“Heart of Glory”
Written by Maurice Hurley and Herbert Wright & D.C. Fontana
Directed by Rob Bowman
Season 1, Episode 19
Production episode 40271-120
Original air date: March 21, 1988
Stardate: 41503.7
Captain’s Log: The Enterprise is sent to investigate a battle that took place in the Neutral Zone. They find a Talarian freighter drifting, with indeterminate lifesigns, as said signs are located near the damaged engineering section. There is a concern about Romulan activity (Picard says that’s a name they haven’t heard in “a while,” which means, I guess, that “Angel One” was “a while” ago), and Riker beams over with Data and La Forge to investigate the freighter. (Yar stays behind because Picard wants her at tactical in case the Romulans are cloaked nearby.)
La Forge detects metal fatigue in the hull, figuring it to be five minutes before the hull collapses. Data finds the survivors, who turn out to be three Klingons, one of whom is in bad shape. Yar manages to beam them back despite the interference from the engines.
The Klingons report to sickbay, where their leader, Captain Korris, and his second, Konmel, explain that they were passengers on the freighter when it was attacked by Ferengi, who were using Klingon weapons. Korris claims to have helped the freighter captain defeat the Ferengi. Picard is skeptical of Korris’s story, but allows them to rest and eat. When the third Klingon dies, Korris pries his eyes open and he, Konmel, and Worf scream to the heavens—a Klingon death ritual, as Data explains, warning the dead that a Klingon warrior is about to arrive.
A Klingon cruiser shows up, and its captain, K’Nera, explains that Korris and the others are criminals who stole a freighter and destroyed a battle cruiser sent to bring them home. Yar takes them into custody, where they are neither scanned nor searched, thus enabling them to remove pieces off their uniforms and assemble weapons. (Oops.)
Worf asks to address K’Nera. He pleads on Korris’s behalf, saying that what burns in their blood also burns in his. (There’s probably medication Dr. Crusher can prescribe for that.) He asks that they be sent to a primitive planet where they may at least die on their feet. K’Nera, however, has no choice.
Korris and Konmel then break out of the brig, making Worf’s pleading pointless. Konmel is killed by one of Yar’s security people. Korris takes over engineering, holding a phaser on the dilithium chamber—one shot will destroy the ship.
Korris’s plan is to force Picard to give them the stardrive section, so he and Worf can find endless battle. Worf asks him in return where in all his talk of battle and glory are the words duty, honor, and loyalty—without which a warrior is nothing? This conversation also allows Worf to get close enough to shoot Korris.
Picard reports to K’Nera that Korris and Konmel are dead—and Worf assures him that they died well. K’Nera also asks Worf to consider serving on a Klingon vessel when his tour on the Enterprise is done, to which Worf says he’d be honored. After K’Nera signs off, Worf assures Picard that he was just being polite. Yes, he really said that, with a straight face.
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: La Forge attaches a Visual Acuity Transmitter to his VISOR so the bridge can see what he sees when he joins the away team on the freighter. Picard gets so sucked into seeing how La Forge views the universe that he temporarily forgets about the mission until Riker rather snidely reminds him. The VISOR processes a ton of information in a variety of spectra, and Picard is also surprised to see that La Forge sees Data very differently because he’s an android—which means Data looks even more different than other humans to him than to those with normal sight. This makes La Forge’s easy friendship with Data even more impressive, honestly (and is the only way Picard’s line about how seeing through his eyes allows him to understand La Forge better makes sense).
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: We finally learn Worf’s story: when the Romulans attacked the Khitomer outpost, he was found under the rubble by a Starfleet officer and raised by him and his wife on the farming colony of Gault. Korris guesses that he had trouble assimilating, which Worf confirms, saying he learned to control it. This backstory would be expanded upon in several episodes, most notably “Sins of the Father,” which would provide more details of the massacre and of Worf’s Klingon family, “Family,” where we meet Worf’s human fosterparents, “Birthright,” where we meet other survivors of the Khitomer attack, and the Deep Space Nine episode “Let He Who Is Without Sin ,” in which we learn of Worf’s difficulties controlling his Klingon passions as a child, which resulted in the death of a classmate.
This is also the first episode that makes it clear that Worf has spent almost no time among his own people, that what he knows of being Klingon is all instinct and study, not experience. This dichotomy would be a recurring issue for the character throughout his appearances not only on this show, but on DS9 as well.
Welcome Aboard: David Froman has tremendous presence as K’Nera, and Charles H. Hyman is wonderfully snotty as Konmel. But the big story here is the first of an unparalleled twelve roles played on all four modern Star Trek series by the redoubtable Vaughn Armstrong. (It’s thirteen if you count the Mirror Universe version of Maxwell Forrest separately from the mainline version of Admiral Forrest, the latter being the only recurring role Armstrong played.) However, this is Armstrong’s only appearance on TNG.
I Believe I Said That: “And Mr. Worf? The bridge wouldn’t be the same without you.”
Picard, showing Worf some love.
Trivial Matters: While Worf’s presence always implied this, it is this episode that confirms that the Federation and the Klingon Empire are now allies, thus fulfilling the promise made by the Organians way back in “Errand of Mercy.” The communication screen shown whenever K’Nera talks to the Enterprise displays both nations’ logos on either side of him, symbolizing the cooperation.
Korris makes reference to “the traitors of Kling,” implying that Kling is the name of the Klingon homeworld, an idea that probably made sense right up until Vaughn Armstrong said the word “Kling” out loud. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country would refer to the Klingon homeworld as Qo’noS, which would stick, with “Kling” mercifully never referred to again.
Worf refers to his foster brother attending Starfleet Academy with him. We meet that brother in “Homeward,” and their time at the Academy is dramatized in the young adult novels Worf’s First Adventure, Line of Fire, and Survival by Peter David.
The Khitomer Massacre is dramatized in my own novel The Lost Era: The Art of the Impossible (which also features a six-year-old Worf running around with a bat’leth).
Make it So: “They died well.” It’s funny, I’m a huge Klingon fan, and have been ever since I first saw Michael Ansara’s Kang in “Day of the Dove” as a small, impressionable child. In my career as a Star Trek fiction author, I’ve carved out a reputation as “the Klingon guy,” having written a butt-load of Klingon-focused fiction both in prose and comics, including a series of books that take place on a Klingon ship.
So you’d think I’d like this episode more, wouldn’t you?
The problem is that it just isn’t a very good story, and the acting doesn’t elevate it. While Armstrong would go on to a distinguished career as a Trek guest—including a most excellent recurring turn as Admiral Forrest on Star Trek: Enterprise—he’s overly histrionic here. One of the joys of watching modern Trek is viewing the progression of Michael Dorn’s skills as an actor, but the downside of that is that he started off mediocre and got much much better, and “Heart of Glory” is right smack in the mediocre phase.
In their defense, I doubt that anyone could sound good delivering the overly mannered, tiresomely metaphoric Klingon dialogue. “Like the hunter that spawned you, join in the struggle of life and death.” “What burns in their eyes fires my soul.” “I too wish they could fly free.” “I have tasted your heart!” “Do not deny the challenge of your destiny. Get off your knees, and soar—open your eyes and let the dream take flight!” “My words were dust upon the ground.”
The plot itself goes nowhere fast. Korris’s group’s guilt is obvious from jump, and even Picard suspects it early on, which makes you wonder why nobody bothered to scan their uniforms for the parts that would make a weapon before putting them in the brig. The lengthy freighter sequence with La Forge’s VISOR serves no useful function except as padding (at least they had the brains to put the padding at the beginning of the episode where you don’t notice it as much), and the jump-cut-to-the-ceiling of Worf’s death scream for Korris is just silly.
Plus the entire notion that Worf might be compromised simply because he’s the same species as the prisoners is absurd reasoning. The script itself provides ample reason for Worf to be conflicted, but those are private conversations among Korris, Konmel, and Worf—why would Picard and Riker be concerned generally if they’re not privy to those talks, unless they think that poorly of Worf’s ability to reason?
Some claim that the establishment of Klingons as being creatures of honor and duty was at odds with the portrayal of them in the original series as straight-up thug-like bad guys, but I contend that the portrayal here and in subsequent Klingon stories has its roots in the Klingons’ very first appearance in “Errand of Mercy.” Watch Kor and then watch this episode—the only thing separating them is a bumpy forehead.
The Klingon poltical arc that would start in the third season’s “Sins of the Father” and end with DS9‘s “Tacking Into the Wind” was one of the high points of modern Trek, and that arc provided some great Klingon episodes. But this first one was a forgettable mess.
Warp factor rating: 4.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written quite a bit about the Klingons over his career as a Star Trek fiction writer, such as the novels Diplomatic Implausibility, The Lost Era: The Art of the Impossible, The Brave and the Bold Book 2, Articles of the Federation, A Singular Destiny, and A Time for War, a Time for Peace; the novellas Enterprises of Great Pitch and Moment in Slings and Arrows and The Unhappy Ones in Seven Deadly Sins; the short story “loDnI’pu’ vavpu’ je” in Tales from the Captain’s Table and “Family Matters” in Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows; and the comic book Alien Spotlight: Klingons. But his biggest contribution to Klingon lore was the series of novels that took place on the I.K.S. Gorkon, a Klingon battle cruiser: A Good Day to Die, Honor Bound, Enemy Territory, and A Burning House. Yes, he likes Klingons. For more on Keith, go to his home page, his blog, his Facebook page, or his Twitter feed.
And this is the episode that sealed it: The Klingons have one world culture that everyone follows, one default personality.
Why do I dislike this? Because I have no honor.
(At least with the Vulcans, we had the Romulans as proof that some of the Star Trek aliens were not a homogenous whole.)
I much preferred the episode where Riker served an abbreviated time as member of a Klingon ship’s crew and there actually were hints of a diverse, conflicted people. Just hints, mind you.
I enjoyed this episode more as, at the time, I felt the writing was getting better and it didn’t have Wesley in it; or at least he wasn’t a factor – it’s been a long time since I saw this. ;-)
I liked the ideas presented and how the gave more depth to the Klingons. I do agree, however, that the ‘honour above all’ idea is a bit limited. If the greatest honour is to be a warrior & die in combat how does everything else get done? Klingons have to farm to eat, someone has to forge those bat’leths.
A better concept would’ve been the espousal of the greatest honour coming from striving towards perfection in what you can do. Otherwise it seems to me the culture would lead towards a society of warriors and ‘untouchables’ in a way. A schism that would fracture Klingon society.
To me, however, the Klingon & Borg story arcs were, overall, some of the best writing of the ST:TNG series. And I always associated this episode with that. Sure it had its problems, but it was a start of something better.
Kato
PS – @1John R. Ellis, I liked that Riker episode as well.
Eric Burns, in mourning John M. Ford’s death, wrote about this episode as a sort of transition/readjustment from the Klingons of TOS to the Klingons of TNG, with special mention for the effect of Ford’s novel The Final Reflection:
“‘Heart of Glory’ was the first Klingon-centered episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It featured Worf (the first episode to really put Worf front and center) meeting with renegade Klingon warriors. And it was clearly heavily influenced by The Final Reflection. Korris, one of the renegades, cries out “you have betrayed Kling!” in clear echo of the concept of klin from The Final Reflection. They make note of Worf’s name (which he said was because he was fostered to humans before the “Age of Inclusion”) in clear echo of the tradition of Klingons in Ford’s work to change the first letter of their given name to K if they join the navy or M if they join the Marines. (All of the warriors’ names began with K in the episode.)…The only thing “Heart of Glory” lacked was Ford’s name. It was a significant lack.”
Well, if you count each Weyoun clone as a different character then Jeffrey Coombs at least comes close to parallelling Hyman…
“Korris and Konmel tell Worf the truth: they commandeered the freighter, and sought out a place where they could do battle, and be the warriors they were meant to be. They claim the alliance with the Federation is withering their Klingon hearts. They are not people of peace.”
This was a conversation right after they lied to Picard and Worf never apprised him of the newly learned information. Worf kept that conversation secret thus violating the trust of his captain even after the Klingon cruiser got there and Picard learned the truth. Seems like important info that, had it been relayed, might have saved a couple of lives. Should be something that eats away at his beloved honor and everyone gives him a pass on it.
Kato: I regret that I can’t remember the title, but I remember that “Enterprise” had an episode in which a Klingon lawyer regretted that the warrior caste was so dominant–he felt that the warriors were overshadowing Klingons who excelled in other professions.
I like the episode where Riker serves on a Klingon ship as well, mainly because it introduced Klag, who’s a really great character (thanks in no small part to our rewatcher).
Having a wife who was part Klingon and part Human was good for Worf, because there was someone else who was part of both worlds.
I, too, am glad that “Kling” never stuck as a name for the homeworld!
Also, the episode “Suspicions” in the 6th season introduced a Klingon scientist (along with a Ferengi scientist).
I think that Suspicions tried very hard to break the Planet of Hats trope that is so pervasive in most of the Trek series. (warning: tvtropes link!)
Kligons on Tos felt like they might have an empire. TNG Klingons felt like they eat each other
It could have been worse… it could have been Klingy…
Bob@9: It could have been far worse: one of the authors writing Trek books in the 80s referred to the Klingon homeworld as “Khazi”. (Un)fortunately, his agent told him to behave…
Bob: Gene Roddenberry often voiced annoyance with some of the early novels, making it clear that he did not consider them cannon. Gee, I wonder why…?
Hmm, for me this was the first episode in the first season that really made me think this new Trek actually had promise (though the episode when Riker does his dance with Minuet also scored well in this regard). I’d have to watch it again, especially in sequence with the previous episodes, to recall exactly why, but I did like (1) the signs of grit (for want of a better word) in the ST universe that seemed real rather than forced–just add Klingons and stir, (2) the evidence that Klingons were NOT monolithic in the all-for-honor sweepstakes–duty vs. honor, the need to choose between one or the other (yeah, not all choices are so black and white, but still . . .), and the fact that these choices could have real repercussions for the characters that might not be so good (let’s call this the “Let’s get the hell out of here” effect), and (3) the Klingon death scream, which was still sending chills down my spine the last time I rewatched this episode, oh, probably about 6 or 7 years ago by now. I’m not saying it’s a perfect episode–the first season was pretty stiff and clunky overall, especially when it came to dialogue and many of the performances–but to repeat I recall thinking when it first aired that this was the first episode that really made me think ST:TNG might actually have some game after all.
“Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country would refer to the Klingon homeworld as Qo’noS…”
— Or rather, the film referred to it as Kronos (a bit odd, since that’s the Greek name for Saturn, both the mythological Titan and the planet), and soon thereafter, the revised edition of Okrand’s Klingon Dictionary explained that name away as a transliteration of “Qo’noS.”
1: “And this is the episode that sealed it: The Klingons have one world culture that everyone follows, one default personality.”
— I have to disagree there. If anything, this episode made it pretty clear that the Klingons were divided: Korris and his group were renegades seeking to return to the old warlike ways because they stifled under the peaceful conditions of reformed Klingon society. It was later Klingon episodes that basically ignored this and reduced the entire Klingon species to a monolithic bunch of bloodthirsty savages exactly like Korris and Konmel, which makes no damn sense. Why would the Federation be willing to ally with a race as barbaric and murderous as the Klingons were portrayed in later TNG, DS9, etc.? I much prefer “Heart of Glory”‘s idea that most Klingons had outgrown that brutality, and it’s a shame that later Trek producers abandoned that idea and reduced them to a grotesque, unsubtle Space Viking caricature.
I agree “Heart of Glory” has its flaws. Yes, the opening stuff with Geordi’s VISOR was padded and pointless (though it might not have felt that way if the show had actually continued to make use of the VISOR as a superpower rather than just a fancy piece of eyewear or a convenient means for bad guys to hack Geordi’s brain). Yes, Dorn’s acting at this point was mediocre compared to what it became — though it was a step up from his usual work in this season. Yes, the failure to search the prisoners is a plot hole (although turnabout is fair play, since TUC established that Klingons don’t search their prisoners either). And the climax always bugs me; the dialogue says Korris is aiming at the dilithium chamber, but he’s actually aiming at a nondescript piece of the engine shaft a full story above said chamber because the director thought it’d be cooler to stage the scene on the upper level of the set.
But overall, I think “Heart of Glory” is possibly the strongest episode of the first season, with only “The Big Goodbye” rivalling it. It’s a dramatically effective episode and our first good exploration of the 24th-century Klingons (and one that unfortunately got followed up on in all the wrong ways). I actually like the melodramatic Klingon dialogue. And I really love Ron Jones’s score here. It’s most notable for its pastiche of Goldsmith’s Klingon theme, but in the big dialogue scene between Worf, Korris, and Konmel in guest quarters, it has a very Fred Steiner-like quality (evoking Apollo’s theme in particular), giving it a TOS flavor which the theatrical, flowery dialogue fits into nicely.
“I have to disagree there. If anything, this episode made it pretty
clear that the Klingons were divided: Korris and his group were
renegades seeking to return to the old warlike ways because they stifled under the peaceful conditions of reformed Klingon society”
The old warlike ways that every Klingon used to follow, according to them. Almost as if there was only one world culture. Almost as if Klingons all shared the same core personality, you could say.
Frankly, the episode gives little evidence that the NuKlingon peace is all that peaceful or reformed. Quite the opposite, and except for extremely mild hints in a couple of other episodes, this only got worse.
Ho hum. I find Klingons very boring. Like the Ferengi, their one personality trait is so ridiculiously outlandish you can’t believe that they actually ever achieved space flight.
Well, for one I have always liked this episode. I remember the impression the Klingon death ritual left on me when I watched this as a kid. Rewatching it now I found it very funny to see Picard “gossiping” with Riker and Data about it!! :P Seemed somewhat out of character…specially doing it on the bridge instead of in private quarters…
The Riker episode where he serves in a Klingon ship is one of the few Riker eps I like….honestly I never liked him very much, I’ve always felt he was the male “Troi”…he basically just repeated Picard’s orders and served as meat shield for him by going on the away missions….
@krad: Most of your criticisms of this episode don’t make much sense to me. You seem to be looking at it firmly through the lens of episodes that came after it, sometimes many years after it, and that’s an unfair way to judge it. You wonder why the crew questions Worf’s loyalty? Until this episode, Worf has played a very small role on the show. Neither the viewer nor the other characters know him very well and have no reason to trust him other than the fact that he wears the same spandex suit as the good guys. This episode is essentially the character’s “roll-out” and I think it functions very well in that sense. In one hour, Worf goes from being a background character to the character we know and love — strong, brave, honorable, and trying hard to take the best of two different cultures. The writers seem to nail his personality on the first try, which is more than I can say for other roll-out episodes like “The Battle,” “Haven” or “Datalore.” This episode also lets us know who the Klingons are now and how they fit into the new status quo of the Star Trek episode. We get to see how they’ve adapted to live in a peaceful universe, and how disciplined they need to be to prevent their aggression from breaking through. Their funeral rites, which we see here for the first time, efficiently tell you everything you need to know about their culture (basically, they’re badasses). I don’t agree that Vaughn Armstrong overacts when playing Korris — he’s certainly no worse than Robert O’Reilly when he plays Gowron three years down the line. Korris seems quite charismatic and his philosophy seems plausible (for Klingons) until Worf dismantles it so efficiently. And I strongly disagree about Michael Dorn’s performance, which you said is sub par. I think he’s great in the scene where he explains his backstory, and I think the scene between Worf and Korris in engineering is one of my favorite performances by Dorn in the entire series. You get the sense that Worf is deeply angry at Korris’s vision of what it is to be a Klingon, because it’s essentially a vision of violent killers with no sense of honor or duty. In the DS9 years of Emo Worf, I really missed the kind of aggression Dorn used to put into his performance.
I also love the scene in this episode where we get to see through Geordi’s eyes. While I bet Picard felt kind of stupid for getting distracted and wasting time when the freighter nearly exploded with the away team aboard, I have to agree with him that this was the moment when we really begin to understand Geordi.
What’s interesting about “Kling” is that the Klingon word for Klingon is “tlhIngan”. However, the root seems to be “tlhI”, not “tlhIng”. I’m inferring this because the suffix “-ngan” is “inhabitant”. (The Klingon Dictionary gives, IIRC, “terangan” for Terran and “romuluSngan” for Romulan.)
So you could make an argument for “tlhI” (“Kli”) for the Klingon homeworld. Which isn’t great, but is better than “Kling”.
I’ve never met a Klingon episode I didn’t like. In the interest of time, I can see how it becomes necessary to make the alien species in Star Trek somewhat one-note (this is afterall just a TV show.) That said, my favorite Klingon encounters are the ones where you do get to see someone doing something other than “warrioring.” After all, there’s got to be some Klingon scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. or like SF_Fangirl said, they would have never acheived spaceflight. And compared to other Star Trek aliens, Klingons are probably the most fleshed-out species we have seen next to Humans.
I agree that this was a great roll-out for Worf. Tons of back-story that was carried through two series.
I agree with Pendard@17’s point that this was Worf’s first real episode. As a junior lieutenant new to the Enterprise, and subsequently new to everyone else on the bridge crew, it seems like a natural possibility for there to be some unanswered questions in everyone’s minds about his loyalties. And when his behavior is not initially and immediately apparent to be on the side of the angels (so to speak), I think they’re allowed just a little bit of room to question what he’s actually going to do. The only person who appears to trust him unequivocally is Yar: even when the heigtened emotion of the adrenalin rush was still lingering, she says her only concern was for Korris’s behavior, not for Worf’s. When Worf reaffirms their initial faith in him at the end of the episode, they are visibly relieved and Picard verbally states their confidence in him as a fellow officer and member of the trusted bridge crew.
After this episode, of course, pulling out the “we don’t know whether to trust you, Worf” card a second time would be overplaying things, I’d say. So I’m glad they didn’t.
Am I the only one who noticed that this episode seemed to imply that the Klingons were actually in the Federation and not just allies? This is the only episode where we see the Federation seal being displayed by the Klingons (or any other non-human species for that matter). Also, Korris referred to Enterprise as a Human Starfleet vessel – as if to imply that there are also Klingon Starfleet vessels…
Wow, I would just love to get into a discussion with everyone here about Klingons needing to break the planet of hats trope in order to achieve spaceflight, and to point out similarities between the overbearing warrior class and certain fandoms in our own society. I could probably write a few pages on that, so…
The Romulan comment makes sense if you go by stardate; “Angel One” takes place chronologically after this. However, it sort of brings up the problem of out-of-order stardates for the first season that I’ve been getting annoyed with. For example, there are at least four episodes featuring Tasha Yar that take place chronologically after *spoiler* she dies.
Love this episode!
Okay, Geordi is trying out a new gizmo during a rescue mission that’s supposed to be done with quickly because the ship is about to go boom-boom. The concept of the VISOR is awesome, and as cool as the scene is, it’s too jarring when placed in a scenario where there’s no time to dawdle.
The Klingon death scream is innovative, fascinating, and cool. As is Klingon lore at this point in the show’s run. There’s mystery and there’s Worf, bridging it. And the Khitomer reference, which leads to several great stories referencing it down the road (Trek VI, Yesterday’s Enterprise, etc).
Given this is early in the show’s run, it’s amazing it works at all – season 1 is often quite messy and unfocused.
I love how the Klingons are pressuring Worf about heritage. “Birthright Part II” – SPOILERS COMING – would see a reversal of this; as Worf of the Enterprise who assimilated with the humans is now prisoner of a camp that has Romulans and Klingons making their own melting pot culture, which he feels a need to disassemble. Which is another reason why much of season 6 is so (underwhelming), Worf’s actions were hypocritical, amongst other things… and proof the Klingon culture that TNG nurtured was being driven into the ground, long before DS9 could dig it down even further…
Having said that, with rumors of a new Worf series that Michael Dorn would be in, I’d salivate. TNG/DS9 would really make Worf shine and they ran out of ideas, but with time having passed, there’s room for new ideas — and Worf was a popular character by any definition.
Caught this one on SPACE yesterday afternoon. Not really one of my 1st Season favs and for good reason. The inital Geordi VISOR transmission substory is way overdrawn filler. When Picard asks Geordi what the shape is that he’s looking at, it’s pretty damn obvious that it’s Riker. I really had no doubt that the away team would beam back safely even after the Batras blew up. Yar’s overreaction to the Klingons picking up one of the Enterprise children is silly as is the crew’s misplaced suspicion of Worf’s loyalties.
I did like the Klingon death howl, that Worf gets to kill Korras in engineering and address the Klingon ship commander. There is some good backstory developed in the inital Klingon dinner scene as well as the scene in what I believe is an observation room.
Overall, not a bad 1st Season episode. Warp Factor 6.
Yes, the VISOR stuff is filler, but it’s interesting, world-building filler. Knowing that Geordi’s VISOR lets him see things others don’t is an important issue behind the series, and giving us a visual to help us understand that is a good idea.
The stuff with the VISOR was one of my favourite parts of this episode, to be honest. That said, it was a little obvious that when Geordi was looking at Riker and Data, it was not Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner but their photo doubles Richard Sarstedt (also one of the most frequently seen extras in both TNG and Voyager) and Ken Gilden.
I think that the episode itself is pretty mediocre but, as previously mentioned, it is important in that it established many things which resonate in later Worf and Klingon centric episodes. I also liked the fact that Worf was given something to do other than report problems to Picard, an arduous task which seemed to occupy 75% of his screen time in Season 1.
It’s a shame that this is Vaughn Armstrong’s only TNG appearance.
Rewatching this episode right now on BBC America. Several things strike me. 1. I know for the viewers, this is Worf’s big roll out but it should not have been done in that way. I hate how “Star Trek” continually plays Worf as this outsider; granted this early, it’s understandable but not in DS9. A person of a different race should never be viewed as supportive of that race first and their loyalty second, unless they have demonstrated it; that’s racist. Worf was a lieutenant junior grade command officer in Starfleet. He was virtually certainly a Federation citizen after being adopted by the Rozhenkos and was in Starfleet regardless; his loyalty is to Starfleet. Picard even mentions this to Worf when he kills Duras, that there are 13 different races represented on the Enterprise with different cultural beliefs and he respects them all but they chose to serve Starfleet first. Korros shouts that he will speak “Only to my countrymen! Only to Worf!” but Worf isn’t his countryman; he’s a Starfleet lieutenant. 2. Why was Yar sent to the transporter room? To ensure security for the Klingons? Where was the transporter operator on-duty? Yar couldn’t possibly have the same skills to transport someone as a “crackerjack Starfleet transporter chief.” 3. Yar’s pretty inept here as a security chief. When she’s ordered to apprehend the criminals, she takes four officers and approaches the Klingons from one direction, with a turbolift to the battle bridge nearby. Then she nearly has a hostage situation on her hands when a little girl runs right out of a turbolift, practically into Korris’s waiting arms. A smart security chief would have done this completely differently to ensure she got her criminals. She should have silently evacuated that deck of all non-essential personnel, especially civilians. Then she should have established security force fields on every access point to the battle bridge and all corridors surrounding their location. Next she should have had security teams fanned out to approach the criminals from all four directions; the turbolift, the corridors, the opposite hallway. That way, no civilians, particularly children, could possibly have interfered and she could have proceeded in a strategic way. Worf should have immediately stepped aside; Yar was his superior officer and had her orders, there should have been no hesitation there. They should have been searched for any possible weapons and secured separately in cells in the brig, not together in open-air crew quarters with a forcefield. The second security officer that got shot should not have waited for Korris to aim and shoot at him, he should have opened up with phaser fire. And as soon as phaser fire was detected, security force fields should have been erected on all crucial decks, especially Main Engineering, the secondary command center of the ship! On a Galaxy-class ship, there has to be dozens of security officers. They should have had three decks above and below that quarters secured with force fields and had security teams crawling all over it. He managed to get to Main Engineering, on deck 36 without any opposition or obstruction? Then the staff in Main Engineering do nothing but gasp and gawk at him; good grief, pull out a phaser, someone. Throw yourselves at him. At least hit a button to put a forcefield up around the inner warp chamber. You just let him take over your engine room and hold the ship hostage with a phaser pointed at the warp core? Pathetic. With the lax security on the Enterprise (as proved again and again), it’s a miracle it survived 7 years.
@27 Access and security are two areas where I’ve always just had to suspend logic. In the 21st century we have keycards or fabs for every off limit area in corporations, tech design buildings, military, museums, medical facilities, and even studio lots. It’s especially true for any facility that has visitors. We even lock restrooms for customer access only. They can’t keep engineering off limits? The same frustration for security. They always seem inept. In this episode, it made me super happy that the security guard managed to get off a warning that the force field on the holding cell was down the moment it happened. But the funny part is that it stuck out in my head as unusually competent. And yet, how I love the show.
The Klingons speak in bad Shakespeare here. Good thing several years later someone had the sense to just have the Klingons speak *actual* Shakespeare. “You’ve never experienced Shakespeare until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.”
Hey @3 Scifantasy: it’s 9 years on, but I wanted to thank you for leading me to Eric Burns’s essay on John M. Ford and his work on ‘modern’ Klingons. Reminds me of the Bill Finger of Worf et al. Now I have to go back and find Ford’s novels…
What’s Bill Finger got to do with this?
I totally need K’Nera’s lighting and fog effects for my next Zoom meeting. And the logos, too.
Watching my shuffled order S7/S1, I got here today. I agree with those above who liked this ep. Interestingly (to me), @krad, you said as a Klingon specialist you’re not fond of this one – tellingly, I am totally not a Klingon fan and usually their episodes are the least interesting to me, but I actually liked this one! I wonder why that is.
I dig the faux-Shakespeare – but I have realized through this rewatch that I am often into the genre quotifications that others may not be. I quite often like the knowing use of stylization and trope, like Fistful of Datas, or the Frankenstein-like midcentury laboratory in “Brothers”, etc. For whatever reason, it’s a kind of mode my brain leaps into joyously, whereas other disbeliefs, it refuses to suspend. :)
I think this is one of many eps that probably plays better in Blu-Ray, since it’s so over the top cinematic. The dialogue, the jump cut screaming… I can only imagine that watching the old VHS tapes (possibly including commercial breaks) would not have worked as well as the 1080p with remastered music on my studio monitor speakers, for something so epic.
Also, while watching this one it finally crossed my mind, yet another reason Buffy might have been influenced by STTNG: Tasha Yar may have been intended as a sort of similar surprise to the Buffy premise, though it didn’t work out that strongly – the pretty blonde who turns out to be the wielder of great strength and confident power. She was voted Most Likely to be the Cliche Victim but actually she’s the Chief of Security, and (almost) nobody questions it (mostly). It’s a lovely idea, and if it had worked out better it might have inspired more women to grow up with more confidence and interest in a broader range of possibilities. But I feel like they didn’t really know what to do with her character to really go places with that, which Buffy did well. Yar should have been played by, or at least doubled by, a circus acrobat/warrior.
@32/Fresnel: If you get that Zoom stuff going, share. :)
P.S. With a name like Kling, I’m glad it didn’t stick!
to return to us after your tour of duty, simply google: rewtch heart
(it’s the second result but I’m still amazed at the google fu of this place)
I did rig a toplight on the curtain rod over my couch! Now just need a fog machine..
I still want to know what Bill Finger had to do with all this.
I really enjoyed this episode. This was the first real attempt to expand on Klingon culture in the show, so I am willing to cut it a lot of slack. Of course later episodes and other shows did more with it, but the seeds of all of that are here. In fact that’s one of the fun things about the whole first season in general. A lot of it’s clunky, but it’s laying ground work and seeding in ideas that later writers would run with. It’s charming in an AD&D first edition sort of way.
I liked this for giving us the first look at the Klingons in the Next Generation era. I felt bad for Worf when he got to bond with members of his own species for what might have been the first time in his life (or so it seemed at the time) only to find out their true intentions.
Very belated reply @21/Jayburd: “Am I the only one who noticed that this episode seemed to imply that the Klingons were actually in the Federation and not just allies?”
I got that same impression, what with the Federation and Klingon emblems together on the wall behind K’Nera. As I said above, the assumption here seemed to be that most Klingons had outgrown being warriors, or at least being conquerors.
Come to think of it, this is the episode that introduced the term “Klingon Defense Force,” indicating that their military was now for self-defense only. I wonder if the intent was an analogy with the Japan Self Defense Force, a non-aggressive military replacing the forces of the previous imperialist regime. It would’ve been interesting to see them developed further in that vein instead of the Samurai Viking thing we got. Or, heck, keep the samurai part, but in terms of the latter-day reality where they were mostly a bureaucratic elite mythologizing their knightly past in fiction and theater.
It would be interesting to calculate the percentage of the occasions when the Enterprise’s security team, when featured in an episode, fails to maintain security. It’s probably like 90%.
Count me among those who think the Klingon death scream ritual is way cool. Apparently the writers here thought so as well. I think Picard mentions this as being perhaps the first time non-Klingons have witnessed it. And then it happens again, the same day. Weird!
@39/fullyfunctional: “It would be interesting to calculate the percentage of the occasions when the Enterprise’s security team, when featured in an episode, fails to maintain security. It’s probably like 90%.”
But that’s the selection bias of fiction, isn’t it? As the saying goes, adventure is what happens when things go wrong. If the security forces succeeded in halting or averting the threat, then it wouldn’t be a big enough problem to tell a story about. So that might happen the majority of the time, but we only see the minority of cases where security precautions don’t work as intended.
Although that argument is harder to justify in an episodic series where major crises happen a couple of dozen times a year.
@CLB agree, of course. And binge-watching on a rewatch the way I’m doing right now probably doesn’t help, because it just magnifies how often this sort of thing happens. At this point, thought, whenever there is mention of a security detail I’m waiting for the breach. :)
@13. Christopher L. Bennett: “a bit odd, since that’s the Greek name for Saturn, both the mythological Titan and the planet”
Which might be easier to swallow were it ever called out in-story but is even odder after the ridiculous coincidence that Vulcan, Romulus, and Remus have names that fit the Earth convention of planets named for Roman mythological figures. (I always wanted a scene where someone brought that up and got told “Oh, ‘Vulcan’ is merely a human convention.” “What do Vulcans call it, then?” [beat] “Hephaestus.”)
@21. EnsignJayburd: “Korris referred to Enterprise as a Human Starfleet vessel – as if to imply that there are also Klingon Starfleet vessels”
That definitely jumped out at me watching this time around.
@27. SethC: “Yar’s pretty inept here as a security chief.”
Everything you say there is true, although pretty much all of it is actually failures of the script (which magnifies the frustration because we have to attribute it to failures of the personnel and they should be much more competent than depicted).
31. MaGnUs: “What’s Bill Finger got to do with this?”
I believe the point being was made was that in the commenter’s opinion John M. Ford was to the development of Klingons as Bill Finger was to the development of Batman and likewise egregiously uncredited. Now if your follow-up question is “What’s Bill Finger but a secondhand emotion?”…
@42/Arben: “Which might be easier to swallow were it ever called out in-story but is even odder after the ridiculous coincidence that Vulcan, Romulus, and Remus have names that fit the Earth convention of planets named for Roman mythological figures.”
It was always implicit from “Balance of Terror” that “Romulus and Remus” were the human-assigned names to the twin planets that the mysterious enemy came from. After all, we never saw them face-to-face and barely had enough contact to negotiate a treaty, so it’s far more likely that we would’ve used our own name for them. Unfortunately, ENT: “Minefield” overwrote that sensible interpretation.
The same was probably meant to be true of Vulcan — it was the name that humans used for it rather than the indigenous name. After all, English speakers routinely use Anglicized names for foreign countries — Finland instead of Suomi, India instead of Bharat, China instead of Zhonghua. So there’s no reason at all to assume that Vulcans call their own planet Vulcan, except when addressing English speakers who know it by that name. (If anything, ENT implies they call it Minshara.)
Indeed, given that Spock was initially proposed to be “possibly half-Martian,” I suspect that the writers originally intended Vulcan to be the hypothetical Solar planet within the orbit of Mercury, whose existence was debunked by General Relativity but which lived on in science fiction for decades thereafter. In which case its name would definitely have been a human coinage.
“I believe the point being was made was that in the commenter’s opinion John M. Ford was to the development of Klingons as Bill Finger was to the development of Batman and likewise egregiously uncredited.”
Which doesn’t really wash, because Ford’s interpretation of the Klingons was not adopted by later canon. If anything, I’ve seen it said that Ford’s Klingons are more like how the Cardassians were later developed.
Also, Bill Finger was essentially the original creator of Batman, more so than Bob Kane. He’d be more analogous to Gene L. Coon as the creator of the Klingons, except that Coon was credited for it.
I’m well aware of Kane’s highly self-serving, even delusionary narcissism, but I think he qualifies as Batman’s co-creator. Anyway, I was simply attempting to answer to MaGnUs’ nearly two-year-old questions. I don’t agree with the correlation for the reasons you mention, Christopher, although I’m not actually familiar with Ford’s novel.
@44/Arben: Here’s artist Ty Templeton’s summary of what Kane created vs. what Finger created:
The Final Reflection is very worth checking out, and very unusual. It’s presented as a historical novel written within the Trek universe based on actual events, with a brief frame story of Kirk and the crew reading and reacting to the controversial book. It was one of the first real standouts of the Pocket Trek novel line, and one of the most influential within the novels of the later 1980s. Its impact on canonical Klingons was minimal, though, aside from a couple of passing references here and there.
I just dove back into reading Trek comics and noticed that in a lettercol from DC’s first series the Ford novel is mentioned, with praise from the editor, as is the FASA RPG’s intriguing theory / explanation of various Klingon branches.
Regarding that strip, Christopher, I opted not to comment earlier at the risk of sounding like a Kane apologist but I have to observe that as much as I respect Ty Templeton — and I know all about Kane’s original conception of Batman as a blond guy with a domino mask in a red suit and bat wings — he’s cheating by mentioning additions to Batman lore that post-date Detective Comics #27 and can properly be credited to not just Finger but Jerry Robinson and other early writers like Gardner Fox. The initial creation, as redundant as that sounds, is its own special beast.
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@46/Arben: I’d hardly call that cheating, given that Kane put his name on the comics as the sole creator for decades, so he certainly claimed credit for the work of Robinson, Fox, and others.
Besides, even the blond guy Kane “created” was traced from a Flash Gordon panel with Leonardo Da Vinci wings tacked on. Although Finger plagiarized the first Batman comic’s storyline from a Shadow novella, so neither one is entirely blameless.