Star Trek: Strange New Worlds showed the Gorn’s ships in “Memento Mori.”
Though the Gorn haven’t actually shown up on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds yet, we did see their ships as well as a glimpse of who they are in Lt. Noonien Singh’s flashbacks. Her memories alone created scarier creatures than anything we ever saw on Star Trek: The Original Series or Star Trek: Enterprise. And apparently, we haven’t seen the last of them, according to Alex Kurtzman.
Kurtzman, in a conversation with Wil Wheaton on The Ready Room [via Trekmovie], confirmed the Gorn would be returning this season. In fact, before the series even aired, there were big plans for the alien species. Series co-creator Akiva Goldsman said the Gorn had to be the key bad guy of the season. So, much like the Borg was for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, the Gorn will be their biggest threat.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds won’t use only CGI for the Gorn.
Kurzman made it very clear that CG alone was prohibitively expensive, but “in the age of Game of Thrones post-Jurassic Park, the technology is there now to make the Gorn really vivid and scary.” So the question was: how do they create these creatures without breaking the bank?
He refers to Jaws and Aliens and how puppetry was used to ignite the imagination of the audience.
"“Like I just watched Aliens again recently and it’s still pretty flawless. But part of why–and [James] Cameron understands this, and [Steven] Spielberg understands this – is that the way you light those things is everything. And the duration of those shots is everything. If you over-light and stick your eye… you have to tease and you have to build it. And obviously, that precedent was set in some ways by [Alfred] Hitchcock, but then Jaws took it to a whole other level. Just seeing this rubber fin in the water, but your brain is inventing what’s underneath the surface so when you see the shark, even though you might go, “Well, that doesn’t exactly look like a real shark,” you’ve utterly accepted it at that point.”"
So with a mix of CG and puppetry, the Gorn will return, and there’s little doubt these villains will be scary. Star Trek: Voyager did a great job at creating some of the scariest villians, including Species 4872, the Hirogen, and the Vidiians, and that was over twenty-one years ago. Even without a big CGI budget, if Strange New Worlds takes the same route as Jurassic Park, scary is a mild term to use to describe the Gorn.