A Matter of Honor
Riker eats Targ and Gagh aboard the Pagh - while nearly starting a war between the Klingon Empire and the Federation
Riker is feeling especially commanding now that he has a beard, and bosses everyone around on the bridge before heading over to the transporter room to beam up some new crew members. One of them looks exactly like Mordock, the Benzite that Wesley befriended when failing to get into the Academy - but no, its Mendon, an entirely new character who just happens to have the same make-up and actor as Mordock. Picard invites Riker to play on their life size Atari 2600 and after shooting a few coloured dots tells him about an opportunity to enrol in the new Officer Exchange Programme that brought Mordock aboard the Enterprise. It seems there's an opportunity to serve upon a Klingon vessel, the Pagh... is Riker interested? Well of course he is. So after some pointers from Worf, a little foreshadowing of a shiny new plot device, and some gastronomic training in Ten Forward, O'Brien beams him over to his new ship.
Meanwhile, Mordock detects a subatomic microbial colony on the hull of the Klingon cruiser, but does nothing about it because the scan is 'Inconclusive'. He annoys everyone on the bridge, and by failing to report his discovery nearly instigates war between the Klingon Empire and the Federation - that's what I call a bad first day! By comparison, Riker gets to beat up his second officer, eat a plate of live gagh, and is also hit on by one of the Klingons. He's so manly about everything that it really makes you wince.
It all builds up to a dramatic showdown as Captain Kargan of the Pagh finds the microbes and interprets this as an attack by the Federation. The cruiser is going to uncloak and blow up the Enterprise, but Riker tricks Kargan into accepting the shiny plot device, then relieves him of command as per Klingon tradition, while Worf beams him over to the Enterprise's bridge so he can shoot him (Worf 2, Aliens 4). Finally, Riker completes his first day on the job by getting smacked down by his boss and being kicked off the ship. I’m betting he won't be asking Captain Kargan for a job reference.
Words
I love this episode, and nearly the entirety of the story was set out perfectly in the screenplay by Burton Armus. It came from a story idea he developed with Wanda Haight and Gregory Amos, about whom nobody knows anything at all, and who have no other credits on any other movie or TV show. The script also adds a huge amount of detail to Klingon culture - not to mention those tasty 'gagh', which will serve the franchise so well in future stories.
Watching this with my family, my wife raised an obvious question about the Officer Exchange Program: "Shouldn't they have asked Worf...? He might have wanted to do it." But of course, the entire episode depends upon Riker being a fish out of water, which could not have happened if Worf had beamed over. Sometimes a story has to bend the logic of the world to ensure that it's going to work.
Acting Roles
Klingons! More Klingons that we've ever seen before!
There's Captain Kargan, played by Christopher Collins (top left), who will be back as the captain of the Pakled ship in "Samaritan Snare", as well as playing two further roles in DS9. There's Klag, played by Brian Thompson (top right), who also had two roles in DS9, one in Enterprise, and even got to play a Klingon again as the helm officer for Lursa and B'Etor in Star Trek Generations. And there's Vekma hitting on Riker, and played by Laura Drake (bottom left), and also Bob Smithson (bottom right) who will come back to play a holographic Klingon in "The Icarus Factor". Lots of Klingons, and lots of fun with them too.
This is really the start of the great tale of the House of Mogh, or rather, the prologue, and I love every moment of it. Worf has a pivotal supporting role in the story, and is part of the link between the A and B plot by being Ensign Mendon’s commanding officer. He even gets to win a battle, meaning he's 1-0 for season 2 right now (although 2-4 overall).
The role of the Benzite exchange officer, Ensign Mendon, sees the return of John Putch, because (frankly) the Benzite make-up only fits him. But he is even more enjoyable as Mendon than he was as Mordock, offering a soft-spoken arrogance that makes me chuckle every time - especially when Picard gives him a metaphorical facial scrub about the chain of command and points him to Lieutenant Worf. Busted!
Honestly, this episode is so full of noteworthy performances and interesting guest stars that it’s impossible to do it all justice, but of course it’s Jonathan Frakes who has to carry it all as Riker, and he does a solid job here. It doesn't really require him to push the boat out very far - he’s basically channelling Kirk throughout - but I can't quite imagine William Shatner taking a punch from a Klingon as a tactical ploy, and in that regard this might even be the point that Riker begins to distinguish himself from other Federation officers with a ‘T’ as a middle initial.
Frakes was having a blast working with director Rob Bowman in this show. Bowman was going through a divorce at the time and found it an immense relief to escape into outer space for a bit of fun. All of the aggression that the breakdown of his marriage had left him with was channelled onto the screen - Bowman later suggested that they had to pare down the violence from what he had originally intended, as it might have gone too far!
All this, and Colm Meaney's seventh appearance - and O'Brien has some actual Transporter Chiefery to do this week too!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Let's welcome the most important new addition to the franchise this week - it’s those delicious serpent worms known as gagh!
We'll definitely be running into these again, although only once more in TNG. It's in DS9 that they become more than just a simple callback, and those loveable little serpent worms pop up in all the franchise shows right up to the end of the original production lineage. Prop master Alan Sims went to an Asian market and picked up almost everything that appears in this sequence, and the gagh is made from long brown noodles, with a little practical effect to simulate the wiggling.
The make-up team are truly on form this week! Between the return of the Benzite prosthetics and the huge number of Klingons, it must have been an absolute nightmare to get all of this done on a TV production schedule, but they somehow managed it! A lot of time spent getting into make-up is waiting for things to dry, so I guess if you’re really organised you can pull off a great deal in this department - as everything on screen here makes clear. So brilliant was their work that this episode was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup for a Series at the Emmy Awards that year, but it lost out to Emmy-panel favourite The Tracey Ullman Show.
The phaser range is a brand new set... it's not much of a set, but it is new. It gets just two appearances in TNG, and both are part of the House of Mogh arc (provided you accept my claim that this episode is the prologue for that forthcoming storyline, which is only true in retrospect).
Also brand new are the sets for the Klingon vessel. Some of the props are borrowed from elsewhere (one of the chairs appears in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, for instance), but for the most part this is all-new set dressing - and it looks great, especially in the dingy red lighting.
But the real star of the week is of course the Pagh, which is... a Klingon cruiser.
Neither the script nor the final episode calls it a bird-of-prey, and I have to wonder if the original plan was to use the classic Trek Klingon cruiser model (the supra-fanonical D7), but there was so little good quality material and it was all used up in "Heart of Glory". Instead, they broke out the wonderful bird-of-prey from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I'm reasonably sure we have now exhausted the deep well of studio miniature shots from that film, but boy, what a gift to TNG it really was to have so much brilliant stock footage available to re-use!
This episode is great fun. I do like Riker and he really shines in this episode.