“jIlajneS. ghIj qet jaghmeyjaj.”
“The Sins of the Father” is so good that it nearly deserves to be a two-parter – one episode just focused on Commander Kurn being an asshole to the Enterprise crew and screwing with his (secret) brother Worf’s mind; and a second for the business at the Klingon council, involving Mogh, Duras, and the family honour. Of course, “Sins of the Father” kicks off Ron Moore’s big Klingon mytharc, the next three episodes of which are some of the best TV Star Trek has ever produced, so the story is not, overall, lacking for scope. And part of the charm of “Sins of the Father” is the degree to which, less than halfway through, it legitimately takes off in a wholly fascinating new direction, and charges through a rich series of beats like a storytelling champ.
As Kurn, Tony Todd gives one of the all-time great Star Trek guest performances; coupled with his turn in Deep Space Nine’s fourth season as an elder Jake Sisko, this makes Todd one of the best guest stars the franchise ever had, period. Kurn is a brilliantly physical performance – an obvious statement, perhaps, for a Klingon, but Todd bends his lanky frame around the alien corridors of the Enterprise with an almost tactile disdain for every person and thing around him. The notion of Starfleet running a student exchange program remains cute – as does Riker’s naïve idea that he would, in some way, be able to guide Kurn on his transition to the Enterprise. Kurn don’t care.
“Sins of the Father” is one of the first episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that was converted for blu-ray, and it’s a real standout in the Season Three set; the exteriors on the Klingon homeworld (which we are visiting for the first time in the whole canon) are gorgeous, and the Klingon propensity to light everything in exit-sign red comes off way better here than it ever did under DVD compression. The missing footage from the fourth act, also, has been located and restored, so the whole episode looks like it was shot yesterday, and as we delve deeper and deeper into the underbelly of the Klingon High Council’s dirty little secrets, “Sins of the Father” becomes an enthralling visual experience.
This is also the episode where the series finally picked up on the fact that Worf and Picard is a much more interesting pairing, especially in an action scenario, than Worf and Riker, who were nearing buddy cop mode by the middle of the previous season. Furthering his makeover as a more active lead for the series, Picard gets to wise off to the High Council, brawl with a couple of Klingon thugs (where his kill count is one mark higher than what Kurn is able to accomplish, a couple of acts earlier), and reprimand Chancellor K’mpec in that stern Shakespearean voice of his.
K’mpec, played by Star Trek V’s Charles Cooper, is a great, rich character who plays off wonderfully against both Worf and Picard, and his decades-old crush on Worf’s nanny is simply darling. If “Sins of the Father” has a single major flaw, it’s only that the episode makes no effort whatsoever to define or contextualize “discommendation,” the fate that Worf accepts at the end of the show to resolve the Council dispute. We can intuit by what follows that Worf is self-selecting some sort of exile from his people, but having no real idea what’s going on sucks the dramatic punch out of the episode’s final moment – which is a real shame.
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 Three is available now.