The Gorn are a challenge for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to create

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds really found it hard to make the Gorn for the show.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has done a great job bringing back concepts and characters that were created 60 years ago in a new and sometimes unique light. None of the characters and creatures that have been brought back to the franchise were done as well as The Gorn, however.

They were a bit-part alien, more remembered as a joke for the sad and pitiful suit that represented the species than it was for anything else. Yet, with the rise of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the Gorn got a re-design more fitting for them and in doing so gave the series a brand new villain with very familiar tones.

Yet, creating the new-look Gorn was not easy. Legacy Effects are the crew behind the alien’s re-design and arrival on the series and co-founder J. Alan Scott spoke with TrekMovie.com and revealed that not only was bringing the alien to life a challenge but so was the design, citing the fandom’s “fanatical” love of the franchise.

It’s one of the reasons Scott told TrekMovie.com that re-designing the Gorn was among the most challenging of his career, saying;

"It’s one of many, one of the biggest ones. …there’s something very satisfying about the subtlety of redoing Spock or redoing the Klingons. They all have their own challenges and responsibilities, but the Gorn is definitely one of the biggest ones, because it’s got such a pedigree and such a history, because that was the big monster in The Original Series. And to bring it into a horror, really terrifying arena was really exciting. But as I often say, when you have to do something like that, that is so loved, you really can only screw it up. The fan base is so fanatical that you have to be really in tune with trying to get it so that it’s an upgrade without diminishing anything, and that it fits in the franchise."

Scott would later be asked about if the Gorn has other design variants, namely an adult version with no spacesuit, a look we’ve not seen as Strange New Worlds continues to air. Scott did assure TrekMovie.com by saying that the adult Gorn design, sans spacesuit, has been created already, saying;

"Yeah, we had to. That was a big push from us. How can we design the hatchling and the youngling without knowing where it was going to go? We wanted this life cycle to make sense. You have to have some things that tie it together so the audience realizes, “Oh that became that, and that became that” And it doesn’t just have to be dialogue, there needs to be visual cues. It’s like evolution, it works like change from one thing to another. It starts as a pure animal, a pure feeding machine, and eventually becomes something that’s more intelligent. So that has to make sense in the life cycle. It can’t just suddenly be standing there and talking and operating a spaceship. How can it be that it was just nothing but a bloodthirsty creature? So they’ve actually designed whole life cycles for their society as well. And then that informs our creature design."

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will more than likely show off more Gorn in season three

While we’re being bold in assuming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will see a season three, after all, Paramount has proven they’ll cancel a show even after they approved another season, but let’s assume that a season three does happen. Another bold assumption to go with the prior one is that we’ll end up seeing more of the Gorn.

Probably we’ll see a Gorn that more closely resembles the one from the show and if we do, then great. The Gorn are so much more complex than they were in the original show, and seeing more of them is not a bad thing at all.