The Enterprise discovers a badly-damaged freighter, drifting in space in the Neutral Zone following a battle. Before the ship breaks up, they are able to beam back three survivors - Klingons. One of them is badly injured, and dies despite Dr. Crusher's best care. The other two are made welcome by Picard, who allows Worf to show them around the ship.
Shortly after, Picard is hailed by a Klingon vessel. The Klingon captain reveals that Korris - the lead Klingon survivor - is actually a criminal. Korris stole the freighter and destroyed a Klingon ship that had pursued him. Picard sends a security team to confine him until he can be transferred to the Klingon ship. By this time, however, Korris has had a lot of time to bond with Worf and remind him of what it means to be a Klingon. When it comes time to act, can Worf be relied on to act in the Enterprise's interest?
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: Sympathizes with Worf's desire to protect Korris from execution, but sees no alternative to turning Korris over to the Klingons. He is willing to allow Worf to speak with the Klingon captain on Korris' behalf, and puts his faith in Worf's ability to deal with Korris in the end. On the other hand, before Worf's refusal to join Korris against Enterprise's security, Picard doesn't take it on faith that Worf will necessarily choose Enterprise over the first Klingons Worf has seen in some time.
Geordi: The first part of the episode gives us a lot more detail on the unique properties of Geordi's visor, as he and Data arrange for the visor's visual images to be transmitted to the bridge's viewscreen. This adds an interesting layer to what would otherwise standard first act, as the discovery and rescue of the Klingons is complemented by Picard seeing first-hand how much information Geordi's visor relays simultaneously. Geordi has had to train himself to focus only on the useful information, and filter out what he isn't actually interested in.
Worf: The series' first Worf-centric episode, and it's long overdue. For most of the first season, Worf has been basically set dressing. He stands in the background and growls a few lines, but it hasn't really seemed as though Next Generation's writing staff had anything in mind for him as a character. The ambition for Worf up to this point has seemed to start and end with "Klingon on the crew - cool," and anything beyond that has been mainly due to Michael Dorn's ability to run with any scraps he's been given. This episode finally starts to take some of those scraps and spin them into a character.
We learn a lot more about Worf's background. Though a Klingon, he was raised by humans after being orphaned. Though he clearly had a good relationship with his foster family, his Klingon blood called to him, and kept him from truly fitting in with the farming community where he was raised. Much of Korris's rhetoric does speak to him... but in keeping with his conversation with Wesley in Coming of Age, we see that Worf has come to place more value on fighting his own internal weaknesses - possibly an effect of having been raised among humans and incorporating some human values around his Klingon instincts. It's good characterization, very well played by Michael Dorn, and it's easy to see why after being underused in Season One, Worf nevertheless went on to become one of the franchise's most popular characters.
Villain of the Week: Vaughn Armstrong is Korris, the Klingon renegade who longs for the glory days when the Klingons were pure warriors, destroying anything in their path. He values everything Klingon, and sneers at anything that he sees as limiting the purity of a Klingon warrior existence. In a sense, he's Worf's id - what Worf's Klingon impulses would like him to be, and what he battles inside himself probably on a daily basis.
ZAP THE REDSHIRT!
Redshirt count: Two. A pair of security guards get in the way of the Klingons. The second one at least manages to take one of the Klingons with him, leaving the way clear for Worf to face down his id, mano-a-mano, at the episode's climax.
THOUGHTS
Heart of Glory is another fairly strong episode. It's not as good as Coming of Age (who'd have thought a Worf-centric episode would be not quite as good as a Wesley-centric one?). But as an entertaining 45 minutes of television, it gets the job done. It also begins Next Generation's move toward making the Klingons into a fully-rounded and complex culture - something that never really happened during the 1960's series or during the pre-Next Generation movies. In the older series, the Klingons were basically "the bad guys." There might be an occasional Day of the Dove to create individual Klingons with character complexity. But it was really Next Generation that made them into a fully rounded, complex race with a complete culture of their own, and this episode is the start of that.
The episode benefits greatly from having Rob Bowman as its director. Bowman ekes out some strong images from the sequence in which Riker, Geordi, and Data investigate the damaged ship. The "Geordi's visor" POV bits now look almost painfully dated, though they certainly didn't in 1987. But other visual cues - the three of them standing in front of the bright light and steam caused by dangerous gas levels in particular - still hold up. Bowman actually managed to get the lights turned down for this sequence (a rare feat, in TNG's nearly universally-overlit first season), which makes the setting feel more claustrophobic and more convincingly dangerous. He even managed to make me believe that the door Data forces actually might be heavy. Extra points for using a riff on the "Klingon score" from the Trek movies when the Klingons are discovered.
The episode moves along quite well, with some very good scenes between Worf and Korris in particular. But there are a few script weaknesses. One is the nature of the climax. It's so convenient that there's a spot in Engineering where a random intruder can simply go up a shaft and fire a phaser at a shiny thing to destroy the ship. Surely the shiny dilithium techno-gizmo should be something that should have to be accessed using security codes, not openly vulnerable to any random loony with a phaser? It was something I couldn't fully suspend my disbelief over, and something that weakened the episode's finale for me.
There's also a bit of questionable continuity here. In a throwaway line near the start, Picard mentions that they haven't had any dealings with the Romulans in a long time. That seems strange, given that Enterprise recently had to rush off to deal with the Romulans. I understand that the Romulans will play a part in the season finale, and so they're trying to build them up with references here and there. But this is not a case of something potentially conflicting with an obscure bit of continuity from 10 or 20 years earlier that only a hard-core Trekkie would catch, let alone care about. The show is contradicting itself, within the span of about a half-dozen episodes!
These are minor enough points overall, more than made up for by this being another good episode, and by the overall arc of improvement of this season's second half. I might still have some niggles and nit-picks, but Heart of Glory definitely gets another strong score from me.
Rating: 7/10.
Previous Episode: Coming of Age
Next Episode: The Arsenal of Freedom
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