Story: Fredric Brown
Script: Gene L. Coon
Director: Joseph Pevney
Producer: Gene L. Coon
This is one of those episodes of Star Trek
whose pop culture echoes precede it when you see it. Kirk fighting the Gorn on Cestus III! So it can be a shock to watch it and remember that you don't see the Gorn until halfway through the show. The famous one to one duel isn't really only the second half.
Which is actually for the best, because as much as I love the Gorn suit and its craftsmanship, and I want to be engaged by this brutal battle, it's paced really poorly, and ends up being pretty boring for large portions of it.
The first half of the episode, on the other hand, is pretty engaging. The Enterprise is lured to a Federation outpost only to discover it's been destroyed by a hostile force, and the communications from it a trap. The landing party is attacked by, I guess future space mortar fire, in an action scene that gave William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy tinnitus for the rest of their lives due to the proximity of the explosions. The enemy ship attempts to escape, and the Enterprise pursues, with Kirk intending to destroy the enemy ship in retribution for Cestus III, convinced he must do this to prevent an invasion. Spock is not so sure, arguing they don't know enough of the variables to justify the taking of sentient life, but Kirk is steadfast that the aliens must die. A matter of policy, he calls it.
Ultimately, both vessels are stopped dead in their tracks by another Star Trek race of mysterious highly evolved superbeings (I think this is the third so far) called the Metron. The Metron declare the two races too dangerous and beligerant to be allowed to continue, and thus transport the two candidates to a neutral site to battle against themselves, and the winner's ship will be allowed to live.
Unfortunately, the battle itself suffers from a few things. For one, it's obviously very difficult for the stuntman in the Gorn suit, which still looks great, to move quickly, a detail written to the script that he's reptilian and thus not agile. It still makes the fight scenes slow and a bit comical looking. He's stronger than Kirk, and about as smart, as he manages to set various traps for him. But the majority of the running time is spent on Kirk running around, trying to look for raw materials to turn into a weapon, since the Metron hinted he could do so.
This means scenes of him stumbling onto sulfur, potassium nitrate, diamonds, coal, bamboo shoots, etc, all while evading the slow-moving but powerful Gorn, until he finally realizes he can make gunpowder and shoot the enemy with a makeshift cannon. Then, with the creature at his mercy, he refuses to finish him off, refuses to kill, which leads to the Metron declaring that there is hope for humanity, that one day they may evolve past their savage instincts after all, and letting both ships go.
It's a very powerful statement of the message of Star Trek, or at least the iteration of that message under Gene L. Coon -- which is that humanity is imperfect, flawed, still struggling, but ultimately, each day, by choosing to be better, we can be better.
Unfortunately, it's pretty interminable waiting for Kirk to figure out the cannon, running around Vasquez Rocks as the Gorn slowly pursues him. And ultimately the Metron are kind of huge dicks too -- like, they're so high and mighty and above violence but they pull two spaceships out of the universe to destroy because these two random ships are too beligerant? I wish their dickishness wasn't just implicit -- there's a cut line of dialogue from Coon's script where the Metron reveal it was actually the winner they were going to destroy, not the loser, as the winner would pose the bigger threat.
So "Arena" ultimately succeeds on its ideas more than it's action, but it's action takes up a larger portion of the running time. And that means it doesn't really live up to what you'd like it to be. I wish we'd gotten a Gorn/Kirk rematch.
Rating: 3 out of 4
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