1x18 Arena

5.0/10. “The Arena” has three things that almost always make for a less than great episode of Star Trek: plodding pacing, ample amounts of hand-to-hand combat, and William Shatner acting by himself. It’s one of only two episodes of Star Trek I’d seen before I started this little project, and in retrospect, I can understand why it made me leery to dive back in.

The pacing is a consistent problem with Star Trek, and it’s just something that I’m going to have to learn to live with. While some episodes manage to pack enough incident into 45 minutes to keep things humming, most of them so far have had a great deal of what feels like filler. Why we need Kirk and The Gorn stumbling around a desert doing nothing for what seems like hours is beyond me. Why we need to keep cutting back to the Enterprise to have the Metrons show the crew what’s happening to Kirk is confusing. And why we need to see every last detail of Kirk’s impromptu cannon building is mystifying. The premise is solid enough, but the script just doesn’t have enough material to make the full hour interesting.

It doesn’t help that the “action” in this one is outright and literally laughable. While the falling bombs on Cestus III are actually pretty cool in terms of effects, watching Kirk dive and roll absolutely had me chuckling. Spock fares a little bit better, but even he looks like a dork stumbling around out there.

And my god, the fights with the Gorn was some of the silliest stuff I’ve seen in a while. This is where my position as a modern day viewer fails me. I just cannot possibly look at a guy in a big rubber lizard suit, wearing a tunic that looks like it’s made from some curtains in a burlesque house, who growls and grrs the whole day through, and take it seriously. (As an aside, the way the remastered versions have him blink is creepy as hell. It’s already clearly a dude in a rubber suit; making it a blinking rubber suit is just unnerving.) I imagine this was perfectly acceptable alien work for the time, but it’s nigh-impossible not to laugh at Kirk fighting a creature who looks like a second-rate Power Rangers villain.

It doesn’t help that the “fighting” is cheesy as hell to boot. The initial slow motion encounter is some of the worst stage-fighting I’ve seen on the screen. I’m sure there were limitations with the Gorn costume, but Star Trek doesn’t work around them very well, resulting in a series of encounters that feel more like a pretend tussle at the county fair than a real match between a human and some six foot tall reptile. Nevermind the stolid convenience of things like Kirk rolling a giant boulder that just so happens to hit the Gorn squarely, or again, his interminable and overly-monologued projectile construction.

The one saving grace was the hint of the idea that despite the fact that the Gorn was fearsome looking, it was clever and the captain of a starship, and not just a brute like some of Star Trek’s other attackers. The fact that it set a trap for Kirk and offered him mercy were nice humanizing qualities, even if it was all belied by the aforementioned cornball snarling.

The episode also hits you over the head with the moral of the story. A number of episode of Star Trek have had a twist or something to make you look at the events of the past hour differently. The “twist” here is supposed to be that [spoiler]The Gorn believed the Federation outpost on Cestus III to be an incursion into their space, with Bones going so far as to say “then maybe we were in the wrong.” But the whole thing doesn’t work because even if that were true, slaughtering everyone at the colony on Cestus III without warning is not, in anyway, a reasonable act of defense or diplomacy. There’s supposed to be this big grand moment where Kirk realizes that violence and fighting isn’t the answer, but he’s not wrong to be after a ship that massacred his people without doing anything to try to warn them off or inform them that they were in the wrong place.

Kirk also seems like more of a war hawk than usual here, presumably to help make his change of heart at the end of the episode have more impact. Maybe you can chalk it up to him being steamed and upset after seeing what happened on Cestus III, and Spock’s reaction seems to indicate this isn’t business as usual, but it does seem out of character. And when that change of heart finally comes, the whole “you’ve shown mercy, maybe you’re not so bad after all” is the peak of the heavy-handed messaging that Trek parodies have made hay out of years.

It doesn’t help that much of the episode is spent with just William Shatner out there on his own. His overdramatic style is shaky in the best of times, but he’s at his strongest when he was someone to play off of, like Spock or Bones, who provides a more earthy contrast to his over the top demeanor. But just putting him on an island (so to speak) and having him talk to himself leads to unvarnished Shatner, which isn’t good for anything but chuckles and facepalms.

Again, the basic premise of “Arena” is perfectly good in an out there science fiction-y way. A superior species (how many of these does the Enterprise run into?) forcing two “lesser species” to settle their violent differences one-on-one is solid stuff. It just turns into a plodding, hammy, unconvincing mess as soon as Kirk is beamed down to the planet, replete with hokey fights, clunky monologues, and lots of stalling for time. Some of that has to be forgiven as a product of the time and the budget for a T.V. show in the 1960s, but it still doesn’t add up to a compelling episode in the here and now.

(As a personal aside, I remember watching this episode in my eighth grade science class, where we had to write down all the elements or compounds Kirk mentioned in the episode. Your education tax dollars at work!)