TNG Flashback: Heart of Glory

I wrote of "Coming of Age" that Star Trek: The Next Generation took its first real step toward telling stories driven more by character than by simple science fiction premise. That trend continued -- and improved -- in its next episode, "Heart of Glory."

Responding to a disturbance near the Neutral Zone, the Enterprise discovers a freighter with a trio of Klingon warriors aboard. They claim to have fought off an enemy attack, but their story is evasive and incomplete. When a Klingon cruiser signals its approach, it's revealed that the three Klingons are criminals wanted by the Empire. But can the Enterprise hold them in custody until the cruiser arrives? And will their efforts to sway Worf to their cause be successful?

This episode focuses on Worf, and fully fleshes out his past with an interesting "nature vs. nurture" story. Living on an outpost as a boy, his birth parents were killed in a Romulan attack, and he was taken to be raised by humans. He spent almost no time around Klingons growing up, but feels a deep connection to their traditions, and a powerful desire to find acceptance among his people. It's an intriguing enough history that even if you never believe that Worf might turn on the Enterprise crew (you shouldn't), you still feel for him and understand his powerful longing.

By contrast, the two surviving Klingons trying to appeal to him, Korris and Konmel, aren't really sympathetic characters. We don't really learn the exact nature of their crimes, but we see that they put a high value on battle and glory, not duty and honor. And even though this is the first time we've seen Klingons on the series apart from Worf, it's made crystal clear what a deviant sense of moral priority this is.

Actually, it's easy to overlook how pivotal this episode was in defining the "new Klingons" of Star Trek. Before this episode, they'd appeared only as villains in the original series, and the first and third Star Trek films. It was this episode that fully established the premium they place on honor, and on dying in an honorable way. (The Klingon death yell also made its first appearance here.) Worf tries to appeal to the Klingon commander coming to take the criminals, not arguing they should be released, but that they should have a chance to die on their feet in battle, marooned on some hostile planet somewhere. It's all foundational Klingon philosophy, but this episode marked the building of that foundation.

The acting is very good. Michael Dorn excels with the expanded role he's given here; he's particularly strong in pleading with the Klingon captain for mercy on the criminals. (And that's particularly impressive, when you remember that he's just acting with an empty blue screen, against a script supervisor reading the lines off camera.)

The two main guest actors, Charles H. Hyman and Vaughn Armstrong, are superb, capturing a wonderful Klingon swagger, and trying all sorts of tactics against Worf -- goading him, entreating him, enticing him. This was the first Star Trek role for Vaughn Armstrong, and while he only appeared on The Next Generation this once, he wound up playing a dozen different characters on the later incarnations of Star Trek, being one of the franchise's go-to guest actors.

The episode boasts a fantastic score by Ron Jones. He paid close attention to what Jerry Goldsmith defined as the "Klingon sound" in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, developing that approach here while not actually copying any of that music. Jones makes use of a similar, unusual array of instruments, including the Alpine horn and bamboo angklung for percussion, and builds his themes on the same fifth intervals Goldsmith used. He builds wonder for an early sequence that shows us the world through Geordi's eyes (more on that in a moment), builds tension as an away team searches the damaged ship for the Klingon survivors, and adds drama to the dilemma facing Worf. Particularly strong is the music for the jailbreak, interjecting a lot of excitement into what actually isn't that elaborate an action sequence, when you look at it carefully.

The one real misfire in the episode happens in the first act. When an away team beams over to the damaged freighter, Geordi is equipped with a bit of technology allowing the bridge to look in on the action, seeing the team's movements through Geordi's eyes. It's a very interesting idea on paper. The question of just what Geordi does "see" was inherently interesting from the moment we met him. And the writers do express some neat ideas here, such as the comparison to learning to sift noise from a crowded room.

But there are several problems. For one, we never really see "GeordiCam" again. (It appears in one later episode, where we the audience see what Geordi sees; but the crew never tries to do this again.) But the bigger problem, within this narrative, is that it steals all urgency from a tense situation. The freighter they board is about to be destroyed by the damage it has taken, but the away team spends a great deal of time just puttering around, oooing and aahing at GeordiCam. I'm forced to wonder if perhaps this episode came short on its script page count in its first draft, and whether the writers simply injected this unrelated element to pad the episode to its necessary running time.

Other observations:

• This is another episode with no opening Captain's Log entry setting up the story. The series really is trying to grow up in terms of storytelling technique.

• There's a nice beat during the escape from the freighter where the transporter fails to work. Not that you believe for a moment that Riker, Data, and Geordi are all going to be killed on the spot, but it's nice to see technology fail not simply for a convenient plot point. (cough-holodeck-cough)

• For those into gadget trivia, I think this might be the first episode where we get to see the food replicator do its thing.

• For those into behind the scenes trivia, all the footage of the Klingon cruiser in this episode is lifted straight from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (Which is why the Klingons apparently haven't updated their ship design in 75 years. The budget for that wouldn't come until a later season.)

• Recurring Star Trek director Rob Bowman, who did a great job with "Where No One Has Gone Before," "The Battle," and "Datalore," also does well here. He has a few showy camera moves too, including a great moment for Korris' death, cutting to progressively farther cameras during Worf's Klingon death yell.

Klingon stories aren't necessarily my favorite, but this is still a solid episode. I give it a B. It's one of the better first season efforts.