“Code of Honor”
Written by Katharyn Powers & Michael Baron
Directed by Russ Mayberry and Les Landau (uncredited)
Season 1, Episode 3
Production episode 40271-104
Original air date: October 12, 1987
Stardate: 41235.25
Captain’s Log: The Enterprise travels to Ligon II to negotiate a treaty in order to acquire a vaccine. Lutan beams aboard with his entourage, and is greeted by Picard, Riker, Troi, and Yar. Lutan has his second, Hagon, give Picard a sample of the vaccine, which Yar tries to take first in order to check it. When Hagon resists allowing her to perform her duty, she throws him to the floor, embarrassing the crap out of him.
Lutan, of course, views this as an opportunity, because he’s a suspicious-looking alien leader, and if he didn’t view this as an opportunity, there would be no plot.
After a diplomatic exchange of silly niceties, Lutan asks Yar for a demo of self-defense on the holodeck. Yar does well against the hologram, but Hagon fares less well, being tossed to the floor for the second time in one day. When the Ligonians beam down, they kidnap Yar. Data analogizes what Lutan does to counting coup—he’s being heroic by taking something from a superior enemy.
When Picard politely asks for Yar back, Lutan invites him down to the surface, where they meet Yareena, Lutan’s “first one.” She owns Lutan’s lands, which he protects and rules. Picard agrees to again politely ask for Yar back, this time at a big banquet in front of his peers.
Lutan, however, goes off-book by deciding to keep Yar and make her his first one. His existing first one takes umbrage for obvious reasons and challenges Yar to a duel to the death because, well, that’s what people do. I guess.
Result: cat fight in a jungle gym! Yar and Yareena (yes, really) have a particularly ineptly choreographed battle, using glavins—a mace with poisoned spikes. As soon as Yar (of course) wins, she beams herself and Yareena’s body to the Enterprise, where Crusher administers an antitoxin and revives her. Thanks to her dying, however temporarily, her mating with Lutan is dissolved, and she chooses Hagon, as he’s the only other Ligonian male with a speaking part.
The Enterprise gets the vaccine, and warps away.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: “Lieutenant Yar is physically very attractive.” Good thing she mentioned that, or we might not have noticed!
Can’t We Just Reverse The Polarity?: “It reads similar to early Starfleet efforts, but uses the Heglenian Shift to convert energy and matter in different… Which is actually not important at this time.” Data showing uncharacteristic restraint.
What Happens On the Holodeck Stays On the Holodeck: Yar demonstrates aikido with a holographic fighter. This leads to one of the episode’s better lines, which was sadly not followed up on: “You can create people without a soul?”
No Sex, Please, We’re Starfleet: Yar does find Lutan physically attractive, and Lutan definitely finds her and her ability to throw his second to the floor pretty hot as well. Yareena loves Lutan because, well, everyone loves Lutan, but not enough to keep him when he tries to have her killed. Hagon has the hots for Yareena, and wins in the end, thus vindicating his constantly being thrown to the floor.
The boy!?: Picard, in order to appease Crusher, lets Wesley temporarily sit at ops. He emphasizes the word temporarily very loudly. Later on, for no reason that the script adequately—or even inadequately—explains, Riker lets Wesley again sit at ops, despite there being an entire crew complement of qualified Starfleet personnel on board.
If I Only Had a Brain…: Data and La Forge’s friendship, which would become a cornerstone of the series, is on display for the first time in this episode. Data tries to tell a joke, and fails rather spectacularly.
Welcome Aboard: Jessie Lawrence Ferguson has tremendous presence as Lutan, which is one of the episode’s few saving graces. The same cannot be said of Karole Selmon, who is painfully overwrought as Yareena. James Louis Watkins falls down well as Hagon.
I Believe I Said That: “I’m sorry—this is becoming a speech.”
“You’re the captain, you’re entitled.”
Picard cutting off his Prime Directive rant, and Troi letting him off the hook.
Trivial Matters: Russ Mayberry, the episode’s director, was fired by Gene Roddenberry partway through filming. Apparently, the casting of entirely African-American actors as the aggressively primitive Ligonians did not sit well with the Great Bird of the Galaxy, and Les Landau—who would go on to become one of the franchise’s most prolific directors—finished the job. Also Katharyn Powers would go on to write a first-season Stargate SG1 episode, “Emancipation,” with several similar plot elements.
Make It So: I’m trying to think of a cliché that wasn’t used in this episode, but none spring to mind. A flat, lifeless hour with no kind of suspense, no interesting character development, and a plot that was aggressively paint-by-numbers. Among the lowlights are clunky dialogue, ranging from the stilted diplomatic backing-and-forthing to the clumsy exposition about the Ligonians, to the Ligonians themselves describing their culture as if it was from a textbook rather than their own experiences. Worst is quite possibly the most unsubtle discussion of the Prime Directive in the history of the show by Picard. Mercifully, he cuts it off before it becomes a tiresome speech.
The accusations of racism against the episode that have been leveled by many—most notably actors Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner and staff writer Tracey Tormé—are a bit iffy, only because the script didn’t explicitly call for the Ligonians to be played by African-Americans. If the Ligonians had been played by white people, none of the dialogue would change, and nobody would call it racist.
However, this episode doesn’t need to be racist to be mediocre.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written a mess of stuff about Star Trek. This rewatch is simply adding to the mess. Follow him online at his blog or on Facebook or Twitter under the username KRADeC.
And this is where I stopped watching TNG during broadcast. I simply could not believe how badly this episode was made. The writing, the acting, the score, the choreography, everything. Absolutely terrible. Worse than the worst of the original series.
I came back when a close friend made me watch the season 2 finale, and I was forced to admit that perhaps the series might have some future. I eventually watched seasons 1 and 2 later in re-runs.
Keith,
Thank you so much for the YouTube link to the 2007 DrogonCon panel with Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden and Brent Spiner.
Hilarious stuff!
In retrospect, it is amazing that I continued to watch this show. I suppose I simply willed myself to forget how bad these early episodes were.
The high point of this episode is the musical score by Fred Steiner, the most prolific composer for the original series and the only TOS composer to work on a subsequent Trek TV series. His score for “Code of Honor” isn’t on a par with his best TOS work, but it’s still good, and it’s awesome that a TOS composer got to do a new TOS-style episode score 20 years later. It’s too bad Berman decided to take the music in a more “modern” direction and didn’t bring back Steiner or any other classic Trek composers.
I agree there wasn’t any intended racism in the script; indeed, the dialogue likened Ligonian culture to Ming-Dynasty China rather than anything African. It was the choice of the casting department and the director to go for African-American actors, and I guess it was the director’s choice to have them use faux-African accents, which was probably a mistake. Aside from that, though, I always felt it was a rather progressive step for its time, since until then, you almost never encountered a humanoid-alien culture in sci-fi that wasn’t Caucasian. It was a nice try that misfired.
Still, Katharyn Powers did have a tendency to write anthropologically iffy alien-culture episodes both here and on Stargate SG-1. Keith, you mention “Emancipation,” which is probably the stupidest episode of that series and a serious case of Did Not Do the Research. (Women in horse-nomad cultures like the Mongols were actually far more equal than in sedentary cultures, and didn’t wear veils or live in purdah. And in cultures where women are veiled and sequestered, they don’t simultaneously wear plunging necklines!!!)
It’s interesting that this early Picard apologized for his speechifying, considering how much he embraced highfalutin rhetoric later on. It shows how differently the characters were initially conceived — and how much they were trying to distance TNG from TOS, since it seemed like a conscious effort to differentiate Picard from Kirk, who was known for his big moralizing speeches.
Again, one of the episodes I didn’t see until much later. By the time I saw it (IIRC, it was well after VOY started), it was hard to believe it was even the same series.
I love the episode. It’s the only ST episode I know of in any series with an all African (or all non-Euro, for that matter) planet. I think it’s completely absurd that through 5 series, an animated series, and 11 movies, the producers were so comfortable with the idea that the whole galaxy would look . . . just like them. That’s what’s racist, not the script or cast of this episode.
yeah so what? the planet of big old jerks is black this week. Nobody Ever mentions TOS klinons look just like Martin Landeau when he played Poncho Villa on Bonanza!
I can’t wait until this rewatch gets to Season 2, maybe 3.
I don’t buy the racist claim either. It’s just too bad the rest of the episode sucked so thoroughly.
I never stopped watching TNG, but I do think it was given a chance because it very fortunately had the history of TOS and the movies behind it. Had it been an entirely new series/concept, I honestly don’t know if it would have made it past the first season.
Katharyn Powers also wrote the “Dukes of Hazzard” episode “Swamp Molly,” in which a strong female wrestler tricks Uncle Jesse into going fishing with her because she’s supposedly afraid of being molested! (Another Dukes/TNG link: Jonathan Frakes played Boss Hogg’s nephew in the season 4 opener.)