6x17 Birthright (2)

[7.7/10] Star Trek isn’t just about space travel or science fiction wonders. It’s about cultures and communities, clashing and intersecting, finding the places they bristle against one another and the places where they’re unexpectedly in sync. The abstraction of fiction allows shows like The Next Generation to come at those issues of societies evolving and grappling with friction from their interactions in unique ways that help us to think about our own cultural exchanges in the real world.

The second part of “Birthright” sets up a wonderful scenario in that regard. Worf stumbles upon what he thinks is a prison camp, but which turns out to be an integrated community of Romulans and Klingons. It’s achieved the sort of peace that eludes the governments of these peoples, but it’s come at the cost of severing themselves from their heritage. Worf is made a prisoner, blanching at his countrymen breaking bread with a people who are their sworn enemies, while trying to restore the traditions he was raised in to the youth of their community, who are hungry for it.

It’s a complex, intricate setup and clash of understandable motivations, the type of which undergirds the best Star Trek episodes across the various series. The best dilemmas and thought experiments in TNG are the ones with no easy answers and no clear heroes and villains. “Birthright pt. 2” has that in spades.

The civilization Worf stumbled upon has achieved something remarkable. Klingons and Romulans live in harmony for the first time the audience has ever seen, and maybe for the first time in history. They are peaceful, prosperous, and happy. For decades, the community here has grown and flourished, with families who seem content and unperturbed by the broader ravages of conflicts from within and without the Klingon and Romulan civilizations they came from.

But there are costs to it. For one, such a paradise comes wrapped in a lie, with children told that there are deadly and dangerous wars beyond their home which augur in favor of remaining within the safety of its walls. The community’s elder’s are desperate to preserve what they have built, and so have taken strict precautions to keep what’s inside in and what’s outside out, even resorting to fabrication.

For another, they have abandoned their traditions. The young Klingons of the community do not know the true meaning of their songs and lullabies, the original uses for the weapons they use as farming tools, or the care for the armor and traditional dress their parents forsook and forbid. The elders do not want to disrupt the balance between Klingons and Romulans they’ve forged, and so have severed any connection to their warrior history.

There is understanding and good-intentions in what they want to save and preserve, and justified qualms about the means by which they do so, and what may be lost in the process.

Worf is determined to restore those traditions. They have sustained him through his own time away from his people, and he, as much as anyone, values them with the fervor of a convert since he was raised by humans. He is, like the youth he connects with, a child of two worlds, and so both understands their position, and laments what they seem to have lost, something he cherished and held onto despite the loss of his Klingon family. His goal, to share his people’s culture and history with those who’ve been cut off from it, is not just laudable, it’s understandable given where Worf is coming from.

The catch to all of this is that Worf is a bigot here. He’s affronted by the fact that the Klingons who fought with his father submitted to their Romulan captors. He’s attracted to one of the young women from the camp until he discovers she’s half-Romulans, at which point he’s aghast and repulsed. For as sympathetic as Worf is in his desire to share his culture with Klignons who’ve lost it, he’s horribly close-minded when it comes to the nigh-miraculous integration that’s happened between enemies in this place.

And yet, what I like about this episode is that the motivations for all involved make sense (even if they’re a little rushed under the circumstances). Worf holds his culture dear since it sustained him as a Klingon when living with humans, and of course he would abhor Romulans after they killed his family. (Hello Discovery fans!) And of course young people who’ve been all but forbidden to know of their cultural history would be intrigued by this new Klingon come to town with tales of the outside world and a fascinating link to their shared history and traditions.

On the other side, the Klingons who chose to stay make sense too. They’re as motivated by honor as Worf was, and were willing to sacrifice their personal honor and stay “dead” in the eyes of their countrymen in order to preserve the honor of their families, and not spread their shame to generations of offspring. Their capture happened against their will without any ability for them to sacrifice themselves. The show does good work in explaining how a group of proud warriors could mellow into the peaceful cohabitants with Romulans we see decades later.

And it humanizes their captor and eventual fellow community member in Tokath. The idea that this community formed in the first place because he wanted to show the captured Klingons mercy complicates the situation and challenges Worf’s preconceived notions. He sacrificed his military career to make this society work. He married into it and became an integral part of it. What’s at stake for him here -- the civilization he worked so hard to build and the personal connections that make it so precious to him -- is as clear and sympathetic for Tokath as it is for Worf.

The rub is that, at some point in the story, “Birthright pt. 2” elides that complexity and turns into a tale of Manichean good and evil. Tokath becomes a malevolent denier of youth and tradition, who’d rather kill Worf than allow him to put ideas into the children’s heads. And Worf becomes a noble crusader restoring his people’s spiritualism and shared history to those denied it. Worf does pay lip-service to the honor the community’s elders displayed in making this place possible, but in the end, he’s the good guy; Tokath’s the bad guy, and the episode blows past all that tantalizing complexity in favor of a clean break and easy answers.

Not for nothing, the resolution for the story is weekend by how much it hinges on a romance between Worf and Tokath’s daughter, Ba’el. For one thing, it’s just an unnecessary element. The audience can easily understand these concerns through the youth of the community becoming enthralled by Worf, without the romantic facet to it.

Toq, the young man who Worf takes under his wing and who eventually embraces traditional Klingon warrior culture wholeheartedly (after having learned about for like a day), sells the stakes of how young people spending time with Worf could disrupt the peace of their society just fine. Ba’el could connect with Worf on the same terms. Going that direction would avoid another bout of unconvincing insta-love, which feels particularly uncomfortable given how Ba’el scans as a young, arguably naive teenager, and Worf reads like a mature adult. Their dynamic doesn’t help the episode’s problems.

More to the point, it refuses to interrogate how Worf’s perspective might be bad. It barely confronts his bigotry against Ba’el based on her parentage. And more than that, the episode doesn’t really question whether Worf reintroducing the youth of this village to Klingon warrior culture could be a bad thing.

Make no mistake, there’s a great deal to admire about the Klingons as we’ve seen them in TNG especially. Worf is an excellent torch-bearer for his people’s values and the good service and good people who can emerge from such a devotion to honor.

But at the same time, we’ve seen how that same sense of honor can lead to prejudice and a scelrotic unwillingenss to evolve or accept change, including in Klingons who reject the peacefulness of the Federation in favor of the more militant Romulans. We’ve seen how it can be a death cult, how Klingons almost fetishize dying at times. We’ve seen how many Klingons talk big about honor, but how in practice, they can be as backstabbing and political as anyone. We’ve seen Worf himself grapple with unnecessary shame and the harmful effects of an unwillingness to seek help due to antiquated notions of inherited sin and the rigid requirement of what it is to be a “true warrior.”

Klingon culture has a lot to offer. But it’s not an absolute good, and certainly comes with drawbacks. Maybe there just wasn’t enough time to delve into that in forty-four minutes, but “Birthright pt. 2” flattens the landscape there, and refuses to engage with the compelling complexity it sets up. Klingon tradition is good and the elders are wrong to keep it from their children, despite the unprecedented society they’ve built without it. That’s all you need to know, apparently.

Maybe I’m a little salty because this episode takes one of the things I love in Star Trek -- an intractable, intellectually challenging problem with no easy answers -- and practically declares that it’s all straightforward enough and there is an easy answer. But I find myself still too enamored with the questions.

How do you balance a society’s incredible success at bridging cultures and making peace when it’s founded on a falsehood? (I can practically hear Mr. Spock telling Captain Kirk that it may seem strange to us, but it works for them, while Kirk resolves to blow it up anyway.) How do you weigh the richness of Worf’s close-held culture and beliefs against the fact that they’ve reinforced his wariness of outsiders and intermixing? How do you measure the loss of longstanding cultural traditions versus the newer, but still valid and beautiful rituals and community spirit that have taken their place? How far is too far when you’re deciding whether to protect your children from a harsh world or allow them to find their own place in it?

These are timeless, arguably unanswerable questions. “Birthright pt. 2” gets all the credit in the world for raising them, and illustrating them in such a thought-provoking scenario. But it earns just as much opprobrium for oversimplifying them in its finish, giving answers and takes that are facile and unsatisfying and which come too easily.

But maybe my frustration comes from the fact that real life issues of this sort are not so easily untangled. I am Jewish individual living in the United States, one whose great grandparents emigrated to this country. My life, my connection to both Judaism and America, is very different from theirs. An Orthodox Jew from one of the communities they left might look at me much the same way Worf looks at the young Klingon using a sacred weapon as a gardening tool. Questions of assimilation, intermarriage, how much of one’s culture to hang onto and how much to mold to a different way of life, are all thoughts the American Jewish community has been wrestling with for generations. (See also: Leonard Nimoy in Fiddler on the Roof.)

“Birthright pt. 2” grapples with these issues, but ultimately sets them back down a little too simply for my tastes. The beauty of science fiction is that it can speak with a clarity often occluded in real life. It can delve into spaces, concoct scenarios, that tease out the truth with creativity and conviction. Sometimes that truth is too elusive to capture on the page, the stage, or the screen. And yet, I still admire the attempt, from this episode and Star Trek writ large, to examine those places where different cultures meet and imagine what new wonders may be birthed from their connection, and what hallowed customs and beliefs may be restored.