“If Klingon food is too strong for you, perhaps we could get one of the females to breastfeed you.”
I just find the idea of Starfleet running a student exchange program endlessly charming. It carries “A Matter of Honor” a long way in my eyes. I’m not huge on the Klingon episodes generally, and that particular sub-genre of Star Trek: The Next Generation is still in its protean stage at this point. “A Matter of Honor” is a clever expansion of the groundwork laid in “Heart of Glory,” but it’s still nothing compared to the massive Klingon mytharc that Ronald D. Moore would begin creating in the next season.
But in the meantime, here we are with the exchange program, and the episode is better than I remembered. Ensign Mendon (a precise duplicate of Mordock from “Coming of Age,” for reasons left largely unexplained) gets traded onto the Enterprise to be supercilious and irritating, and Riker gets traded off – to a Klingon vessel. Number One gets into a fistfight the moment he steps onto the Klingon bridge, which is kind of badass; and the supporting role for The X-Files’ Brian Thompson as the Klingon second officer plays well. I think the Pagh represents the first Bird of Prey seen on Next Gen, a favourite ship design of mine from way back in Star Treks III and IV. The interior of the ship, too, looks astonishingly good in blu-ray; normally, the default Klingon lighting design (REDDDDD!) washes out into mud on standard-definition television and DVD, but the high-def presentation reveals a lot of colours that just haven’t been there before, from the greens of the bulkheads to the blacks of the overhead grille.
“A Matter of Honor” is a solid Riker episode, and the relish with which the first officer digs into his preparatory meal of Klingon food is quite a lot of fun – to say nothing of the food itself, which is a high-water mark for Star Trek gross-out cuisine, including the introduction of gagh, which is best served live and wriggling. We’re also introduced to an idea that I quote regularly even today: the fact that promotion on a Klingon ship involves murdering one’s superior officer. Because the expectation to do so is ongoing, we can imagine Klingon vessels as tight containers filled with would-be Katos, forever leaping out of the rafters at their bosses, with knives in their teeth. You may (or may not) be surprised to learn how accessible this metaphor is in day-to-day corporate life.
The Klingon response to the episode’s crisis is too absurd to really work – the fact that they first insist that there’s no possible response to the metal-eating organism except to allow it to destroy the ship; and then, Captain Kargan’s decision to attack the Enterprise based on some extremely thready assumptions. Christopher Collins, as Kargan, has two key roles this season, and returns as one of the Pakleds in “Samaritan Snare.”
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. I’m double-timing it this week, to sync up for Season 3’s launch in April.