19. ArenaWHY WE LIKE IT: The Gorn! An ingenious solution! Great location shooting!
WHY WE DON'T: Another godlike being so soon?
REVIEW: Ok, maybe I'm a Godzilla fan, but I can't help but like Arena. The Gorn may be a guy in a rubber suit, with a very limited expression, but he works for me, and it's really a shame that we never saw much of the species again using later technology.
It helps that we don't see a Gorn until late in the episode, starting this out as a mystery and a suspensful battle where you can't see the silver of your enemy's eyes. If your alien can't be too realistic, at least go for realism elsewhere, and they do that here, with an impressive, huge outdoor set for Cestus III and the always cool Vasquez Rocks for the Metron battleground. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy also appear to do their own stunts in the explosive barrage scene!
Even the styrofoam rocks are looking appropriately heavy (for the most part). The fight itself has its ups and downs, with some dreadfully slow blows from the Gorn, for example. But he is redeemed by his sheer toughness. Had I been Kirk, I would have run for days and days after that first exchange of rocks. Nice solution at the end, and I mean both the gunpowder weapon and Kirk sparing the Gorn's life. The revelation that we were in the wrong to start with was nice too.
My only real worry about this episode is that we just saw a godlike being in the previous episode (Trelane). How many of these things are there? (Turns out, there are lots.) Good thing they played the Metrons totally differently.
LESSON: How to make explosive gunpowder! Who said television couldn't be educational. All right kids, let's go blow up stuff!
REWATCHABILITY - High: Lots of money on the screen, the future of siege warfare, a neat alien, and a humanistic resolution (there's the core of Star Trek, right there). One of the most memorable of the series.
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