“qab jIH ngIl.”
Great storytelling has depth, by which I don’t mean layers, levels, or profundity; but merely the kind of top-to-bottom richness that results in its leaving a deep imprint, which can be seen for a long time afterwards. “Reunion” is such a story. Not only was it one of the most rousing, entertaining hours that Star Trek: The Next Generation ever put on screen (and it remains so), but it is lastingly responsible for the storytelling that followed it. This episode pretty much writes the book on the next decade of Klingon stories. If “Sins of the Father” was The Hobbit for Star Trek’s Klingon mytharc, The Lord of the Rings starts with “Reunion.”
I’ll always remember this as the “Worf’s been a bad, bad boy!” episode, because that’s how it was first described to me in the summer before it aired – the episode where Worf and K’Ehleyr’s illicit coupling on the holodeck back in “The Emissary” would result in an unplanned pregnancy. Except that when K’Ehleyr beams aboard the Enterprise with her son, he’s… a four-year-old. The math makes no sense at all, and for years I simply refused to believe that Alexander was conceived in the previous season. He must have been made when Worf and K’Ehleyr had their relationship six years ago, right? But no. Their first, and only, sexual tryst was during Season Two of Next Gen – which means that a) Klingon pregnancies last about a month and a half or something, and b) Klingon children mature from infancy to school age in about a year. All of which is, I suppose, plausible – the series never ran out of ways to demonstrate that the Klingon body was unfailingly engineered for maximum survivability, and cutting down the time spent as a vulnerable fetus or baby is certainly a strategy in that direction – but boy, it’s weird.
The episode introduces the first new Klingon ship since the Bird of Prey debuted in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The sleek, gunmetal grey Attack Cruiser was badass enough to decorate the margins of my schoolbooks for years, and earned a spot on my shelf of plastic models, as I recall. Aboard the Attack Cruiser we find Chancellor K’Mpec, dying of a slow poisoning, and making his second (and last) appearance on Next Gen. It’s a pity, because I quite love the character, and Chris Cooper plays the hell out of him as a fat, dying spider. (“All for the glory of the Empire,” K’Mpec quips; “That should be my epitaph!”) But the domino ripple that K’Mpec’s death sets off can’t be undervalued for long term reach. We meet his successor, Gowron, played to the nines by the fiery eyeballs of Robert O’Reilly in a role that would last till the end of Deep Space Nine and remain among the most entertaining Klingons ever put on screen. And, of course, we bring back Duras.
Although Duras, too, meets his end in “Reunion,” he continues to haunt the saga for a decade to come. It’s probably better that Duras gets written out here, because he’s such a stupid character: laughably transparent, trivially evil, and quite the coward to boot. When Worf beams aboard Duras’ cruiser with his Bat’leth to finish Duras off, only a fool would fancy Duras’ chances. The Bat’leth is introduced in this episode, and Michael Dorn does an impressive amount of his own swordfighting with the iconic Klingon weapon. And slaughters Duras like a chicken, in one of Next Gen’s bravura reminders that the Klingon security officer is, well, not a human.
And of course, the third death in the episode is the one at the heart of the whole thing: K’Ehleyr. There’s something horrible and lovely about K’Ehleyr and Worf’s secret love affair, and the secret progeny it brought about, that bubbles under the surface of the episode until K’Ehleyr’s murder causes it all to spew forth like lava from a volcano. For a murder that occurs entirely offscreen, K’Ehleyr’s death lingers as one of the most intensely savage images that The Next Generation ever put together; Worf and Alexander finding her broken and dying, slung over a blood-soaked ottoman, results in one of Worf’s most powerful lines: “You have never seen death? Then look, and always remember.”
“Reunion” is the first collaboration between Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, and is Jonathan Frakes’ second directorial effort for the franchise, and far and away his best. The pieces all click, and the results are rich and rewarding.
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 Four is in stores now.