Arena
The Coon era kicks off with a bang. More than one, actually. And this is supposed to be anti-war?
Hipster Criticism
I say “the Coon era”; the guy had been working on the show for eight episodes at this point. It’s not even the first instance of Coon’s writing on the show – one of the reasons he was hired in the first place was to replace John DF Black on uncredited rewrite duties.
That said, though, the sheer importance of Coon’s scripts both to the franchise and pop culture in general pretty much demand we treat “Arena” as the beginning of something genuinely new. I mean, this is the episode that featured in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, inspired a Mythbusters investigation, and was adapted into both a video-game advert and, almost as worthily, an episode of Enterprise. And all this before Coon even got around to inventing the Klingons.
As it happens, though, the iconography of “Arena” isn’t what I want to talk about here. Firstly, the examples above rather demonstrate cultural osmosis has done that job for me. More importantly, though, I think the most interesting thing about all these classic beats is how little there is to say about them. The actual clash between Kirk and his Gorn opposite takes up far less of the episode than I’d remembered. The Gorn itself is a game attempt at something genuinely alien after so many episodes of ETs looking either almost human or defiantly wibbly-wobbly, spacey-wacey, but Disco Bondage Lizard is far more impressive in terms of the bravery of its concept than the success of its execution. And as much as Shatner gives this everything he’s got, as standard, giving no-one to bounce of as he trudges through the Californian desert really doesn’t make the most of his ample skill set.
None of which is to say the arena itself is bad, or even that it’s baffling that it ended up buried so deep into the pop culture consciousness. It’s just not going to be our way into the episode.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Guide To Warfare
So what is? Well, handily, I’ve already set this up. I said in my post about “The Squire Of Gothos” that jumping from the last of Paul Schneider’s anti-war stories to the first of Coon’s sealed Trek’s reputation as show dedicated to the pursuit of peace. A one-two knockout punch, if that’s not too inappropriate a metaphor.
Here’s the thing though. I said that back before rewatching “Arena” reminded me the episode begins with Kirk trying to blow up an unseen enemy with a 23rd century mortar-analogue, and ends with him using all his intelligence and ingenuity to do the same damn thing.
Which is to say, the status of “Arena” as an anti-war parable is something that actually needs to be demonstrated. It can’t simply be taken on faith. Particularly given its title. Nobody went to the gladiatorial arenas to demonstrate how strongly opposed they were to violent spectacle.
Nor is the self-evident truth that this bout of extra-terrestrial fisticuffs is being presented for our entertainment the only reason to question whether Coon is delivering on Schneider’s promise. The initial action sequence may struggle to overcome its TV budget (though filming it in the courtyard of a ruined fort – actually a pre-built set out in the California desert – works as a sort of oblique visual reference to the episode’s title), but the fact the production team struggled to convincingly show Kirk and crew dodging disintegrator rays to set up a mortar emplacement doesn’t detract from it obviously having been intended as being a thrilling action scene.
Further, the initial intervention by the Metrons is, at best, highly conditional in its disapproval. Any idea the Metrons seek to avoid bloodshed is (appropriately enough) blown out of the water by declaring the losing captain’s ship and crew will be destroyed. It’s not violence the Metrons seem opposed to, so much as battles being fought at a distance. They’re clearly perfectly happy with keeping the body count in the hundreds, so long as the battle itself proceeds mano a Gorno. It’s a paean to the good old days of martial combat, back when battles were just duels declared en masse so as to save time. Back when you had to look a man in the eye as you killed him. You can see Squire Trelane nodding along with the twisted romance of the idea, which isn’t a particularly encouraging thought.
In other words, if the message here is intended to be “war = bad”, it’s somewhat surprising that both the in-universe and the actual movers and shakers were so keen to pack the episode with explosions and punching. At the very least, if we’re going to hail this as the dawn of the show’s second era, more optimistic and less gung-ho, then we need to make sure we make the case.
So let’s do just that.
Harbour Resentment?
Let’s start back at Cestus III, and the initial action scene. This engagement on its own clearly can’t be enough to sink the entire episode – if you want your characters to learn something about the futility of war, then by definition they can’t start out being fully aware of the fact. There’s a reason “Duet” doesn’t start with Kira insisting #NotAllCardassians.
Not that everyone on board the Enterprise immediately wants to go all in on the vengeance factor. Spock would much rather his captain proceed from the assumption that the people who attacked the colony are intelligent beings, whose lives have value. The fact Kirk isn’t ready to hear that doesn’t mean the script doesn’t intend for us to listen ourselves. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the episode primes us from the very beginning to see Spock as the voice of reason, with it being him alone who notes the oddness of the guest list drawn up by “Commodore Travers”, while Kirk and McCoy just want to salivate over the sumptuous meal they’re expecting.
Almost immediately, this sets up Kirk and McCoy as being ruled, or at least overly influenced, by their urges, rather than engaging their reason [1], with Spock’s position being the one it’s necessary for them to arrive at. And ultimately both of them do, once they hear the Gorn’s side of the story.
This is no small thing, when you consider that our heroes’ own side of the story is that the Gorn didn’t just make Cestus III into a new Pearl Harbor, they lured the Enterprise in so they could murder everyone on board as well. Watching in January 1967, just weeks after the 25th anniversary of what has become the most notorious sneak attack in history, the American public wouldn’t have been likely to miss this framing of the Gorn as even worse than the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces. Kirk’s opponent is being cast in the worst light imaginable, even before we consider the idea that the Gorn’s reptilian appearance is particularly unsettling.
(In truth, I don’t actually buy Kirk’s argument that most humans have “an instinctive revulsion to reptiles”, though I guess he – or Coon – wouldn’t be the first person to claim their personal prejudices as a basic human instinct. Reptiles are, in fact, awesome, as my entirely scientific and reliable Twitter poll on the subject- 76.7% yay, 16.7% meh, and just 6.7% ick – clearly demonstrates. I think what Kirk/Coon means here is that we might not respond to reptiles in the same way we do mammals, in the sense of how much we identify with them. In other words, while I don’t think revulsion is the right word, I do think making the Gorn reptilian widens the distance between them and us, and accordingly increases the scale of Kirk’s success when he finds a way to bridge it.)
If the Metrons’ goal is to show humanity the error of its warlike ways, Coon has deliberately provided them something of an uphill struggle.
Make Bantz Not War
The Metrons respond by making provisions of their own. Admittedly, it’s a little difficult to figure out the dimensions of just what they’re up to. In large part that’s because, as the always invaluable Memory Alpha informs us, the episode as filmed doesn’t contain the fairly important revelation that the Metrons were lying all along. Originally, the idea was that they were figuring the winning captain would be the most dangerous, and therefore most in need of scrubbing. This is why the Metron we meet makes the otherwise out-of-nowhere comment that Kirk’s display of mercy means that he won’t be destroyed after all.
It’s probably not surprising this was removed, given that it makes zero sense. Choosing one colossally inferior starship to obliterate because its captain happens to win a brawl, and so you’re scared they’ll one day be a threat to you? That makes as much sense as forcing two termite queens into a boxing match, and pouring boiling water into the winner’s nest in case one day they want to nick your car. If you’re terrified about insectile GTA so much, why not just do for both of them?
The thing is, though, as ridiculous as the idea is, it’s not like the rest of the episode is a vacuum-sealed bag filled to bursting with purest logic either. The Metrons’ motivations make no sense with or without the above admission. At least with it still in, the script would have been more explicit that the contest hadn’t been intended to fête martial prowess, but to fear it.
Even without those missing lines of dialogue, though, there’s evidence here the Metrons are not being wholly honest. Take the translator devices, for example. The Metrons give Kirk a device capable of rendering alien languages intelligible, and they remind him that ingenuity offers an alternative to brute strength. Even though Kirk isn’t initially aware that the device also functions as a transmitter, then, he’s offered the opportunity to bend his intelligence toward opening a dialogue, rather than an artery. It might not have worked, sure, but this is a guy who set himself to building a cannon from diamonds and space-bamboo. An aversion to long shots was most clearly not the issue here.
But instead of trying to use a translation device to, y’know, communicate, Kirk uses it to maintain a dialogue with himself, one in which he fills with self-justifications about the desperate need to kill someone he hadn’t even known existed the day before. Even when he learns he can talk to the Gorn – because the Gorn gives up a tactical advantage in order to offer what is admittedly a rather twisted form of mercy – he does nothing but rail against him, even as the Gorn explains their justification for the attack.
In short, while the Mertrons might genuinely been surprised that their experiment ended with neither captain dead, it certainly wasn’t the case that they hadn’t provided for it as a possibility. Kirk passes their test, but that might ultimately mean less than the fact he comes so very close to failing it.
Seeing Is Believing
It isn’t just us watching Kirk struggle to remember who he should be. By this point, the Enterprise bridge crew have been patched in what’s happening, too. Coon here is borrowing Roddenberry’s idea from “The Menagerie” of having main characters reduced to watching footage being beamed in from elsewhere. While Roddenberry was severely limited in what we could do with this approach by the very circumstances that required he used it, though, Coon gets to deploy it by choice.
Let's ask why, then.
The episode’s structure relies on Spock and co not being able to help the captain, clearly, but that isn’t equivalent to requiring them to sit and watch what they they’re unable to affect. They could have been given a B-plot, or come up with some kind of Hail Mary that could generate drama even though it doesn’t actually end up changing the episode’s resolution. They even could’ve played up the clash between McCoy and Spock more, perhaps giving McCoy an actual plan – preferably as reckless and dangerous and unlikely to work as possible – that he could present to Spock as an alternative to simply sitting on their hands.
Instead, they become part of the episode’s audience, allowed to comment on the action but not influence it. This does two closely related things. It brings our protagonists – other than Kirk himself – into parity with us as viewers, setting up the idea that the conclusions they reach as they watch should at least roughly match our own [2]. Second, it forces them to watch Kirk’s actions at a remove, giving them the opportunity to consider the wider implications while the captain fights for what he believes is both his life and theirs.
And the result is extraordinary. Removed from both the destruction at Cestus III and the adrenaline of combat, McCoy realises the truth: this could all just be a mistake. The Gorn really could have watched the arrival of Commodore Travers, with his fort and his grenade launchers, and concluded they’d stumbled over the spearhead of an invasion force.
If we take the original script’s line that Kirk’s death would have actually saved Enterprise, then, or even if we just work from the principle that the Metrons were dissembling from the very beginning about either ship actually being in danger, perhaps they’re giving Kirk’s crew an opportunity to learn a lesson, even if Kirk won’t be able to do so himself.
Except, of course, that he does. The instant his life is no longer directly under threat – once his opponent is finally helpless before him – he realises what he’s about to do, and he refuses to go through with it.
It’s true that he could have done it sooner. I say “directly under threat” above, but that’s debatable. Ironically, given the colossal distances that you’d have to figure would be involved in space combat, throwing Kirk and the Gorn onto Neo-California gives them the space they need to breathe. It’s a partial defusing of the situation, an uneasy cease-fire. It’s not really the Metrons’ fault that they immediately fall back into trying to murder each other.
But don’t the Metrons demand the fighting resumes again? Isn’t that the more obvious, immediate solution than trying to work out how to talk to each other? Well, yes. Clearly. What’s your point? When in the history of the world has there not been powerful people demanding the war continues at any cost? When has it ever been easier to talk than to attack?
The Metrons’ genius here is to recognise that, if you want people to demonstrate they have “the advanced quality of mercy”, you can’t simply force them into a situation where they can’t hurt each other anymore. You can’t judge how much people genuinely desire peace when you render them literally incapable of war. That isn’t to say there’s no point to sabotaging the guns while they’re still firing (which of course is precisely what the Metrons do). It’s just that if you want a cease-fire to grow into peace, you eventually have to let people make that choice for themselves.
One can fairly ask what right the Metrons have to judge humanity, or the Gorn. But at least they’re judging us as fairly as they can. At least they’re letting us be the ones who can choose to condemn ourselves.
And so Gene Coon’s first offering plays out in exactly the way me might want it to – smart but subtle, condemnatory of warfare without pretending to not understand how it happens in practice. This is famously the episode that introduces the term “Federation”. It may be though that the true legacy of “Arena” is not what it calls Trek’s civilisation of the future, but what it shows us its citizens might be capable of.
The defence rests.
[1] In truth, this feels a little off model for McCoy – I’d argue the guy is way too irascible and keen to define himself by his morality to revel in the culinary opportunities his rank affords. But I guess there’s nothing specifically in his appearances so far to suggest McCoy isn’t constantly trying to source his next buffet.
[2] I can foresee pushback on this idea. The viewers themselves are hardly likely to draw identical conclusions from what they’ve watched. Why should TV characters be any different? Wouldn’t using characters to deliver authorial messages be evidence that those characters are being badly written in the first place?
In general, that’s a fair point. In this specific case, though, I’d point out a) McCoy is already desperately off-model, b) the episode has already stacked the deck in favour of Spock and c) when you have a character whose primary characteristic is literally that he thinks and acts only in terms of pure logic, the idea he will represent the writer’s own beliefs about what’s correct becomes difficult to avoid.