Title: Arena
Airdate: 01/19/1967
Plot Summary
Kirk and company beam down to a colony only to find it totally destroyed. They find themselves under attack and after a short, but intense, battle they get back to the Enterprise to chase down the attackers. However powerful aliens have other ideas and do not want this petty lower species making a mess in their star system.
So they have Kirk battle the captain of the other ship in hand-to-hand combat to the death, with the fate of the Enterprise hanging in the balance.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is pissed and makes assumptions but it’s totally understandable. He nearly blows up the ship pushing it beyond its limits. Even so, he makes sure a medical team is left on the planet to try to help anyone they can.
Then he makes the decision not to kill, showing what kind of man he really is. It’s possibly one of the top moments of establishing Kirk’s character and by proxy, the character of the Federation.
Logical
Spock is left to command the ship when Kirk is taken. He recognizes the components of gunpowder first. He also is at first suspicious of the communications from Cestus III.
Spock also is the voice of reason to Kirk, calling him Jim for the first time, at least the first time I’ve noticed. He points out that destroying the Gorn ship won’t bring back the colony.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy’s there to basically tell Spock to “Do Something” even though he can’t. And keep the lone survivor surviving.
Canon Maker
The ship’s phasers are finally fired as beams of energy. It’s also made clear that you can’t beam someone up through the shields, something that will be basic lore throughout Star Trek (and tossed aside when inconvenient.)
Photon torpedoes are named and shot and shown as they should be for the first time.
Cestus III will be the home of Cassidy Yates in Deep Space Nine. So I guess they kept the planet.
Canon Breaker
Apparently the Gorn can make a tricorder explode like a grenade. This is not something that will ever happen again.
I’m not sure this is a canon breaker but I’ve never seen a photon torpedo mortar before. I’m not sure that was really a thing.
Strange New Worlds would turn the Gorn into Alien and really ruin the whole thing.
Kirk mentions “a small fortune in stones” even though the Federation did away with money. He’ll even admit that himself in Star Trek IV.
Technobabble
We find out the Enterprise can do Warp 8 though it’s not a good idea. Seemed to hold up a lot better than when it tried to catch Mudd’s ship. (I’m never letting that go.)
The Metron transporter not only sends Kirk back to the bridge instantaneously but also takes the time to clean him up a bit, comb his hair, wash his face, etc. Convenient!
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Redshirt
O’Herlihy gets probably the most redshirt of redshirt deaths. One line: “Captain I see something!” and then vaporized. It’s pretty hilarious from that perspective.
I Know That Guy:
Vic Perrin plays the Metron voice. He’d be back as Nomad in The Changeling and actually have a full part in Mirror Mirror.
Ted Cassidy returns as the Gorn’s voice, though stuntmen played the Gorn in costume. Can’t say I blame him, it looks like it was hot as hell out there and that costume was probably not fun to wear. He was in What Are Little Girls Made Of? and the voice of the Balok puppet in The Corbomite Maneuver.
Sean Kenney plays DePaul, looking much better after playing Pike in his flashing wheelchair.
Carolyne Shelyne (Barry) plays the Metron at the end. She would come back in the first season of The Next Generation in Home Soil.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
When people think of the cheesiness of Star Trek, they think of Arena. Shatner fighting a guy in a lizard suit, tossing foam boulders at each other near Vazquez Rocks.
First of all, when Arena was aired, no one had a TV much bigger than 13 inches, and standard definition at that. If it was even a color TV. So cut the production values a break.
But really if that’s all you see, then you will NEVER get Star Trek. This is by far one of the best episodes in the original series.
Kirk finds a colony that is destroyed. He lets his emotions get the better of him. A more powerful race sets him against the Gorn in the most basic of fights to the death.
He shows how clever he is, and how smart and resourceful he is by finding the gunpowder components to shoot the Gorn. But most important of all, he shows the compassion he has every right to deny the Gorn.
The Gorn are clearly in the wrong. They may have had the right to the planet but how they went about it was nothing but evil. No communication to try to straighten things out. Wiping out innocent civilians. Using underhanded tricks to ambush the Enterprise. And no way would the Gorn captain have shown mercy to Kirk.
But with all that, with a stronger weapon, a justified reason, and for himself and his ship’s very survival (if nothing else), he still chooses NOT to kill. This is so amazing given the circumstances.
Look at how we are now. We are willing to hurt each other over TWEETS for chrissake. This is the world of the future that Roddenberry wanted, a humanity that had true humanity. It’s something that made the world rethink how to handle its problems. Even though there are people who are dead, Kirk understands that killing the Gorn will lead to more killing.
We have countries that can’t let go of past hate and past atrocities and therefore the killing, the animosity, the hate just continues for generations. We cannot progress as a species if we cannot learn to let go and take a different path.
This showed there is a better way. It will be messy, it will hard, and people will succumb to their baser instincts. But it won’t be the norm. That’s what Star Trek was all about. It’s what made me truly fall in love with this show. Portraying humanity as not what we are, but what we could be.
Some would say that it is naive, that talking with psychos will lead to more death. And that’s probably true. But keeping a strong hand and giving consequences to bad behavior does not preclude trying to dispense mercy first. And I think Trek certainly showed that the Federation was more than willing to fight if the situation demanded it.
Arena is one of the finest episodes, production warts and all. Other episodes may be better as more personal character-building stories but this really built the world and philosophy of Star Trek. It’s this kind of episode that should not be made fun of because 1967 couldn’t do the things on screen we can now.
Still, I’m not immune to laughing at the surface silliness and neither is Shatner in this great commercial he did in 2013.