4x18 Rules of Engagement

[7.2/10] The “problem” with long-running characters is that the audience already knows and likes them. Newer characters? Well then we can buy a heel turn or some facet of their personality we’ve never seen before. But the longer a character exists, the longer we know what to expect from them, and the prospect of any secret turn to the dark side starts to feel less and less plausible.

Which is to say, I never bought that Worf was guilty in “Rules of Engagement”, even in his heart. The Klingon advocate, Ch’Pok, accuses him of deliberately firing on a Klingon civilian transport that drifted into a skirmish between the Defiant and some birds of prey. Innocent bystanders, including children, died at Worf’s hand, and Ch’Pok wants the Federation to extradite Worf to stand trial in Imperial proceedings for his crimes.

The setup isn’t bad, provoking a courtroom stand-off with an officer’s life and career on the line, a Star Trek tradition that goes all the way back to Captain Kirk and “Court Martial” from The Original Series. But the problem is, I don’t believe that Worf would deliberately fire on a civilian transport.

Hell, I don’t even believe that he’d do so recklessly. The episode wants to play up his estrangement from his countrymen, his desire to prove himself as a warrior and Klingon. But if we’ve seen one repeated motif from Worf across all his adventures, it’s his damnable honor. And as Worf himself points out, there’s no honor in destroying some unarmed space bus in the midst of battle. So there’s no tension to the proceedings, since between Worf’s personal character and the inertia of maintaining the status quo, any outcome where Worf is unmasked as a butcher is unlikely.

But maybe the tension isn’t supposed to come from the possibility that Worf might actually be guilty of this crime. Maybe the point is that even if he’s not, Ch’Pok is a talented advocate who can paint the picture of Worf as so vicious and vengeful, that the presiding admiral will have no choice but to extradite him. The stakes are clear -- the Klingons would have more leeway to expand their territory in Cardassia thanks to interstellar sympathy for their unjust losses. And so maybe the drama, and the point, is supposed to come from Ch’Pok manipulating the “form” and “procedure” of the Federation legal system he so derides in order to obscure the truth about Worf and railroad him toward a victory for the Empire.

There’s two big problems with that apart from Worf’s character: 1. It’s never clear exactly what question the extradition hearing is supposed to answer and 2. the “forms” and “procedures” are silly enough T.V. conceits that it’s hard to take them seriously as an indictment of the Federation legal system or the American equivalent the show’s pulling from.

For the former, the opacity about what specific question the Starfleet tribunal is trying to answer in order to decide extradition makes the whole proceeding feel mushy. When Commander Riker was accused of murder in TNG’s “A Matter of Perspective”, Captain Picard had to adjudicate whether there was enough evidence of Riker’s guilt to extradite him to the aliens-of-the-week. Here, there’s no factual questions about what happened. Everyone agrees that Worf fired on the civilian transport. Instead, all they’re left with is a fuzzy question about whether Worf has the “heart of a Klingon” such that he needs to be processed by the Empire’s legal system.

What the hell is that? The show tries to dress up the question as relating to Worf’s motive. And the American criminal justice system does require determinations as to the defendant’s state of mind for most offenses. But what exactly Ch’Pok needs to show in order to garner extradition, or what Worf needs to prove to avoid, is never laid out. Instead, all we get is a bunch of squishy back-and-forth about Worf’s character without any clear anchor to the trial at hand.

Worse yet, the infamous “procedures” and manipulation of Federation rules Ch’Pok deploys in order to corner Worf are ludicrous. The U.S. legal system generally prohibits what’s referred to as “propensity evidence” or “character evidence”. Without getting into the nitty gritty details, the upshot is that you typically can't try to prove that someone committed a crime by arguing that they have poor character or that they’ve committed similar acts in the past. Worf’s hearing is basically nothing but that.

Now despite obvious parallels, there’s no reason that Federation legal proceedings have to match American legal proceedings. But the reason U.S. rules of evidence forbid that sort of thing is that it’s considered too prejudicial and disconnected from the question of whether someone committed this bad act. So when the evidence for Worf purportedly killing four-hundred civilians is him being vengeful in the holodeck and showing that he’ll get steamed if you bait him enough, it just feels stupid and irrelevant. The show wants you to feel that Ch’Pok is taking advantage of flaws in the system, when instead it just feels like the admiral should have shut this B.S. down from the first question.

Likewise, the U.S. legal system typically prohibits speculation from fact witnesses, and the reasons are obvious -- they’re there to testify about what they saw and know, things that might have happened if circumstances were different that are impossible to judge or verify. So when Chief O’Brien’s time on the stand is nothing but, “What would you have done in Worf’s shoes,” it again seems silly and irrelevant, even under the far more lax auspices of T.V. law. Ch’Pok at least tries to talk up O’Brien as a combat veteran whose opinion could be germane as an expert on tactics, but his simple “I’d have done it different, but I wasn’t in command” seems like the most glancingly relevant statement, rather than the bombshell the episode seems to mean it to be.

Speaking of which, it’s pretty ridiculous that Captain Sisko is Worf’s commanding officer, and his defense counsel and his character witness. This one is probably the most forgivable. There’s a long history of Starfleet officers stepping into service as advocates (see: Tuvok defending Quinn in Voyager’s “Death Wish” around this same time.) And as always, Avery Brooks kills these big courtroom monologues with the fire and conviction he brings every time.

I get wanting to use his talents and not have to hire another guest star. But when the whole story seems to rest on the erstwhile bad guy twisting the rules to his own ends, those rules, and the court’s reasons for not stopping his shenanigans, have to make intuitive sense or the whole episode comes off like tilting at windmills.

It’s a shame, because Ch’Pok is a great character and guest star Ron Canada gives a great performance. The idea of a Klingon who gets the “thrill of the fight” from the courtroom rather than the battlefield is an intriguing twist on the Klingon archetype. (One that Michael Dorn himself pioneered in The Undiscovered Country and which Enterprise would follow-up with distinction.) Ch’Pok is crafty, but capable, knowing the right buttons to push and the right ways to nudge even Captain Sisko to get things to slant his direction. Seeing Klingon cunning put to such ends, with a formidable opponent who revels in the courtroom battle but is cordial (if subtly threatening) outside of it helps diversify a species that can be a bit one-note outside of Worf himself. The law-bombs lobbed back and forth between him and Sisko are worth the price of admission on their own.

But the climax is a dose of foolishness. Ch’Pok’s piece de resistance is unsubtly goading Worf by effectively questioning his manhood, impugning his status as “not a real Klingon”, and otherwise showing he has a temper until inevitably, Worf knocks him down. It’s supposed to be the capper to Ch’Pok’s case (and presumably an homage to A Few Good Men in its tone).

However, it’s a long way between “Worf can get angry and even physical when you poke at an obvious sore spot” and “Worf deliberately fired on a civilian vessel”. And it’s that much more absurd that the admiral never puts a stop to such obvious chicanery (to borrow a term from the similarly legal shenanigans-focused Better Call Saul).

Despite that, the ending here isn’t bad. As silly as the proceedings here are,and as jarring as the fourth wall-breaking testimonials are, there’s something to be said for the idea that Sisko ends up having to go outside of the normal process to prove Worf’s innocence. The reveal that the Klingons intentionally used an empty civilian transport to provoke this incident and garner the sympathy to justify their expansionary aims is a clever, Machievellian scheme. As with Ch’Pok himself, it makes the Empire seem like a smart and crafty enemy rather than just the rigid embodiment of “stomp loudly and carry a big bat’leth” diplomacy.

I even like the follow-up, where Sisko is glad to have gotten Worf off the hook, but warns him that he got lucky, while still encouraging him as a commander. I love Worf still feeling guilty because he admits he did have something to prove, that he did harbor some vengeance in his heart after all he’s been through. Worf is not a robot. He’s always been anxious to show that he’s a real Klingon despite being raised by humans, even if it seems nigh-impossible he’d ever destroy a civilian ship to do so. And I love the two of them commiserating about the complexities of command, about how separating out your personal feelings and making the tough calls isn’t easy, something Sisko’s been through time and again.

And yet, part of me bristled a bit at Sisko criticizing Worf for firing on the civilian vessel. Worf put together a good explanation -- that the Klingon warships had been doing a “swoop in, decloak, fire, swoop out” routine for several skirmishes, and he was trying to anticipate that move when a civilian vessel “accidentally” decloaked in the throes of the fight. Even if it hadn't been a deliberate feint by the Klingon, it feels like Worf’s tactics would have been justified, even if the results would have been unfortunate.

And yet, Sisko raises the point that Starfleet values demand something more than good tactics. Wearing that uniform means checking to make sure civilians aren’t in harm's way, even if it means losing a battle or losing your life. The humane, self-sacrificing principles of the Federation are a big part of what makes our heroes so admirable, even as plenty more tests of them are in store. Doing the harder thing, but the right thing, is a hallmark of Star Trek, and Worf is one of its greatest embodiments of that idea.

That's why it’s so hard to even consider the possibility that he would wilfully commit such a heinous act. As in “Sword of Kahless”, such extremes seem too far beyond the Worf we know and love. Nonetheless, writer Ronald D. Moore is the franchise’s resident Klingon expert, and has written more Worf stories than anyone. Maybe some deference is warranted. Maybe Worf’s inferiority complex could get the better of him on a bad day. And maybe even those we know and trust and support need the occasional reminder of what they, and we, still stand for.