7 Ups & 1 Down From Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.1 — Hegemony, Part II

4. UP — More Gorn, More Gore, More Lore

When it comes to the Gorn in particular, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds hasn't spared on the gruesome. All Those Who Wander, for example, was as chest-bustingly gory as it was terrifying. In Hegemony, blood painted the floors and the walls of the town on Parnassus Beta. Part II provided the most gloriously grim Gorn spectacle yet.

Through La'an, we already knew about the 'breeding planets'. There, a person was either live incubator or live sport for Gorn hatchlings. To those nightmares can now be added one "massive digestive chamber," in Sam Kirk's words, aboard the Gorn destroyer. The colonists and Enterprise crew beamed up from Parnassus were being slowly dissolved into nutriments. Let's just hope something else was on the menu at that Gorn wedding we saw in Star Trek: Lower Decks!

Fodder is also food for thought. In Hegemony, Part II, we learnt a few more things about the Gorn in terms of their table manners. In the first half, Scotty had already speculated that coronal mass ejections (CMEs) could start a 'feeding frenzy' in the Gorn. Now, Uhura had discovered that "X-class [solar] flares" and "supra-arcade downflows" (both equally real solar phenomena) were linked to periods of Gorn inactivity. Uhura just saved the Federation from a grisly fate.