Birthright, Part II

After a failed prison break, Worf becomes a school teacher specialising in Klingon studies

It seems that some Klingons did survive the Khitomer massacre. Worf is all snooty with them for dishonouring themselves, but doesn’t kill them all on the spot, which seems to be what honour requires. Indeed, Worf immediately tries to escape, but is captured by the Romulans (Worf 20, Aliens 21).

Worf is stuck teaching the young Klingon kids all about their Klingon heritage, which forces the Romulan commandant of the prison camp to order Worf’s execution. Is this the end of our beloved Klingon security chief? I’m certainly not going to take any bets on that, but it does set up a dramatic Spartacus-style ending for the episode.

Words

Writer René Echevarria was very emotionally attached to this story:

It was very personal, somehow. My parents were immigrants from Cuba, and all of the issues that came up in the episode – about assimilation and how do you keep your heritage – is something I grew up with.

Meanwhile, Michael Piller saw this as an opportunity to play around with ‘Klingon pride’:

I had just seen Malcolm X, and I said Worf is the guy who’s saying “You’re black and you should be proud to be black.” That’s where I started from with the character standpoint, but when you get into it and you realize there is something good in this society and that he’ll lose this woman he’s in love with when he can't shake his own prejudice, it’s a price he has to pay for his character and his code… I think it’s wonderful when people act in heroic ways that turn back on them.

There were a number of scenes in the screenplay that ended up on the cutting room floor, mostly around the relationship between Worf and the half-Romulan, half-Klingon Ba’el. There was also a confrontation between Worf and the elderly Klingon woman Gi’ral, who defends her marriage to a Romulan, and a scene with Troi in which she tells Captain Picard what she and Worf discussed last week (as a result, she doesn’t appear at all this week outside of the recap). It’s all fairly extraneous stuff.

This episode was directed by the senior special and VFX supervisor Dan Curry - it’s literally the only episode of anything he ever earned a directing credit for. But Curry had in fact been directing all the time as the second unit director (which shoots most of the footage that doesn’t involve the main cast, typically including a lot of stunt scenes). Why was Curry chosen to direct this episode? It might be because he was a Tai Chi master, and therefore responsible for the Klingon martial arts, but nobody has come right out and said it. However, Michael Dorn was especially happy about Curry getting to sit in the big chair: “We have a rapport and he was just wonderful to work for.”

Another odd part of the words of this episode is the Klingon aria, which was composed by Jay Chattaway, with lyrics by Brannon Braga that were translated by Marc Okrand. According to co-producer Wendy Neus “We did a Klingon rap version of it too.” Sadly, this does not seem to survive, but the sheet music does!

Michael Dorn was a huge fan of this episode!

I thought it was great. It also showed that this is like a bottomless well. It will never go dry. The Klingon story will just go on and on.

However, the fanbase complained that because so much work went into making the captured Klingons and Romulans sympathetic, Worf comes across as a bit of a fascist racist for ruining their peaceful sanctuary. Writer Echevarria has defended this aspect of the story, however:

His motives are in fact racist, when he’s dealing with Romulans. But his actions are different; all he said was these people should know the truth and be free to leave. He never advocated violence and bloodshed.

There’s a distinction here that remains important today, and which is all-too-frequently buried under politically-charged rhetoric.

Acting Roles

Remember James Cromwell who plays Jaglom Shrek? He does appear in this episode, but has no speaking lines.

That’s because between the filming of part one and part two, Cromwell broke his leg and had to be written out of the episode. The final version of the script I have doesn’t include his scenes, but apparently an earlier version had a scene in which he confesses that he used to be a prison inmate himself, and another in which Shrek was killed by one of the Klingons who was determined not to hear the truth about his father. All this had to be written out after Cromwell’s injury. Echevarria later remembered some aspects of his original plan for the character:

One idea was that Worf was going to see he had some tattoo of having been a prisoner and Shrek was going to talk about being a prisoner and that his government let him rot and it took his family to come and risk their lives to free him. He says he knows how governments can be and doesn't trust them. “You think I do this for money, but I actually do it because I know what it’s like”, Shrek tells Worf.

Shame that didn’t make the final episode, really!

Cristine Rose delivers a decent performance as the somewhat naïve Klingon-Romulan woman, Ba’el - although the sixteen year age difference between her and Dorn is a little disconcerting.

Rose is best known as playing the dream-diviner Angela Petrelli in fifty two episodes of Heroes, although you might also have noticed her playing Ted’s mother in seven episodes of How I Met Your Mother, or perhaps as Paul Rudd’s mother in Friends for two episodes. Her career is full of recurring roles and bit parts - including two roles in L.A. Law, one before and one after this appearance in TNG.

Richard Herd gets the coveted ‘and’ billing as L’Kor, and is very enjoyable in his role as the patriarch of the Klingon prisoners, even if all the good stuff is essentially condensed into one scene near the beginning of this episode.

He had small roles in the 1970s thrillers All the President's Men and The China Syndrome, and they got him back in Voyager for four episodes as Admiral Owen Paris (Tom Paris’ father). You also might have seen him as George’s New York Yankees boss, Wilhelm, in eleven episodes of Seinfeld or as Admiral Noyce in Seaquest DSV for twelve episodes. He had some memorable appearances in Quantum Leap too, playing a coal miner, and Captain Galaxy from the (invented) 1950s TV sci-fi show Time Patrol. He even had a small role in the original V and its sequel V: The Final Battle.

As mentioned above, some scenes with Jennifer Gatti’s Gi’ral were cut, leaving her with a very small presence in this episode, although her performance is good. They got her back for Voyager too.

Her career is full of bit parts, but it started with a recurring role on the long running US daytime soap Search for Tomorrow, which she was on throughout 1983. On the back of that she picked a role in another US daytime soap, The Guiding Light, for ten episodes. Between these two roles, you might have seen her in the music video for Bon Jovi’s “Runaway”.

Sterling Macer Jr plays Toq, and gives a spirited performance as the young Klingon discovering his heritage.

Macer has had an astonishing number of small roles in police procedurals of all kinds, often as officers. He played Deputy Director Victor Stark in Bones for four episodes and a police officer in Lincoln Heights for seven episodes. Seldom have I seen an actor quite so typecast, to be honest!

Lastly, Alan Scarfe gives a measured performance as the Romulan commandant Tokath.

It feels a little too measured for my taste - I like my Romulans a little more passionate, but it works well in the context of the episode. Scarfe had a small role in Lethal Weapon 3, but you’re more likely to have seen him as Dr Bradley Talmadge in 66 episodes of time-travel adventure show Seven Days. You might also have noticed him as an alien wiseman in three episodes of Andromeda or as Captain Cyrus Harding in the 1995 TV adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. He was also in SeaQuest DSV and Quantum Leap, not to mention Alien Nation, just three of the many and varied TV shows that he had small guest roles in.

Oh, and Worf is now 3-3 for this season. It’s going to be close!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Apart from a reused shot of a Romulan Warbird from “Data’s Day”, the main special effect contribution this week is the Romulan prison camp maquette, which appears in three wonderfully composed shots. Here's the original 34x48 inch balsa wood model in its full glory.

And here it is in its three establishing shot appearances.

Director Dan Curry composited these shots over jungle photographs he himself had taken in Laos in the 1960s. Mike Okuda remembered this project well:

Dan Curry directed that episode, and he asked us to make a model based on the sets Richard James created for that episode. I asked Alan Kobayashi to spearhead that project, and all of us in the TNG art department lent a hand in odd moments. The model was simply made, using fomecore, balsa strips, a few Plastruct parts, some model greeblies, plus lichen trees from a hobby store. Rick Sternbach helped enormously by painting it to apply an appropriate amount of aging and weathering. Dan photographed the model, then put it into a photograph of the jungle in Thailand that he took years ago, when he was in the Peace Corps. The result was a great matte painting that showed the isolation of the prison camp that lent a lot of scope to the episode.

What’s a ‘greeblie’ you might ask? It any small intricate detail added to the surface of an object to make it seem more interesting. Sci-fi ships are positively coated in greeblies!

I personally don’t consider this a matte painting, and I’m surprised to hear it described as that (Okuda might be misremembering where the photos were taken too, although Laos and Thailand share a border at the Mekong river). But two of the three composite shots in this episode were reused in DS9 to represent places on Bajor. The model of the prison camp itself was eventually sold at auction for $2,200, a fitting end to the star feature of this episode.