“I would rather die here than let the traitors of Kling pick the meat from my bones!”
“Heart of Glory” is a very rich episode, and if it doesn’t ring entirely successful to me as a completed piece, it nonetheless delivers so much mythology for the series as a whole that it’s hard not to like it. It’s the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to deal with the Klingons directly, for one thing, and the species as presented here is a fascinating mix of their Original Series conception and stylings (essentially, aristocratic Mongol warlords) and what they would become on The Next Generation in subsequent seasons (samurai cavemen). There’s Klingon food, Klingon death rituals, and hidden Klingon weapons assembled Golden-Gun style from ornamentation on Klingon armour.
“Heart of Glory” is also the series’ first proper Worf episode, and kicks off what I’d call the unspoken Worf Problem – that Worf doesn’t behave much like a Klingon, ever, in spite of constantly always talking about his Klingonness, and Klingon this, and Klingon that. What we come to understand in some of the better episodes that address the Worf Problem – and this is one of them – is that Worf is essentially a Klingon fanboy, rather than a genuine Klingon; at a Star Trek convention, he’s the fat guy pissing at the urinal next to you with half his homemade Klingon latex forehead coming unglued. Something beats deep in the heart of Worf – his heart of glory, if you will – that is so overwhelmingly in love with everything Klingon-y that he would probably burst into tears of rapture, were he capable of such things. But – as we learn in this episode – Worf was orphaned in a Romulan attack, rescued by a human Starfleet officer, and then raised on the farm colony of Gault, and as such, has never actually been exposed to Klingon culture as anything other than arm’s-length theory. He has reckless Klingon instincts and that near-sexual connection to animal urges, but he has no idea how to express them correctly; he’s a teenaged boy who hasn’t learned how to masturbate yet, and is wet-dreamin’ all over the sheets every night. (There’s an otherwise tepid Deep Space Nine episode where we learn that Worf, as a teenager, accidentally maimed a human boy in a sports match. For a third analogy in this paragraph, we might connect Worf to young Clark Kent.)
More and more!: we also see the Klingon D-7 battlecruiser for the first time since Star Trek 1, and hear Korris make an offhand reference to the Klingon homeworld, calling it Kling for the first and only time (the planet would be renamed Kronos after Star Trek 6). There’s a beauty moment when Korris picks up a small girl during a crisis, and we are called upon to wonder if the gigantic, enraged Klingon is about to rip the child limb from limb right in front of a full security detail. We see the prototype brig (which would be redesigned in Season Three), just before we get to watch Korris and Konmel break out of it with their hidden Golden Gun, a mechanism so cool I actually built a replica of it when I was a teenager. And as Korris, Vaughan Armstrong would go on to become a kind of Star Trek mainstay, appearing in twelve other roles, including the recurring role of Admiral Forrest on awful Enterprise. Korris scores one of, if not the best, death scene in the series, his corpse falling through the glass deck plating on the second level of Main Engineering to crash onto the deck below, only to have Worf perform the Klingon death ritual in a telescoping-outwards series of single shots.
Oh, and there’s Geordivision, in the opening act – which nearly functions as a self-contained short film all on its own, as Riker, Geordi and Data explore a beautifully damaged-and-about-to-explode freighter, all while Geordi transmits his VISOR signal back to the bridge. It’s the first (and most aggressive) depiction of the outright chaos that Geordi regularly sees through his prosthetic, including the beauty moment where he learns for the first time that humans don’t normally see a halo around Data. It’s a lovely piece of storytelling.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.