TNG - Birthright

[clearspira]

Whorf whinges when a boy uses a Klingon spear as a spade to dig the garden. That is a whiggly whoggly, a wharrior's wheapon. It is dishonourable to dig the garden. Later he goes to the Temple, above the altar is a battleth, so he whinges That is a battleth, a wharrior's wheapon. It is dishonourable to let it be rusty and dirty. The spear was useful so it was clean and sharp and for all its dishonour it worked to kill the antelope. Make up your mind Whorf.

It's funny because throughout human history the sword, spear and knives were tools as well as weapons. They did a dozen things. This is worf being worf.

[Yukaphile]

Kinda funny when you remember in DS9, he had his honorary KINOs (Klingons In Name Only - proper ones unlike in STD) till the soil to give them a final battle before facing nonexistence.

[cdrood]

Whorf whinges when a boy uses a Klingon spear as a spade to dig the garden. That is a whiggly whoggly, a wharrior's wheapon. It is dishonourable to dig the garden. Later he goes to the Temple, above the altar is a battleth, so he whinges That is a battleth, a wharrior's wheapon. It is dishonourable to let it be rusty and dirty. The spear was useful so it was clean and sharp and for all its dishonour it worked to kill the antelope. Make up your mind Whorf.

It's funny because throughout human history the sword, spear and knives were tools as well as weapons. They did a dozen things. This is worf being worf.

In fact, many weapons STARTED as tools because that's what farmers had to defend themselves.

[Madner Kami]

Yes, like spears and bows and arrows.

[cdrood]

Worf's part of Birthright was very interesting to me; given my experiences with different groups and units and commands. There were good points that were brought up, like Worf's attitude towards the female Romulan/Klingon hybrid - but even then we have a history of Worf not exactly taking well to Klingons anyway. The running joke on this site in early TNG seasons is that Worf is just a feral animal, so I think Worf displays some nuance (for him) in dealing with this location that is Romulan and Klingon together.

Worf's declaration of "I'll stay, but you can't make me not be me while I'm here." is reminiscent to me of places and groups I've had to be in where they tried to make it so you were whatever they expected or demanded you to be while you were there, and nothing else. You're not allowed to have outside interests, not permitted to search for alternatives, or a community that one would better fit in as a community.

Certainly this place is NOT the place for Worf, but at no time does Worf put a gun - I mean a phaser to any individual's head and expect that all Klingons follow the one true way - Worf's way, then they should all be killed to save their honor.

What Worf does do is invite those who have any interest in exploring learning some aspects of their culture that they were unaware of, or forbidden to learn as the case may be. Yes he does instigate some of it, but Worf would never force any of the people there to come to his way of thinking.

Look at Worf's own experience with his son Alexander, how much he struggles to have him fit the mold of a perfect Klingon son. You can say that Worf dumps Alexander on his parents to get rid of him because he views his son as a failure, but more likely it's that Alexander isn't going to be able to adapt to the kind of active duty lifestyle that Worf has serving as ship's company.

I think he does a better approach here with playfully and gently (for Wof) guiding those who show interest into their heritage. If the society the Romulans and Klingons have built together can only sustain itself by forbidding anyone to ever leave the area, or learn about any Klingon culture, then it still is a prison, only a more benign one; and not particularly stable either if an outsider's ideas could bring the whole thing to collapse.

Should anyone I know who has served with me be asked, they would tell you that I push back against strict adherence to ideas, things that are explicitly forbidden, or tradition simply because I'm told "because I say so", for example: Command P.T. - no problem with that, however I said I would not participate in a command sports game because I just detest playing sports. Nowhere does it say I can be ordered to play a sports game -AFTER- P.T. with the unit simply because the majority would like to play so they can delay starting work. They were not happy at all because this is their custom and they've built a thing around it.

I always want to know why and that's not a question that people like hearing who are your superiors. That may be why I like the Worf story a lot more than either Data's, or the review's opinion. I'm fine with that being an unpopular opinion, it just seems to me that Worf's part of this got a lot more looking down on than it deserved.

I'll point out as a fellow Veteran that the purpose of such activities is to build team morale and bond you with the people you're serving, so as to be more effective together. However, it is annoying when you have time off and you want to spend it doing what you want, and instead are spending it doing what your commanders' want.

Worf's experience is a little different than being forced into mandated extracurricular activities with the rest of the community, however. He's being thrown onto a former prison turned into penal colony. There was a bloody war in living memory of those on that planet, and they've found a way to find peace between them and stop being bloodthirsty enemies towards each other. While traditions are vital to a culture, they're not completely forgotten or restricted in this case. They still have the songs, games, fashions, etc. that are part of the Klingon culture. Worf isn't satisfied with how it's evolved from his version of Klingon beliefs, and is unhappy with it. The episode then sides with him on this, and we're supposed to side against the older generation for having built peace between these two warring peoples.

I'd like to compare this to Pike from the season 2 Discovery episode "New Eden", when he discovers the primitive humans on a faraway colony, with their combination of different beliefs and cultures to make a more peaceful world. He doesn't chide their accomplishments, he listens, and quietly accepts that they have different views on things, and have changed culturally than from what we are, and it has worked for them. They run into some prime directive shenanigans, and he does give them a boost to help their culture to get progress started, but he doesn't start showing immediate revulsion for their differences from what he's used to. (This is also why I'm very fond of Pike, he's a very diplomatic and principled man)

Worf doesn't seem to recognize the great potential this community has achieved, and views it with utter scorn. That's why it's a little hard to side with him.

Suppose, instead of being about Klingons, this episode was about a group of humans who, after being abducted by a powerful alien race, have built a culture and lifestyle of peace and harmony for themselves, either rejecting or being unaware of humanity's old warlike ways. But then someone more in touch with humanity's violent past arrives, and starts teaching the people there how to hunt and fight and kill, while expressing visceral disgust at the idea of co-existing and copulating with aliens.

If that were the premise of the episode, then I can't believe that Star Trek would present this restoration of martial culture as being anything other than woefully misguided at best, or outright villainous at worst. Doing otherwise would be about as antithetical to the franchise's core themes as you could get.

You're basically describing any work about a man finding utopia, and either having to leave because his presences would destroy it, he eventually settles into their ways and obtains peace, or has to defend it against a greater threat. See the novel or movie Lost Horizon and my sig for reference about why such a place would have to exist in secret.

If it's not that, expect a grand reveal that they're meant to be cattle for some other predator race, and need to learn the value of violence again. See a number of Outer Limits and Twilight Zone episodes in which peace on earth and good will towards man is actually an alien plot to use us.

This episode doesn't really hit either, and that's the problem. We're supposed to side with Worf in his quest to utterly destroy their society, but the episode kind of realizes that this is a bad thing, so we have this weird compromise. Plus, from what we've seen of Klingon culture, excluding Worf, they're utter hypocrites who only care about the face of honor when compared to other families and what their honor gives their family in return(power, wealth, land, vassals, etc.) The Klingons there are leaving their lives and are going to have to be burdened with those societal expectations for the rest of their lives, or disappear and swiftly either emigrating to the Federation, or returning to the planet to rejoin their families.

Remember, this is the same culture that disrespects any non-warrior, and they're primarily raised to be farmers and craftsmen. They're going to find themselves, unless they're of very high blood(which may not matter due to some of them being unpure genetically or dishonored due to their families not wanting them), as the bottom rungs of Klingon society. At best, they'll rise in station due to the Cardassian invasion, and that's only if they're not horribly killed by Starfleet, the Cardassians, or the Dominion later on. Hurray for Worf, he's guaranteed they'll be cogs and servants for the rest of their lives.

If the TNG era has a major flaw, it's that it never really delved into the consquences of the empires from TOS (Klingons & Romulans). Sure, we saw fallout from the Cardassians and little from the Dominion, but we've never even been shown a subject race of the Klingons or Romulans. We're only shown how these dictatorships affect the high born members of their own species for the most part. As far as we can tell, they have no voice in government or the military. They may not even be allowed to travel offworld, and that's assuming they're not just slaughtered as part of the invasion.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

This two-parter had an opportunity to address the incompatibility between Worf's typically Klingon views and the Federation's philosophy, but it didn't really do that satisfactorily. And despite a decent set-up of the issue, in the end it didn't deal with the specter of Mogh very well either. Instead it ends up being the definition of an average (or mediocre) episode, which is disappointing.

Unlike many, I'm not a huge fan of Data's storyline either. It should be important, but instead it comes across simply as something that happens. There's no real story arc there, it's filler that's abruptly told and abruptly ended. The nice, kinda trippy flight sequence doesn't make up for that for me.

The problems with this two-parter are the sort of problems that often develop when you have a story that adds up to only a little bit more than one episode but much less than two.

[Darth Wedgius]

Your point about Kirk is well stated. The vast majority of his "one night stands" with alien women tend to be a means to an end. He'll seduce them to get information or to get them on his side. It's very much a James Bond scenario.

When you look at the actual relationships we've been presented, it's a much different scenario. All are human and Caucasian. All are highly intelligent and as focused on their careers as he is, which kind of gives him an out. However, in all but one instance, they seem to truly maintain a genuine affection and would seemingly be willing to resume the relationship, even if only for a short time.

And one Native American. Well, descended from Native Americans. But arguably he wasn't quite himself at the time.

[Beastro]

If the TNG era has a major flaw, it's that it never really delved into the consquences of the empires from TOS (Klingons & Romulans). Sure, we saw fallout from the Cardassians and little from the Dominion, but we've never even been shown a subject race of the Klingons or Romulans. We're only shown how these dictatorships affect the high born members of their own species for the most part. As far as we can tell, they have no voice in government or the military. They may not even be allowed to travel offworld, and that's assuming they're not just slaughtered as part of the invasion.

As odd as it sounds, it's an issue Trek has only really touched on in the 4x game Birth of the Federation, where minor races and how you interact with them is a big facet to the game (butter them up with credits to eventually invite them to join you or just outright conquer them).

Ironically, the game the way it played opened up to some weird territory due to how the game played out. Conquering other main race systems simply wasn't worth the effort. Taking them often damaged their infrastructure too much to make them worth keeping an always near rebellious population around, whereas minors could be worth it simply to build their unique buildings you couldn't get from the majors. The result was that it was better to just bombard systems and wipe them clean of life to repopulate with your own people. The systems wouldn't be of much use starting off from scratch, but you never needed to worry about them causing trouble.

It didn't help either that often for many factions the best way to improve empire moral was to do just this (The Klingon's get a mood bonus from all aggressive acts, negatives from peaceful ones, the Federation the opposite, everyone else a mix in between)

[Beastro]

This two-parter had an opportunity to address the incompatibility between Worf's typically Klingon views and the Federation's philosophy, but it didn't really do that satisfactorily. And despite a decent set-up of the issue, in the end it didn't deal with the specter of Mogh very well either. Instead it ends up being the definition of an average (or mediocre) episode, which is disappointing.

Worf was really in need of an episode that smacked him in the face with how much the Klingon warrior culture was antithetical to his own.

Now that I think about it, it's actually part of the reason why I've always felt annoyed by the DS9 treatment of Klingon politics and how they're implied to be an odious, dishonourable shame that undermine the started warrior values of Klingon's that ignores how wonderfully screwed up the Klingon Empire would be if they didn't bow to practicality and politicing. Without it I could see the Klingon Empire's change of leadership always becoming a civil war while numerous foreign wars keep happening in between as the Empire thinks through its lens of honour culture and resorts to war as the reply to every slight (with further civil war if the leadership don't wage war as a sign of their unfitness to leader the Empire).

If somebody does eventually continue on from the TNG era in the way TNG did after the TOS one I really hope they work on removing the Plant of Hatness to the well established races like the Klingons and show that the Empire has actually just been in the grip of an influential sub-culture that emerged to prominence after Kah'las that has periodically waxed and waned in power over the centuries with TOS era being the last time another group was in power.

[CharlesPhipps]

I dunno, it's possible Klingon religion/philosophy is actually Lawful Good and it's just that Klingon culture as a whole ignores any part of it that it's inconvenient. Worf is the Saint Francis of Assisi version of a Klingon who is all about the rules of honor, nobility, integrity, and being a stand-up dude while everyone else is about "WAGHHHHHHHHHHHRR!"

It's not like we don't have similar things in our own society happen all the time.

Certainly, no one in Klingon culture tells Worf is doing it WRONG (except maybe once or twice). They're just exasperated by the WAY he does it.