10 Star Trek Scenes Even More Impressive When You Know The Truth

In The Original Series first season episode Arena, we meet the Gorn for the first time. By today’s gut-busting Strange New Worlds' standards, the Gorn costume may look like it was bought on the cheap from the local Halloween store, and the fight scenes like they’d got the work experience guy/girl in to choreograph it, but it’s still a great episode and continues to rank among the most popular.

Making more of an impression than pushing that boulder off the rockface, or constructing that canon, is the truth behind certain scenes. During the shoot, Shatner was standing too close to one of the prop explosions when it went off. This left him with particularly bad tinnitus for life. Leonard Nimoy was similarly affected, so one assumes this took place during the filming of the scenes on Cestus III of the teaser and Act One.

Shatner has spoken extensively on how the disease severely impacted his mental health to the point where he "didn’t know if [he] would survive the agony" until he received habituation therapy. He went on to be a spokesperson for the American Tinnitus Association, an organisation he credits with "literally saving [his] life". He has raised money towards research and even spoken to the United States Congress on the illness.

Shatner certainly suffered greatly for his art to give us these few scenes. Fortunately, he now manages to live with the condition it resulted in.