“Looks like it’s just us, handsome.”
I mentioned the Next Generation poker game’s influence on my life in my post about “The Measure of a Man,” but if there’s a single scene that probably taught me more about how to play the game than any other, it’s the one at the head of this episode – which not only contains great game play (Worf wins, setting him up to bluff his way through the episode’s climax after proclaiming that “Klingons never bluff!”), but is just generally a magnificently written and performed scene, with full kudos to Muldaur, Burton, Spiner, Frakes, and Dorn. It’s one of two scenes in “The Emissary” that are probably responsible for it being better regarded than it actually deserves. The episode is rudimentarily staged, written, and performed, in spite of its good ideas. But there’s little denying that in the moments when this sucker works, it really works.
The other time “it works” is the series’, and Star Trek’s, first full foray into Klingon sex. Unfortunately, it’s probably one of the most chaste love sequences that Star Trek would ever put together, on par with – and this is saying something! – Vulcan mating (the stroking of fingers) back in “Amok Time” or Star Trek III. Fingers get good play here as well – Worf grinds K’Ehleyr’s nails into her palm hard enough to draw blood, as part of what I guess is foreplay – and then we tastefully cut to commercial.
Now, when I was a kid, I assumed (because this is, after all, Star Trek, and sex on Star Trek is weird) that the bloody palming of K’Ehleyr actually was Klingon sex, which later iterations of the series have gone on to disprove. (Also gone with the wind: the markedly chaste notion that once Klingons “do it,” they’re mated for life. Also, my palm theory doesn’t leave a lot of room for the conception of Alexander, who’d turn up a year and a bit later. Bad boy, Worf!) But no matter. Whatever other problems “The Emissary” suffers from, its core scene – Worf and K’Ehleyr’s languid and, for Klingons, even relaxed post-coital confessions – works marvelously.
The major problem elsewhere, unfortunately, is Suzie Plakson, who plays K’Ehleyr, a character of whom I’m fond enough to know how to spell her name without looking it up. Revisiting “The Emissary” was a bit of a rude shock – Plakson pitches the majority of her screentime way, way over the top, over-enunciating and hollering, and selling her sexual come-ons to Worf in a manner that would creep me out, to say nothing of the stodgy Lieutenant. Credit where it’s due, though: Plakson is playing, for all intents and purposes, Star Trek’s first female Klingon, or at least the first one with more than three lines. And, more’s the indignity, she only gets to be half-Klingon.
There’s a whiff of the self-hating Klingon around much of Plakson’s performance, which makes her a nice complement for Worf, who – as I’ve described previously – basically isn’t a Klingon at all, but rather a human pretending to be one, who just happens to be genetically Klingon. And “The Emissary,” via that lovely notion of the mated-for-life tradition, introduces a situation where, basically, Worf loses his virginity (?) and freaks so completely out that he asks the girl to marry him so that neither of them need be dishonoured. Which continues to make the Klingons a rare, fascinating folk in the Star Trek pantheon: martial wildness continuously restrained and even strangled by bizarre, shame-borne body politics.
Three enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season 2 is available now, with Season 3 due on April 30.