Reunion
The Family season claims yet more victims as the House of Mogh plot arc bloodily returns!
Picard tries to distract us with an exposition dump about radiation and probes, and we’re not very interested when suddenly - what’s this? It’s an entirely new Klingon starship studio miniature, and Ambassador K’Ehleyr is soon grinning all over the Enterprise’s viewscreen. Quite the step up from travelling by torpedo casing! You’d think all that would be enough to set up the teaser, but no, she beams aboard with... a Klingon child. Shocker! But then, it is the family season.
Anyway, all this is pretty marginal, because this episode is only just getting warmed up. In just a few scenes we go from the Enterprise’s home schooling deck to an infodump from K’Ehleyr that is so much more thrilling than Picard’s scene-setting twaddle that I bet he's feeling mighty jealous right now. I mean Klingon civil war, the Chancellor of the High Council poisoned - it's like I, Claudius in space this week! By the way, Patrick Stewart was in the BBC adaptation of that book, in case you didn’t know! Here, I’ll prove it…
Meanwhile, back in TNG what we have here is basically a power struggle over the throne of the Klingon empire. Picard is given the unenviable task of mediating the succession of the Chancellor coupled with the equally unenviable task of playing interstellar Cluedo (Clue if you’re in the US) between Gowron, who is brand new in this episode and has awesome Gollum eyes, and Duras, who we’ve already been trained to hiss at like a pantomime villain from his previous appearance in “Sins of the Father”. I wonder who the bad guy is going to be...?
Conspiracy, bombs, nuptial interruptus, murder, more murder, foreshadowing about the Romulans disguised as misdirection, and a duel to the death with a brand-new Klingon weapon the bat’telh (sic) - it’s all extremely violent and terribly absorbing. Oh, and there’s Alexander. Hello Alexander. I’m sure Wesley Crusher is glad that a child even more annoying than him has come aboard to distract attention from him.
Words
Before we get to the screenplay and that aspect of the production story, let’s take note that this is Jonathan Frakes’ second episode as director - and he does a pretty great job too. It’s difficult with network TV shows to be really sure how much influence the director had on much of the content because the production process dictates a great deal of what’s going on. Nonetheless, this has a good pace, a lot of exciting moments, and is much less expensive than the lavish sets make it look. That new studio miniature (more on that later!) is the most expensive element, and you know they were committed to making good use of that going forward. So hat tip to Frakes for delivering the goods in the directorial chair.
This is the first screenplay by Brannon Braga, working here with Ronald D. Moore - and not for the last time, I might add. The two would be writing partners for a long while, including on the first two TNG movies. This is their first collaboration. At the time, the two were the youngest writers on the production team, and it seems they got on swimmingly. But it wasn’t Braga or Moore who made the decision to kill Worf’s lover. As Michael Piller recalled:
I killed K’Ehleyr. The original idea was about Worf’s kid and bringing K’Ehleyr back, who was having a relationship with Duras. But when we started talking about how to make the story work, I’m the one who said she should die… You wanted to get to a place where Worf was going to take Duras apart, and there’s no real good reason for him to do it unless she dies… he had it coming.
But Moore and Braga leapt through the opening this bold step made possible:
Anybody who watches that episode is moved and outraged by the killing of K’Ehleyr. You’re mad and you have that same need for vengeance that Worf does. If we’ve tapped into those feelings so when Worf goes back to his quarters and grabs that sword and the audience is screaming for Duras’ head, then you've done it. You really had to do that scene where Picard calls Worf onto the carpet for what he did and puts it to him.
It’s a great screenplay all around, and by bringing in another disreputable Klingon in the shape of Gowron, they were able to get all the drama of killing Duras without running out of characters who can help the plot arc surge towards even greater adventures yet to come. It’s a brilliant piece of TV writing all around!
Acting Roles
Obviously this is the last appearance of Susie Plaxton’s K’Ehleyr, but boy does she have fun with it, and she still has that wonderful chemistry with Michael Dorn’s Worf.
To think she could have been a recurring Vulcan character instead... but I do wonder if they’d have killed off Dr Selar for dramatic effect as well. I wouldn’t put it past this writing team!
Plaxton also gets to introduce Jon Steuer as Alexander (he does not have a surname at this point), although this is the only time Steuer plays the role, which is soon after recast.
Steuer is fine, but he’s so young that we can’t expect much from him (and this alone points to the need to recast him). Of course, they kick Alexander off the ship at the end of this episode, but sadly they’ll be getting him back for good (or ill) soon enough.
And while it’s great to see Charles Cooper’s K’mpec and Patrick Massett’s Duras return to get killed off, in hindsight it’s all enormously overshadowed by the introduction of Robert O’Reilly as Gowron.
He had a small role previously in “The Big Goodbye”, of course (follow the link if you don’t know about that), but Gowron is a career-making role for O’Reilly, which he will reprise not only on TNG but repeatedly throughout DS9, where the character plays a pivotal role. O’Reilly is always wonderful as Gowron, and he throws himself into the role with genuine gusto. His freaky eyes work with the prosthetics to give him an utterly unforgettable role here and forever after.
And who is filling in for Colm Meaney’s O’Brien in the transporter room this week? Why, it's none other than April Grace in her debut appearance!
She will play this unnamed role four more times on TNG not to mention appearing in the pilot for DS9 when Picard waves goodbye to O’Brien. Suprafanonically this is Ensign Maggie Hubbell, but in this episode she has no name at all, and even in her next appearance she's just ‘Transporter Chief Hubble’. The first name appears nowhere in TNG and is only fanonically associated with the character when she appears in that short scene in DS9.
This isn’t the only lower decks adventure here, because it’s also allegedly the last appearance of Michael Rider, who had previously been our pinch hitter for transporter chief. Here, the fans report that he’s bumped back down to security chief - a role you might recall Colm Meaney also played for one episode back in season one. But I’ve looked, and neither of the security guards in the main scenes are played by Rider. If anyone has seen him in this episode, please show me a screen capture!
Meanwhile, on the bridge, a big welcome Tracee Lee Cocco, who makes an astonishing sixty three appearances in TNG, and is in three of the movies as well!
Suprafanonically, her character is named ‘Jae’, but there’s nothing in any of the production materials I can find that confirms this, and no other staffer on the show seems to have mentioned the name either.
Regardless, keep your eyes open for Cocco because this is your new TNG “Where’s Waldo?” from season four onwards!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
We are so used to the Klingon make-up now that we forget to marvel at just how good it is! But even this brilliance is overshadowed in this episode as the props team achieve a legendary win with the debut of the bat’telh, perhaps the most iconic Trek melee weapon of all time - and no, I did not spell that incorrectly.
The pronunciation guide for this screenplay helpfully gives us this rather redundant suggestion:
BAT’TELH BAT-telth
Thanks for that, very helpful (not).
And amazingly, this weird spelling is echoed for every appearance in TNG - it doesn’t become ‘bat’leth’ until DS9. Why did it change? I have really no idea, other than the fact that nobody ever followed the original pronunciation guide. I suspect Michael Dorn effectively outranked Klingon language maestro Marc Okrand through the simple expedient of actually having to pronounce the words on set.
But of course, the big debut here for the SFX team is the Klingon attack cruiser. Suprafanonically, this is the Vor’cha class, and maybe that gets confirmed on screen in TNG, but to the best of my knowledge it does not. The screenplay just says ‘attack cruiser’, and that’s how it’s referred to in the episodes, both here and in “The Chase”.
I’ll confess, I don’t like this half as much as the other Klingon studio miniatures, although admittedly both of the other two in TNG were made on a movie budget. I do like that it recalls the design of the classic Klingon cruiser from the original show, but the trouble is it’s not half as iconic or appealing as that original Klingon warship. I don’t hate it, I enjoy seeing it in action, but it just can’t hold a torch to the beautiful bird-of-prey. That said, this episode is such a triumph for the SFX team, the props team, the sets team, make-up, guest stars, and so much more beside, that it’s impossible not to have a riveting ride with it.