So for us TOS fans concerned with Gorn violations of canon, brace yourselves:
https://trekmovie.com/2023/06/18/in...pocks-arc-klingon-design-gorn-canon-season-3/
This episode establishes the Gorn as a continuing big bad for the season, or maybe the series. So the question is: why the Gorn who have some tricky canon issues instead of using the opportunity to create your own whole new villain species?
Akiva Goldsman: Because for me, storytelling beats canon. And that may not be popular, but it’s the truth. So when they can go hand-in-hand, great. But when I was writing the pilot, I was looking for something that was just monstrous, that was Cthulhu-like. Something that was unthinking. Our shows are empathy generators and I wanted to have an element which was in relief of that. I wanted something that you couldn’t identify with, something that was utterly alien, something that was all appetite and instinct in ways that we couldn’t quite understand. And I also wanted to signal place and time in a way that personally I found interesting. So you should definitely blame me for this one.
Here's my own answer to that. Last I checked, nothing, and certainly not TOS fans, were preventing SNW showrunners from creating a *new* species that can be "monstrous... Cthulhu-like". Doing that might even be a hit with the fans. There's absolutely nothing about SNW's Gorn that requires them to be TOS Gorn last I checked. Nothing. They could have colored them orange, called them the cobrasaurs or whatever, and literally nothing would be different.