Heart Of Glory
It’s TNG 2.0.
I mentioned in my “Coming Of Age” post that we were entering a new era, with Maurice Hurley taking over from Roddenberry himself as the showrunner. I also argued there that that particular episode was too far through the production process when Hurley took the reins for it to tell us much about how the Hurley-run show might look different from what preceded it.
In contrast, for all that “Heart Of Glory” had an immensely problematic gestation, ultimately it was written by Hurley himself, with every element of the resulting episode being created under his tenure. It’s far fairer to think of this as the start of his era of the show, then.
So what does he offer up first?
Forgot About Duras
The short answer: something particularly tasty, which is damn impressive given the fact there weren’t just too many cooks, but also the kitchen was infested with rats. And the rats were on fire. Hurley pretty much ground out this entire script in just two days due to a schedule crunch. Frankly, it’s impressive the episode is even coherent, let alone enjoyable.
Not that Hurley takes sole credit. The production team might have been in an endless state of pressure-cooker panic as their schedules were squeezed more and more tightly, but they’ve learned enough by now to have both nailed the basics and started into pushing the envelope. The scenes aboard the damaged freighter are a triumph of set design and lighting. Figuring out how to make the most of the vertical engineering set quite literally adds a new dimension to the way the show is shot. Perhaps most importantly, the costumes for the Klingon Defence Force debuted here would go on to define their look for every show set in the 24th century. It’s true that their design is only a modest rejig of those put together for Star Treks I and III (this episode borrows a matte background painting and the footage of the Klingon cruiser from The Motion Picture, too). That’s fine, though – it just means this new show is smart enough to know which aspects of the past can be carried through into the present.
Which, of course, is a central concern here. The Klingons are now fully back. It’s actually slightly odd it’s taken them this long. I’ve mentioned before that this first season of TNG started airing less than a year after the release of The Voyage Home. It’s worth noting how much the film series to that point (and after it) was making use of the Klingons. While only The Search For Spock put the children of Q’onoS front and centre, it’s them who are given the honour of opening the film franchise with their doomed assault on V’Ger, and they show up to lodge a diplomatic protest against Kirk just before all that business with the whales. In fact, Wrath of Khan was the only pre-TNG film to not include at least one Klingon, and that still saw them being quoted by the titular rotter [1]. Because of course a man as intelligent as Khan recognised knowledge of the Klingons was an essential facet of 23rd century life.
In contrast, TNG has chosen until now to steer well clear of the Klingons. I mean, there’s Worf, quite obviously, but the whole deal with him is that as a Starfleet officer he can no longer fully represent the culture he was born into. Aside from the occasional reference to how Klingon warriors are expected to behave, and the what-were-they-thinking wrongness of Riker whistling up Worf a waking wet-dream in “Hide And Q”, Worf might as well have been Data for all the difference his origins made. If anything, it’s the Romulans who have most proudly flown the TOS flag in the new show, insofar as there’s been a couple of references to them, as they begin flexing their muscles in the Alpha Quadrant once more. There’s another one of these at the top of this episode, in fact, though his turns out to be a feint – we’re not going to get the returning antagonists from TOS you thought you were.
Already this is a nice little twist, albeit not one the episode particularly relies on – the identity of those inside the freighter ends up mattering more than who was shooting at them. By referencing first the Romulans and then the Ferengi in the opening minutes, though, Hurley goes beyond misdirection and enters the realm of commentary. “Isn’t there someone you’re forgetting?”.
There’s a deliberate decision being made here to pause the boldly going, and to consider what’s been passed by on the way. Not in the sense of replicating or reliving past glories, of course (quite the contrary), but in recontextualising and progressing old ideas and themes. I hadn’t realised this until I went back to check, but this is the first time the Klingon-Federation Alliance is mentioned. For all that Hurley thought Roddenberry’s view of the future was “wackadoodle”, here he embraces fully his boss’ abiding and laudable love for showing former antagonists working alongside each other.
“Wars Not Make One Great”
These are savvy moves. They complicate the standard, and problematic, sci-fi approach of conceiving alien species as being strict subdivisions of our own natures, stereotypes given spacecraft. It moves the franchise one step beyond simply suggesting cosmetic differences shouldn’t matter – which as always is both indisputably correct and utterly toothless – into the much more actually useful idea that seemingly irreconcilable differences between groups of people can be resolved, with antagonism replaced with cooperation. The last line we’d heard from an official representative of the Klingon Empire at this point was “There shall be no peace while Kirk lives”. Now, Klingon cruisers display the flag of the Federation alongside their own in their video communications. Relationships can improve. Things can get better. [2]
A simple message, then, but a good one – and one which paved the way for The Undiscovered Country, which you can make a decent case for being the best Trek film, if only by the very specific metric of enjoyment provided divided by budget spent. And again, the fact the Ferengi are name-checked here is significant. The new enemy in the Reagan-era is hyper-charged, rapacious capitalism. The nationalistic stand-offs of our military past are better off left by history’s wayside.
This is very much reflected in our Klingon visitors. Charles H Hyman and Vaughn Armstrong play their parts with gleeful, infectious relish – getting the absolute maximum they can out of the contrast between themselves and Worf – but Korris and Konmel are clearly not intended to be sympathetic. They start off being ungrateful to their rescuers in general and rude to Worf in particular. They’re not only cagey and unhelpful about what precisely happened aboard the Talarian freighter, they act as though it’s an unreasonable imposition to force them into coming up with even the half-assed lies they can be bothered to spin out. Already their interpretation of the mighty Klingon warrior code seems to consist mainly of unpleasant duplicity.
From there, the newcomers’ already fragile model of the true Klingon way collapses. They confess their last battle involved them tricking their own countrymen to their deaths. They demonstrate their martial chops by threatening a child. It’s a short step from there to murdering an innocent – if utterly incompetent – security guard, and Korris threatening to kill hundreds of Starfleet Officers and their families, unless he’s allowed to kill Kahless knows how many other people he decides to pick a fight with. What absolute champions.
The script here is gloriously unambiguous. The rampaging, blood-crazed warriors of the Empire’s past are dead and gone, and absolutely good riddance. Korris and Konmel aren’t the last noble soldiers of a might martial lineage. They’re narcissistic reactionaries, stomping around with their chests puffed out while doing nothing but threatening the innocent, and endangering and even killing the people they claim to speak for. With our current historical moment seeing the horrifying return of the far-right across at least four continents, “Heart Of Glory” is distressingly prescient: beware the no-mark thugs obsessed with the idea of the wars of the past without any concern for their cost. The people who tell you suffering is good because they think they want the kind of life that suffering allowed. Those who just want to be endlessly and boundlessly offensive, so they can use other people’s negative reactions to that offensiveness to justify rabid hostility.
As Worf points out, it’s not impossible to find positive virtues in military service – I’m anti-imperialist and anti-nationalist, but I know the Nazis needed stopping. But the important part in the phrase “fighting for the cause” isn’t the word “fighting”. You can take pride in stepping up to fight someone who needs fighting, but the fact you might have to take up arms in order to defend people doesn’t make warfare a good in itself. That’s like saying the invention of vaccines means it’s OK to revel in stabbing people with steel needles. The problem with the Klingon attitude isn’t that no war is ever just. It’s that they’d be completely bummed out about the possibility of a just war actually ending. To return to the WWII analogy, they’d wish more Nazis had existed, just so they could have the opportunity to kill them. And until that wish is granted, well, there's always a bunch of other people they can murder in the meantime.
Even Konmel’s name points to the problem – a single letter-swap away from being “Konmen”. Klingon fraudsters, selling an impossible dream, heedless of the damage it does to those swept up in it, or those who have to deal with the fallout. None of which is made better by the fact they’ve bought into their own hustle.
This is a legitimately astonishing take for someone like me, who’s been through Deep Space Nine in its entirety twice since it ended, but who hadn’t seen this episode since the BBC put it out in 1991. The Ronald D Moore approach to the Klingons is comprehensively skewered before it even starts. This is what the people of Q’onoS should have been in the new show, a society grappling with its blood-drenched past and trying to be better. The wine-guzzling bullies that ruin quiet parties the length of the Alpha Quadrant are bores at best and murderous bullies at worst. Hurley’s Klingons > Moore’s Klingons. I will die on this hill. I won’t expect someone to write some ludicrous opera glorifying how I died on that hill, though, because I’m not a warmongering git.
It’s interesting to compare all this to “Coming Of Age”, in which the show tried to prove it was ready to level up, but in doing so revealed it hadn’t quite got a full handle on where it already was. Continuing with the video games metaphor, “Heart Of Glory” sees the show deciding inside to go back and complete a side-quest, thereby unlocking more of the fictional universe being played around in, and learning what works and what doesn’t in the process. The fact this ends up showing more maturity than the clumsy shadowing and foreshadowing of “Coming Of Age” is as instructive as it is unsurprising.
A Different View
Hurley’s approach isn’t completely without its problems. The idea that the lust for battle is a fundamental, irrepressible trait in Klingons is the same ugly biological essentialism I was attacking in my post on Faces. Seeing characters argue that Worf may be compromised with two of his countrymen aboard is somewhat ugly, and the episode never really gets round to pushing back against that – though Worf making Picard sweat about the possibility of losing him to the KDF comes close. There’s also the fact that the Klingons making such a display of their alliance with the Federation, while our Starfleet protagonists haven’t so much as mentioned it over the last eighteen stories, runs the risk of implying the Klingons have to continually prove themselves worthy of an alliance with humanity, rather than it being a mutual effort.
It isn’t Hurley’s fault that this hasn’t been touched on by the show until now, of course. It’s also the case that Picard’s Starfleet is noticeably less militaristic than Kirk’s, suggesting Starfleet has been putting the work in themselves as well. We could even go so far as speculate K’Nera only whips out the Federation/Klingon background when he’s making a call to the USS Whatever – it certainly doesn’t look like an actual bridge.
Really, though, if you want evidence that this isn’t a story about demanding other become more like us while we make no effort to understand them, just look at the scenes aboard the Talarian freighter. They don’t just look gorgeous, they give us a window into Geordi’s world, one that’s treated as being every bit as unique and valid as our own.
Watching Picard work to better understand his disabled crewmate through open dialogue is an absolute treat, a reminder that we work best together when we commit to listening to each other describe the world as we see it. The idea that there are parallel stages of development that Geordi has gone through – learning to focus on what he needs from the VISOR and disregarding the rest, like having a conversation in a crowded room – is a particularly nice touch. It’s a reminder that disability brings with it its own set of qualities and experiences. It’s not just a checklist for what constitutes able-bodied, with some of the items crossed out. [3]
For my replicator rations, though, the best part of this sequence is the idea that it’s never occurred to Geordi that anyone else would be unable to see a halo around Data. Geordi can’t “see” faces in the way most of us understand the idea (this is underlined by both Frakes and Spiner being replaced by their stunt doubles in the scenes representing Geordi’s VISOR view), but he can recognise an android faster than any other human on the Enterprise. And later, in an absolutely brilliant moment of visual storytelling, Data moves in front of the central core of the freighter, and just for a moment, he has a halo. For the briefest moment, we are again allowed to return to the world as Geordi experiences it.
This is some of the best work TNG has done this far, both on its own terms, and as regards underpinning a larger message about strength in an alliance of the diverse. It’s almost time for the show to really start boldly going where no Trek series has gone before.
Except that it still can’t find a way not to treat one third of its female leads like absolute garbage. Yar’s role here is almost exclusively to watch as Worf deals with two separate situations that clearly come under her remit [4]. Something is going to have to change.
Alas, I’m sure we all know what that is. Before the end, though, we’ve got two more chances to see Lieutenant Natasha Yar fully in action.
Let’s hope they’re good ones.
Ordering
1. Heart Of Glory
3. (The Infinite Vulcan)
[1] Though maybe if he’d spent less time on advances in vengeance theory and more time on the Reliant’s technical manual, he’d have figured out space has a third dimension.
[2] We learn seven years later that everyone thinks Kirk is dead, of course, but presumably The Undiscovered Country changed the game in any case.
[3] The reference to filtering out noise in a crowded room is all the more interesting because of how incredibly difficult that can be with people who have hearing issues and/or are on the autistic spectrum. The analogy that helps create understanding between someone blind and someone fully sighted is no more universally applicable than anything else, even among people who aren’t fully deaf. Everything is contingent on the people involved.
[4] No wonder the dude ends up replacing her. The show was already giving him her job.