Captain Kirk’s Tiny Little Endless Battle

When Captain Kirk beamed down to Cestus III with his officers and tactical team, they were expecting some long-overdue R&R as guests of Commodore Travers, a man known for his hospitality. What they got instead were the bodies of Federation personnel littering the grounds of a decimated outpost, and incoming fire from an alien force hunkered down just over a nearby ridge. Worst shore leave ever.

Those events, and the epic one-on-one battle with The Gorn Captain that occurred as a result of them, were chronicled six decades ago in an episode of the original Star Trek television series known as “Arena.” They are also the inspiration for the diorama Michelle and I put together this week to celebrate the show’s 60th Anniversary.

Michelle and I have engaged in plenty of one-on-one battles with each other over the years, most of them recorded and uploaded as “sculpt-off” challenges. This project was no different. She needle felted the brave but impulsive Captain Kirk, while I used polymer clay to sculpt the inscrutable and terrifying Gorn Captain.

In the episode, Captain Kirk must collect various elements and minerals from around the planet’s surface to cobble together an ersatz mineral bazooka. We went through a similar procedure here, searching the shelves of the workshop and art stores to compile the elements necessary to recreate that iconic hand-cannon in miniature.

And because details are important when you’re battling a savage Gorn, the cannon is packed with the diamond projectiles.

I’m well aware they’ve redesigned the Gorn for the Strange New Worlds series and that they are, arguably, more horrifying in their current iteration than the original ‘guy in a rubber lizard suit’ from sixty years ago.

But when I was a ten-year-old kid, alone in my parent’s living room on a Saturday night, I caught “Arena” in syndication and that rubber lizard suit scared the socks off me.

Of course, my Gorn went through an encutening that is often a side effect of the miniaturization process. Still, modern redesigns notwithstanding, the original Gorn will always be terrifying and unaccountably realistic to the ten-year-old kid that lives in my brain.

The same goes for the alien planet on which Kirk battled the Gorn. I think I was well into adulthood before I realized Vasquez Rocks was an actual location in California where they filmed that episode of Star Trek (and others, as well as many other productions). In my head it was just some alien planet out in the Beta Quadrant of space, a largely unexplored section of the galaxy.

Even having access to multiple images of Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park on the internet (most courtesy of sci-fi fans making a pilgrimage) hasn’t entirely convinced me otherwise. Thankfully, though, those photos provided valuable reference and we were able to get a decent sense of the shape of things.

If you’re familiar with the episode, you know that even Captain Kirk discovers a quality of mercy and understanding that prevents him from committing an egregious, fatal error. But nobody wants to see a diorama of a merciful starship captain standing over the prone body of a lizard monster shouting “I won’t kill him!” So, this battle continues.

Of course, sixty years after Star Trek was first beamed into living rooms, there are bloodier battles being waged, and more important fights to win. The lessons Captain Kirk learned about the price of unnecessary violence have apparently been forgotten. And that’s another reason building this diorama was so much fun. Escaping into this safe, sci-fi fantasy dustup from my childhood — where nobody really gets hurt and cooler heads always prevail — felt like a welcome respite from current events. Video below for anyone interested. Piece is in our shop. LIve long, and prosper.