Code of Honor
A deadly fight to the death with a weapon shaped like a chicken!
The worst Security Chief in Starfleet history manages to get herself to be kidnapped. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she then kills a major political figure who is subsequently brought back from the dead in order to effortlessly effect a regime change on Ligon II. Yar’s alternate-history daughter is a scheming Romulan, but even she never achieves a fully-deniable coup quite as perfect as this one. Meanwhile… well, actually, that’s about it for the plot of this week’s episode.
However, this is one of those rare episodes where the holodeck works as expected. It conjures up (gasp!) some gym mats. Astounding. You definitely get the feeling that the original concept for the holodeck was much less ambitious than the writing team eventually made it.
Words
It would be unfair to call this a remake of class Trek’s “Amok Time” - that story brought so much more to the table than this script ever manages. Widely considered racist because the Ligonians were cast using all-black actors, I personally think it's amazing that an all-black planet was ever on the table (it never will be again!). Besides, the script strikes me as far more sexist than it is racist, but there's plenty of room for every kind of pretty moral outrage when it comes to responding to this story.
The 'Prime Directive' does most of the heavy lifting in the story... the 'code of honour' of the title is largely there just to facilitate a lot of hang-wringing about the Prime Directive. Not for the last time, I might add - it’s practically Picard’s hobby! The Prime Directive itself is a kind of fictional reworking of Westphalian sovereignty, and even to Star Trek fans it sometimes seems bizarre. Don’t be misled, though: the underlying principle offers a solid defence against the abuses of colonial empire that are just as relevant today, even though no nation would be caught dead admitting it was an ‘Empire’ nowadays!
'Vaccine' does a lot of work as a plot device in the script, and as usual it is used as a ‘magic potion’ MacGuffin to set up a ticking clock (“The plague on Styris IV has flared up out of control”). However, real vaccinations aren't like healing potions in Dungeons & Dragons that make everything better with a few gulps. Rather, vaccines are like a ‘fake key’ unlocking some proportion of the resistance we would gain from encountering the real genetic ‘key’ of a specific infection. In either case, it is our immune system, not the vaccine, that does the work of protecting us. To my knowledge, no science fiction TV show has ever managed to dig into the fascinating scientific issues surrounding vaccination. I suspect this might tell us something rather important about the limitations of our sci-fi mythology. Either that, or it’s just a reminder that screenwriters only ever dip rather shallowly into scientific concepts!
Meanwhile, Picard mistakes a thirteenth century artefact for a fourteenth century artefact just to show off Data’s immense knowledge (Picard's archaeology skills improve enormously as the show goes on). Have you ever wondered why the Enterprise crew are giving these African-pastiche aliens a Sung Dynasty horse...? It's because in the script, the Ligonians are Japanese-influenced, being armed with bo and dressed in hakama (both terms being carefully explained in Katharyn Powers and Michael Baron's script). Of course, the Japanese are not Chinese any more than they are African, and had the production crew cast the Ligonians as Japanese they still wouldn't have escaped the accusations of racism. Honestly, it's easy to understand why this show ends up with so many all-white alien races going forward... they were trying to avoid accusations of racism(!).
Acting Roles
Even Patrick Stewart has nothing to do here but suffer the dismal script, although Brent Spiner and LeVar Burton get a nice scene revolving around Data's inability to deliver a joke, which helps establish their friendship. This is a situation that’ll get reused quite a few times in the early seasons.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find Jessie Lawrence Ferguson absolutely spellbinding as Lutan, the alien leader who correctly-yet-implausibly believes Starfleet's worst-ever Security Chief is strong enough to beat his badass wife in a duel to the death. Ferguson had his career-defining role four years later as Officer Coffey in John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood, but his movie career, alas, never quite took off. I wonder if anyone thought to ask Ferguson if he thought this episode was racist...? Somehow, I rather doubt they did. Having mostly been cast on TV as petty criminals, I suspect he was thrilled at the opportunity to play the leader of an alien world on a major new show.
Karole Selmon’s Yareena may get the big fight scene with Yar, but she’s not really given much material to work with in terms of dialogue so I’m reluctant to judge her acting talents based solely on this episode. But don’t you think it’s just a little bizarre that the showpiece duel is between Yar and Yareena? You’d think somebody would have spotted that before filming, wouldn’t you… They didn’t, most likely because in this and all the first season’s scripts, Yar is listed solely as ‘Tasha’ with no surname mentioned.
And did you spot our Transporter Chief, played by Michael Rider? He had a scene playing this role in “The Naked Now”, but it didn’t make it into the final cut. In this episode you only get to see the back of his head, but I guess that’s a step up from being completely invisible! Don’t worry, he has two more appearances you won’t have noticed as well.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
The Enterprise model has nothing much to do in this episode, alas. There's plenty of work on set for the prop-makers, though. Geordi's VISOR is given a small role in exposition, where it basically stands in for a tricorder, and we get some brilliantly odd contraptions in the form of chicken-shaped poison gauntlets. I have a feeling these end up on Worf's 'Wall o' Weaponry' in later episodes, because Klingons have an especial love of impractical weapons that other species simply can't appreciate.
Speaking of our favourite Klingon, Worf is nowhere to be seen, making this that rarest of Star Trek episodes: one in which nobody is wearing latex alien make-up! You might be wondering what happened to him... well, this was the second script written and, at the time, Michael Dorn wasn’t actually a member of the cast. Worf was originally only going to be a bit part in the background of the pilot in order to say 'look, the Klingons are our friends now' - similar to the way the Ferengi ensign will be used in season 4's “Future Imperfect”. How lucky for us that the producers spotted Dorn's potential and swiftly gave him more to do!
Finally, matte paintings. Fitting for an episode that rips off TOS clichés, it uses TOS-style side-on planet shots, as most of these first few episodes do. I must say that it breaks my heart that the planetary matte painting in the side-on orbital shots is so poor. Where did all the budget go...? Please tell me it wasn't into the costumes.
But wait - check out this beauty!
This brilliant matte painting by Syd Dutton depicts the Ligonian Centerplace in long shot. It appears in two brief cuts (one with and one without the yellow light beams), and almost single-handedly rescues this episode in terms of visual effects. But as is so often the case with Trek matte paintings: blink and you might miss it.
Yet another sexist episode. I'm finding a good balance between being outraged and amused. I mean, you have to laugh, right?