In "All Those Who Wander", we see the Enterprise away team visit the crashed Peregrine, find frozen and/or mutilated bodies of the crew outside and inside, two survivors inside, and a log from the captain explaining that they'd picked up three castaways, one of whom (an Orion) killed himself with a plasma grenade to prevent the Gorn eggs he was previously infected with from hatching, and this caused the crash. We don't ever get a detailed explanation of what happened.
Memory Alpha says:
After a week of contending with the Gorn, Gavin and her remaining crew, numbering approximately twenty out of an initial complement of ninety-nine, decided to lure the hatchlings outside to protect their civilian passengers. However, in doing so all of them would succumb to hypothermia or Gorn attacks.
( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Peregrine )
This leaves a lot of open questions:
-
The Gorn eggs inside Buckley can be explained by him having been infected before the Peregrine picked him up (gestation period can vary per species) or having been sprayed by a Gorn before the Enterprise away team arrives. But what happened to the Gorn that the Peregrine's crew were originally fighting?
-
Do we just assume that the Peregrine crew's plan worked, all those Gorn were lured outside, and then died in the cold somewhere that their bodies were not found, instead of getting back inside? If the plan worked, where are the civilian passengers? Did one or more Gorn stay inside/go back and kill them? If so, where's that Gorn?
-
The Orion blew himself up, and this damaged the ship enough to crash, but did not kill the Gorn inside him, as they were still able to attack the crew. That seems a bit of a stretch.
It's a great episode (and 100% fine by me they're borrowing from Alien lore to develop the Gorn as antagonists), but 2/3 viewings later these seem like gaping oversights. Could it be some sort of big play for later when we discover something like a Gorn ship arrived there before the Enterprise and interfered with the crash site/beamed Gorn off?
Well, we gotta establish a couple things to start with.
A. Gorn Eggs: How many are born from a cluster? We see 4 burst from Buckley in the episode so I'm going to act on the assumption that 4 is the usual number. They're also hostile to each other immediately upon birth.
B. Gestation Period: In humans its hours, in Orions its weeks, but Buckley is a completely unknown alien species. No clue how long the gestation period actually is. As you stated though, it doesn't really matter when Buckley was infected due to the variation.
C. Civilians: The Civilian Passengers were Oriana, Buckley and Pasko. Everyone else on board was Starfleet personnel.
D. Sensors: Gorn, and their eggs, are completely invisible to them at this point. Biofilters can't even grab the eggs.
With those established, it becomes a bit easier to answer the remainder of the questions.
The bodies are just outside and hard to find. Over the course of a week, Starfleet officers died trying to kill the Gorn We don't know exactly how many but it's somewhere around 80. They found 20 crewmen outside but M'Benga says that there could be more bodies that they didn't see. We know they didn't do an extremely thorough search of the area because of the elements and the hike to the ship. Gorn bodies also wouldn't show up on the tricorder and their numbers would have been far fewer, maxing out at 4. The search area and limited search tools mean they would have had a lot of difficulty locating Gorn corpses under the snow.
Pretty much. Over the course of a week they probably killed one gorn. Likely through some sort of coolant leak or something that showed they were cold blooded. The rest of the crew made the plan to lure the Gorn outside and freeze it to death. They succeeded but they also lost their way back to the ship and were stranded. We didn't see any other Pasko-Gorn on the Peregrine and Oriana is still alive so it's safe to assume that the Peregrine Crew succeeded in killing Pasko-Gorn.
Pasko blew himself up with a plasma grenade inside of main engineering. It wasn't an enormous attack on the ship itself so much as a pressure point that got pressed. The matter-antimatter reactor was 'busted' according to Uhura and it damaged backup batteries. Without that the ship had extremely little power. They re-routed what little they had from the warp core injectors as emergency power. So the ship was damaged but in a survivable way. Hell, it even survived the landing on the planet. We see from the shots inside of Main Engineering that it had very little physical damage that could be ascribed to an explosion. We don't know much about Plasma Grenades but my assumption is that it generates plasma and throws it in all directions instead of simple shrapnel. If so then it wouldn't destroy the body like a typical explosion. It might shred it and do extreme damage, but major chunks would be overall 'intact'. The Gorn hatchlings are also pretty small overall as well as durable so I can see them surviving it not just from toughness but also because the chances of the grenade shredding the Gorn inside of the host body was pretty small.
Conclusion: Pasko successfully disrupted ship operations to the point it was forced to make an emergency landing, however he was unsuccessful in providing a large enough explosion to destroy the hatchlings inside of his body. The Peregrine crew led the Gorn outside, successfully, but died in the process themselves. The Gorn bodies were left somewhere in the field near the ship but remained undiscovered by the Enterprise crew due to (a) sensor limitations, (b) size of search area, and (c) time constraints imposed on them, especially when recalled by Pike.
Those be my thoughts at any rate. Not sure if that'll help you with your own conclusion but I hope it does.
Thankyou for that input, you've explained the gaps I was struggling with.
The big mistake I made was taking "to protect their civilian passengers" to mean some other civilians we didn't see, when in fact it meant the remaining two castaways (Buckley and Oriana). I didn't give enough weight to the facts that the area is prone to sporadic heavy snow storms, and that there was no time for a thorough initial search by the Enterprise away team. It is possible the Peregrine crew deliberatly launched their plan just before a big storm was incoming, to make sure the Gorn would be trapped in it, which of course makes sense that the crew themselves would all die from Gorn attacks or from the storm (as supported by M'Benga's assessment of the bodies outside).
I'm still a bit hung up on the plasma grenade not killing the gestating Gorn, but I suppose it is reasonable. I think the Peregrine captain's log even mentions "but he didn't succeed" (in killing the Gorn inside himself) or something. If gestating Gorn can survive later stages without being "attached" to a living host, this may also give some clues into possible twists with the Batel situation.
I will rewatch with all of this in mind. Thankyou for untangling my brain-knot!
But of course. Glad that my unhealthy amount of Trek watching could help someone at all. Take care!