Star Trek’s Greatest Battleground Taken Over By Baseball Fans
Star Trek has enough weird names for planets that it can be hard to keep track of which one is which. For example, you may not immediately know what makes Cestus III significant because you probably refer to it as the “Gorn planet” where these lizard monsters attacked before Captain Kirk had to fight one of them in the classic episode “Arena.” However, the franchise’s many writers love to sneak Easter egg references to these classic planets into scripts, which is how this famous Gorn planet ended up the home of a 24th-century baseball league.
Arena
Just in case this Gorn planet needs an introduction, Cestus III is introduced in The Original Series episode “Arena” as the site of a colony that is mostly wiped out by the Gorn, a mysterious race Starfleet knew very little about (although Strange New Worlds seems to be retconning that more and more each season).
Some fans with shaky memories think this is the same planet where Kirk actually fought one of these creatures one-on-one, but the god-like Metrons actually force the Starfleet captain and the Gorn to fight on a remote planetoid. Kirk’s McGyver-like skills win the day, and in true Star Trek fashion, he spares his foe’s life.
The Gorn
Decades later, we briefly saw a Gorn not on any planet but on a ship in the Mirror Universe Enterprise episode “In a Mirror Darkly.” Later, we were teased with the sight of a Gorn skeleton in Captain Lorca’s creepy menagerie aboard Discovery.
Finally, Strange New Worlds paid off all this teasing by making the Gorn the show’s primary antagonist, but in a weird twist of fate, the original Gorn planet, Cestus III, has sometimes gotten even more love from various Star Trek writers over the years than these fearsome alien warriors.
The Way Of The Warrior
The funniest example of this occurs in the Deep Space Nine episode “The Way of the Warrior.” In that episode, Kasidy Yates presents her future husband and serious baseball fan Captain Sisko with a baseball cap featuring the Pike City Pioneers, a team her brother plays for.
That team and an entire baseball league are located on Cestus III, the original Gorn planet whose colonists were almost entirely wiped out about a century earlier.
Trials And Tribble-Ations
While the Deep Space Nine captain didn’t mention it to Kasidy at the time, he was already fascinated with the original Gorn planet because he was a Captain Kirk fanboy. In the standout episode “Trials and Tribble-ations,” he admitted wanting to shake Kirk’s hand and “ask him about fighting the Gorn on Cestus III.”
Sisko’s phrasing makes it unclear whether this was a soft recon about where Kirk had his one-on-one battle or whether he was more interested in the earlier Cestus III battle where Kirk used a grenade launcher (!!!) to drive off Gorn forces he could barely see.
Those Old Alligators
Aside from confirming that the original Gorn planet is later home to a bunch of baseball fans, a later Discovery episode confirmed that Section 31 agent Leland was once “up to his *ss in alligators” on Cestus III, which is a winking nod to the Gorn that wouldn’t attack the planet for another few years.
Given that, we can’t help but wonder whether it would be more frustrating to be surrounded by alligators or futuristic baseball hipsters. If these colonists play anything like the Oakland A’s, we might just take our chances with the gators.
