“Look for me there, on that point of light.”
This is a fairly workable episode which deals with a wholly unsuitable (for Star Trek) premise: Worf’s crisis of religious faith. Star Trek, which had been an entirely atheist (or at the very least, secular humanist) treatise on the future of humanity prior to Gene Roddenberry’s death – and held, among other things, that primitive cultures might believe in god figures, but would inevitably evolve out of that phase – began to toy with the place of religion and faith in one’s life more and more after Roddenberry was gone. Interestingly, because Roddenberry had fundamentally established that humans had long since evolved past religious belief, Star Trek was always forced to address the issue through its aliens: the Bajorans on Deep Space Nine; and here, with the Klingons.
As such, “Rightful Heir” is a weird animal: an episode that is good enough on its own terms, but the moment those terms are widened to any consideration of its meaning or larger context, becomes more and more ridiculous. And I’m not speaking from any anti-religious bias here: it’s simply that, as in “Birthright II” a few weeks ago, the thematic intentions of the story proper run into a brick wall of what is and isn’t possible on this show as a whole. You can’t tell this story on Star Trek without having to make some major changes to how Star Trek works.
So, Worf has a crisis of faith (caused, actually, by the events of “Birthright II”), and goes off to a Klingon monastery to find himself. This episode draws a much stronger Asian influence into the Klingon aesthetic than we’ve seen before; and I must also compliment the blu-ray presentation, which brings a clarity to the low-light, smoke-and-fire visual style which was never possible on analog television. As such, I can appreciate details now, like the beautiful Klingon monks’ robes, or Worf’s little Kahless manger (!!).
But then Kahless pops up IRL – spoilers, it will turn out that he’s a clone – and everything goes bananas, mostly because (in direct defiance of everything we know about the characters, Starfleet, and Star Trek itself), nobody wants to actually go on record and say that he can’t be the real Kahless – not even Data, who instead files this incident away on his perpetual list of “things I am not capable of understanding because I am an android.” Well, fine, except that long before we (the audience) know Kahless is a clone, we know full well that he has to be something, because supernatural beings don’t show up on Star Trek. It wasn’t God in Star Trek V, and it wasn’t the Devil in “Devil’s Due,” and it sure as hell ain’t Klingon Jesus here.
I suppose we could make a case for Worf’s scientific skepticism failing him under the circumstances… but Beverly? Data? Picard?! They immediately prostrate themselves to Worf’s religious beliefs and stop being scientists as a result. This leaves Gowron, of all people, to be the sole voice in the story who comes down on the side of scientific rationalism – which is actually a nice opportunity for him. Gowron can often be written as a brute or an opportunist, but here, he’s the cleverest and most competent leader in the story. Everyone else is a prototypical version of our contemporary science deniers. Next up, they’ll be telling us the Earth might very well be 4,000 years old – we just don’t know for sure, and should therefore teach both possibilities in schools.
There’s something ahead of its time, too, about the idea of the Klingon clerics mocking up a fake Kahless in order to influence Klingon society, and presumably in the direction of religious fundamentalism. In the final moments, even Gowron can’t help but acknowledge that Kahless the religious symbol is simply bigger than any “truth” can ever be; this is an uneasy message for Star Trek, and the episode wears it uncomfortably, never more so than in the scene where it attempts to analogize Worf’s religious experience with a story about Data taking a “leap of faith” about whether or not he was a person. The dots don’t, and can’t, connect.
This is one of those episodes (next year’s “warp speed is polluting the galaxy” episode is another) that introduces major change to the Star Trek universe but doesn’t end up sticking. (The clone of Kahless, like the warp speed thing, gets name-checked once or twice in future shows, and is then conveniently forgotten.) Perhaps the writers realized, after the fact, how dysfunctional their core idea had been in the first place.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Six is in stores. Season Seven will conclude the series, starting with our New Year’s special – the blu-ray hits today!