Galaxy and conquerors vs being from our own and territorial xenophobes is a radical departure from established canon.

Somehow Nero coming to the past shunted an entire species off to another galaxy with a completely new history? Come on. Canon? Really?

Granted the lone appearances in TOS and Enterprise are not much to go on but we do know their motivation at Cestus III and we know that they considered part of their territory.
We also know they are immensely strong, not very agile and extremely durable like shrugging a multi-ton boulder steaming down the hill into them as if it were a back yard football tackle but that is about all.

Their ships and tech is much an open book and there was plenty of room to create there but in a lot of ways they made huge deviations and I don't see how they can claim the game is canon where the Gorn are concerned.

 

[publiusr]

I think the spacecraft the Gorn have been depicted as having in Comics, SFB, FASA, remastered, computer games are probably the most diverse of any group. No similar themes.

 

[BillJ]

Their ships and tech is much an open book and there was plenty of room to create there but in a lot of ways they made huge deviations and I don't see how they can claim the game is canon where the Gorn are concerned.

Much of the Gorn is an open book and I don't see anything that really conflicts with on-screen material so much that you can't work around it.

 

[-Brett-]

Tie in games and books have never been considered canon before. Don't see any reason to start now.

 

[HOoftheKinshaya]

Their ships and tech is much an open book and there was plenty of room to create there but in a lot of ways they made huge deviations and I don't see how they can claim the game is canon where the Gorn are concerned.

Much of the Gorn is an open book and I don't see anything that really conflicts with on-screen material so much that you can't work around it.

Where to start? For one they are an Alpha Quadrant power and considered Cestus III part of their territory, not from some far off Galaxy or even a far off quadrant like the Gamma quadrant only accessible through a worm hole/rift. Sorry they are the Dominion.

Their history is unknown but clearly in was in the Milky Way and Alpha Quadrant to boot so they weren't galaxy conquering expansionist as in all the history through Deep Space Nine and Voyager were they even mentioned, let alone engaged in some galactic war to control the Milky Way or even the Alpha quadrant. So all canonical history shows them to be what was portrayed in Arena as territorial xenophobes who simply attacked because they though their space was being invaded.

Of course physiologically their were wild deviations. The Gorn in Arena, or even the ENT epsiode, In A Mirror Darkly were not portrayed as quick or agile. The game got their immense strength and durability right but turned them into raptors instead of the stolid plodding creatures in the tv series. Only the Gorn Champion was an accurate representation.

They only areas were they could have taken huge license to change was the tech and ships as they have been unseen.

 

[BillJ]

Thousands of years ago, the Gorn could've suffered a cultural split much like the Vulcans/Romulans. One group set out to find a new home and ended up in our galaxy. Beginning anew.

And the Gorn velociraptor from Enterprise seemed much quicker than his TOS counterpart.

Easy as pie.

 

[General_Phoenix]

I was just glad they went with the Gorn as the villain instead of doing the safe thing and using Romulans or Klingons. I kinda agree with the radically changing the Gorn origins, but since this is the new timeline I am fine with it. Also, I am probably one of the few that feels this timeline has always been different, even as far back as the Kelvin.

 

[HOoftheKinshaya]

Thousands of years ago, the Gorn could've suffered a cultural split much like the Vulcans/Romulans. One group set out to find a new home and ended up in our galaxy. Beginning anew.

And the Gorn velociraptor from Enterprise seemed much quicker than his TOS counterpart.

Easy as pie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK7NZ9IDtTc


No not very quick as Archer was crawling away as fast he was approaching. Still slow and plodding and no tail. The biggest change via CGI was the eyes.

 

[HOoftheKinshaya]

I was just glad they went with the Gorn as the villain instead of doing the safe thing and using Romulans or Klingons. I kinda agree with the radically changing the Gorn origins, but since this is the new timeline I am fine with it. Also, I am probably one of the few that feels this timeline has always been different, even as far back as the Kelvin.

Even if you go far back as the Kelvin, it doesn't rewrite the entire cultural and evolutionary history of a space fareing species for thousands years, or the galaxy of their origin.

The Keilvin was only 20 some odd years before the events of the movie.

 

[BillJ]

Thousands of years ago, the Gorn could've suffered a cultural split much like the Vulcans/Romulans. One group set out to find a new home and ended up in our galaxy. Beginning anew.

And the Gorn velociraptor from Enterprise seemed much quicker than his TOS counterpart.

Easy as pie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK7NZ9IDtTc


No not very quick as Archer was crawling away as fast he was approaching. Still slow and plodding and no tail. The biggest change via CGI was the eyes.

He closed ground on the "red shirt" rather quickly in that clip.

 

[Obiwansolo18]

It seems that there shouldnt beany conflict in this "new" gorn vs the "old" gorn. There was probably they had most room to do something different. Why not allow them to be galaxy conquering race? I watched the episodes involving the gorn again before playing the game. It seems that they did a lot with them that made them a more convincing foe to the federation. Sometimes things with such little past needs some growth for future interest in using the idea (in this case species).

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think it's pretty clear that the makers of the game treated JJ Abrams' Star Trek as a full-on reboot, rather than the branching timeline that the movie writers have claimed in interviews.

That said, the radically different Gorn types don't bother me - different castes have been a staple of the novelverse for years now. The Gorn Champion is likely the game's visually upgraded version of the Bad Rubber Suit Gorn from "Arena" which in the novelverse is the Gorn Warrior caste.

The backstory is more difficult. I think it's a poor fit even for the very little we know of the Gorn in Trek canon. But the same could be (and was) said about the Klingons in The Motion Picture and beyond - they were completely changed simply because Gene Roddenberry wanted to.

And I like BillJ's idea of an Vulcan/Romulan-style ancient cultural schizm.

 

[ATimson]

And I like BillJ's idea of an Vulcan/Romulan-style ancient cultural schizm.

I like the idea too, but it's harder to rationalize the distances involved here!

 

[BillJ]

And I like BillJ's idea of an Vulcan/Romulan-style ancient cultural schizm.

I like the idea too, but it's harder to rationalize the distances involved here!

The Kelvans made it to the Milky Way.

 

[ATimson]

I like the idea too, but it's harder to rationalize the distances involved here!

The Kelvans made it to the Milky Way.

True. But if the Gorn had the tech, why didn't they show up before the Helios Device opened the Rip?

(Oh. Obvious answer: They didn't have the patience the Kelvans did. The peaceful schismatics who colonized our galaxy did.)

 

[HOoftheKinshaya]

I like the idea too, but it's harder to rationalize the distances involved here!

The Kelvans made it to the Milky Way.

True. But if the Gorn had the tech, why didn't they show up before the Helios Device opened the Rip?

(Oh. Obvious answer: They didn't have the patience the Kelvans did. The peaceful schismatics who colonized our galaxy did.)

They misplaced it. Oh yeah, another stretch.

 

[Freman]

Yeah, add me to the list that is wondering what they were smoking when coming up with the new Gorn. It is ridiculous to thing that Nero showing up would change an entire culture's history, look, etc etc. Very, very sloppy.

I'm just going to consider them the Gorn version of the Romulans. They split off from the Alpha Quadrant Gorn sometime in the past.

 

[Tribble puncher]

Also, I am probably one of the few that feels this timeline has always been different, even as far back as the Kelvin.

No, you're not actually. I always felt like the JJverse was never the "Prime" Universe. It was it's own Independent timeline, that had some common event's with the prime universe, but was still it's own separate universe, not born out of Nero and Spock "Prime" 's accidental incursion.

 

[HOoftheKinshaya]

Also, I am probably one of the few that feels this timeline has always been different, even as far back as the Kelvin.

No, you're not actually. I always felt like the JJverse was never the "Prime" Universe. It was it's own Independent timeline, that had some common event's with the prime universe, but was still it's own separate universe, not born out of Nero and Spock "Prime" 's accidental incursion.

That is clearly not was portrayed nor has been stated by JJ Abrams. The timeline was the prime timeline that branched off the day of Kirk's birth. In the novelization based of the official script, when Spock first encounters Scotty he comments that it is evidence the timeline is attempting to "correct" itself.


Abrams on the alternate time line:

ABRAMS: "Here’s the thing… I think the key to that was, first of all, it was one of those things that not everyone even cares about or understands the timeline of it all. The notion that when this one character, Nero, arrives in his ship, that basically the timeline is altered at that moment, so everything forward is essentially an alternative timeline. That is not to say that everything that happened in The Original Series doesn’t exist. I think, as a fan of movies and shows, if someone told me the beloved thing for me was gone, I would be upset. But we didn’t do that. We’re not saying that what happened in that original series wasn’t good, true, valid, righteous and real. Let people embrace that. We’re not rejecting that. That, to me, would have been the big mistake. We’re simply saying that, "At this moment, the very first scene in the first movie, everything that people knew of Star Trek splits off into now another timeline.

 

[I am not Spock]

I was just glad they went with the Gorn as the villain instead of doing the safe thing and using Romulans or Klingons. I kinda agree with the radically changing the Gorn origins, but since this is the new timeline I am fine with it. Also, I am probably one of the few that feels this timeline has always been different, even as far back as the Kelvin.

I also think this. I think it is a different universe, long before Nero and Spock showed up.