Star Trek TOS S01E18 – Arena

Dir. Joseph Pevney, Wri. Gene L. Coon & Fredric Brown

The Summary: Kirk and an incredibly strong and resourceful alien are forced to fight to the death to save their crews.

The Good: The episode-opening banter before the plot gets going is cute and characterful. Just being actually outside in an area larger than a living room is surprisingly exciting in the context of watching this show consistently from week to week. So often they’re in caves or ships to enable filming on a sound stage, but the expanded environment really does wonders here. Sulu having to make some hard decisions is good for his character–he’s really hasn’t had a better serious moment before this episode. They do a good job of establishing the baddies as a serious threat. The arena situation is well contrived to be exciting—faced with an opponent who outmatches him, how will Kirk succeed? They at least try to give some narrative reasons why the guy in the Gorn suit cannot move at all, and it doesn’t feel too forced. It’s a rough situation (his lack of mobility), but I think they did the best they could under the circumstances. I think they’re intentionally going for some cool metacommentary with us watching the crew watching Kirk. There’s an interesting seed of an idea there that being removed from the action usually doesn’t have in this show. I love the ingenuity of Kirk’s solution and the race against time element of implementing it. I do like that Kirk learns a valuable lesson, but I’m not entirely convinced that the character should have needed to learn it, if that makes sense.

The Bad: The survivor that the crew first encounters is…not a good actor, to put it mildly. He almost ruins the scene he’s in. There is definitely an unfortunate retread of the whole “stop then before they get home” motif from “Balance of Terror,” and BoT definitely did it better. You’re never going to come out ahead in that competition. There’s definitely still some inconsistent characterization with Kirk being all “frontier justice”. Everybody reacting like Kirk didn’t just get vanished from the bridge last episode is kind of silly. At some point, you just get used to your captain vanishing on a weekly basis. As is widely recognized (and joked about), the Gorn…has not aged well visually. The people back on the Enterprise have nothing to do again, but they continuously cut back to them anyway. It works once thematically, but quickly becomes boring. Kirk, clearly characterized as a bookworm on multiple occasions, doesn’t know what sulfur is or its chemical properties until he needs to remember it. That really frustrates me for some reason. I don’t like that the writers are underestimating him. Oh, and guess what—it’s another godlike being, and this one is weirdly inconsistent—it praises Kirk for sparing the Gorn, then immediately offers to kill him as some kind of weird present or reward. I…I don’t really get this one at all.

The Review: This episode is really tricky for me to rate, actually. There is a lot a like about it and a lot that frustrates me (as you could probably tell from the really extensive lists of both pros and cons above). I like the general moral thrust of it and the thrill of its finale, but the pointless crew time and character inconsistencies are just annoying. The ideas are hamstrung by a combination of needing to fill an hour’s runtime and by writer’s who have a good sci-fi idea but a poor grip on Trek’s characters. Yet again, I feel like if it were half the length I would have no problem giving it a wholehearted recommendation. For a first time viewer, the length is likely to be the biggest issue. As a long time fan, though, it’s really the Kirk stuff that ruins it for me the most. Frontier justice from a noted pacifist and diplomat (even under extreme circumstances) rubs me the wrong way. A man who graduated top of his class from the Oxford or Harvard of his day not knowing basic freshman chemistry, stuff like that. If you let the episode go into soft focus, so to speak, it’s got the outline of genius, but the devil’s in the details and this one gets too many of them wrong for me to recommend it without pause. I think it still barely scoots by, but it’s a near thing. It’s a legendary episode (for all the wrong reasons), so everyone should watch it just for the Gorn, of course, but when it comes to a rating this one doesn’t quite make the cut.

The Score: