“Code of Honor”
Written by Katharyn Powers and Michael Baron
Directed by Russ Mayberry; Les Landau (uncredited)
Season 1, Episode 4
Original air date: October 12, 1987
Star date: 41235.25
Mission summary
A devastating plague threatens millions of Federation lives and only one planet seems to have abundant supplies of the vaccine: Ligon II. The Ligonians, who are all black, are described as “proud,” “structured,” “ritualistic,” and “honor-based,” because I guess positive adjectives are supposed to make their African tribal vibe seem less racist.
Picard greets the leader, Lutan, and his first officer equivalent, Hagon, aboard the Enterprise. Lutan is immediately taken by Lt. Yar because on their planet “it is the duty of women only to own the land, and the duty of men to protect and rule it.” Picard gifts them some pottery and they get a tour of the Enterprise, then Yar gives them an aikido demonstration as a way to show off both the holodeck and her own physical skills. All seems to be going well, as Lutan appears both pleased by Picard and willing to negotiate for the vaccine. He politely says his goodbyes, but just as he’s beaming out he abruptly snatches Lt. Yar and transports her with them to the surface.
Rather than saying “good riddance,” however, Picard decides he has to have her back. Numerous hailing attempts fail to elicit any kind of response from the Ligonians, so the Enterprise is forced to do some actual research on their culture and figure out what’s going on. Data suggests this is a form of “counting coup“–a gesture of heroism meant to make Lutan seem brave. They must wait for Lutan to contact them, and when he does, politely request Lt. Yar back. Picard does so and Lutan invites the captain to the surface for a banquet in Picard’s honor, where he promises to return Yar. Picard, before all the Ligonians, requests the return of Yar as obsequiously as possible.
LUTAN: Your conduct in this matter has been beyond exemplary, Captain Picard, but now that the moment has come, I find I cannot part with her […] I want Lieutenant Yar to become my First One.
That slot is unfortunately currently occupied by a lovely lady named Yareena, who challenges Yar’s “supercedence” in a death match. Picard refuses to allow her to fight, but it becomes clear that there’s no way to avoid it if he still wants the vaccine, which has become more essential than ever as the plague spreads. Picard tries to reason with Lutan but Hagon lets slip that Lutan is poor without Yareena’s money and land, which are his by marriage. By their custom, however, if Yareena were to die (say, by ritualized combat…) he could claim her assets and marry someone else. Win-win!
Data and La Forge investigate the weapons to be used in this combat and discover that they are deadly sharp and tipped with poison, which Lt. Yar’s Starfleet training can’t save her from. Picard decides to hatch a little scheme, though. When it comes time to battle, the two women, armed with pointy ball spike gauntlets called glavin, poledance their way around each other. The kerfluffle ends with Yar poking Yareena with the poison-tipped glavin. She then hugs Yareena’s body and the two beam out.
Lutan is confused, but seems satisfied that his wife’s out of the way and agrees to hand over the vaccine. Picard then beams both him and Hagon back to the Enterprise where they find Yareena, alive and well thanks to Dr. Crusher’s antidote. Because Yareena technically died of the poison, her marriage to Lutan is dissolved, and she instead offers all her money and land to Hagon because he seemed mildly concerned for her life during the death match. Then, to further shame Lutan, she makes him her “second.”
And they all live happily ever after in a racist utopia.
Analysis
Have you ever wondered, “What if ‘Amok Time‘ were more like a racist 1940s serial?’” Well have I got great news for you!
I wish I could set this episode on fire. It was even worse than I remembered. The appalling racism is so casual, so thoughtless, it feels almost like a pulp satire. I can imagine only a handful of ways this could have been more offensive (one of them involves jumping around like monkeys, which the next episode so helpfully will take care of), but I think the costumes really take the cake. The “ethnic” voice affectations and clapper sticks could conceivably be reinterpreted, but there’s no getting out of those Hammer pants and open-shirted tunics.1 If the all-black guest cast had been in suits, we could have least pretended, you know? But no, instead we get the planet of African stereotypes that features women in ’80s bodysuits facing off in poledancing death matches.
If I had any revelation on this viewing, it was that the racism was only one of many staggering flaws. I had entirely forgotten the laughably inept attempt to be feminist at the end by having Yareena gift her large tracts of land to Lutan’s right-hand man. If you look beneath the surface of patriarchal societies, you’ll see that it’s women who really control everything! Don’t you feel enlightened, now? And how does Lutan get to be her “second” anyway? How can both parties choose hierarchical polygamy? Does that mean Lutan can’t get remarried? Oh right, it doesn’t matter because you’re supposed to be busy admiring the sekrit feminism and not thinking about how ludicrously implausible this society would be. And let’s not forget the real kicker, here: Yar likes Lutan’s attention. Because women are totally turned on by harassment, kidnapping, and manipulation. You just can’t tell because they like to play hard to get. (True fact!)2
But none of that really hurts. After all, there are many works I enjoy despite their archaic notions of race and gender. The true turd factor—the irredeemability—comes from the flippant, reductionist treatment of the prime directive. Troi tells Picard that their job would be “so simple” if they did not have the prime directive. Actually, no. It wouldn’t be simple (I mean golly, first contact between cultures on this planet has always been sooo easy!), and the prime directive is not the problem here. The prime directive doesn’t say to allow your crewmembers to be kidnapped. It certainly doesn’t give you the right to upset the entire power structure on a planet by dissolving the leader’s marriage. And it most certainly doesn’t command one to play along with every juvenile request an upstart dictator sends your way. The whole reason you have people—actual individuals—commanding ships, instead of just reference computers spitting out infractions, is so that one can exercise one’s own judgment weighing subjective factors. This is a balance the show took way too long to finally get right.
Like with “The Naked Now,” “Code of Honor” does no favors for humanity’s cheerleaders. One of my least favorite moments is when Picard denounces the Ligonians’ “pompous strutting” that “we” have “grown out of.” So what was that right there, if not pompous strutting of your own? The constant references to how the Ligonians are essentially backwards humans represent exactly the kind of self-satisfying smugness of superiority that makes the Enterprise‘s diplomatic efforts unlikely to succeed in this or any other mission. Granted, it’s justified here because the Ligonians are cartoons, but it’s off-putting nonetheless.
On a more mundane level, the plot just doesn’t make sense to me. Why would this planet—with no technological capabilities—have a vaccine to a disease that exists halfway across the galaxy? And what kind of soulless jerks are they that they don’t just donate the vaccine to people in need instead of dick around for ship tours and aikido demonstrations? And my lord, the “humor.” I love Geordi and Data’s friendship (or at least, as it appears later…), but that whole scene about shaving and jokes was agony. (I do admit to liking the French joke, though. That meme has not yet gotten old.) I never paid much attention to Wesley Crusher when I saw this the last time around, but his special treatment thanks to a needling mom is grating on me already.
To those of you who, like me, re-watched this episode, I’m going to quote Tasha Yar: “How sad for you.”
1 On the plus side, I got to use my first instance of the “planet of the hats” tag.
2 Not actually true or a fact.
Torie’s Rating: Full Stop (on a scale of 1-6)
Best Worst Lines: TROI: But it was a thrill. Lutan is such, such a basic male image and having him say he wants you…
TASHA: Yes, of course it made me feel good when he — Troi, I’m your friend and you tricked me!
TROI: How simple all this would be without the Prime Directive.
Trivia/Other Notes: James Louis Watkins, who played Hagon, was considered to play Lt. Worf but lost out to Michael Dorn. He’s perhaps best known now as Dr. MacIntyre on Smallville (where he’s credited as Julian Christopher, as he’s since changed his name).
In the script, only Lutan’s guards were described as African-ish. It was the decision of Russ Mayberry, the director, to make the entire planet black. Gene Roddenberry fired him for it (though allegedly Mayberry was also mistreating the actors) and Les Landau finished the episode uncredited.
Memory Alpha has a nice bit on some reactions to the episode from the cast and crew:
As noted in the TNG Companion, Tracy Tormé was embarrassed by what he called a “1940s tribal Africa” view of Africans in the episode. Jonathan Frakes referred to it as a “racist piece of shit” while Brent Spiner called it “embarrassing.” When asked what his least favorite episode of The Next Generation was at a 2007 science fiction convention in Toronto, Canada, Jonathan Frakes told the audience in attendance “The worst and most embarrassing and one that even Gene would have been embarrassed by was that horrible racist episode from the first season… Code of Honor, oh my God in heaven!” According to Wil Wheaton, “If the cast wasn’t arbitrarily decided to be African-American,” the idea of the episode being racist or non-racist wouldn’t have been an issue. Star Trek: Voyager actor Garrett Wang said this episode “stinks” to which LeVar Burton added “without question” at a Star Trek panel at DragonCon 2010.
Previous episode: Season 1, Episode 3 – “The Naked Now.”
Next episode: Season 1, Episode 5 – “The Last Outpost.”
Torie is absolutely right about everything in this episode. I will have some more comments later, but first this thought, which made me somewhat irate: Once Enterprise finally has the vaccine, after wasting days at this horrible planet, they head to Styris IV at warp three? Where death from the plague is being estimated in the millions? Nice, guys.
My warp rating: Full Stop.
This is totally unfair to racist 1940s serials. We’re in the realm of really, really bad Rider Haggard/ERB imitators here, like Gor with race instead of sex. Hell, that may be insulting to Gor.
Probably the biggest problem with this episode is the casting decision. In a way, Wil Wheaton’s right that if all of the Ligonians had been white, the discussion wouldn’t focus on the racism of the episode. But all of the other flaws would still be there. And we wouldn’t be so distracted from them. As Torie pointed out, even different costuming choices might have mitigated things a little. And lose the Caribbean accents. I kept expecting Lutan to start babbling about kola nuts (older members of the groups will know what I’m talking about).
I’m going to say that full stop is a bit generous and call this one dead in space.
I’d have to go with “accelerating backwards into a time we’d all rather forget.”
Next!
The episode is just fractally bad, every line of dialogue an every frame of video a complete shitheap.
I hope to have more to say about this episode later; my memory of it isn’t so good and I’m not entirely sanguine about rewatching it. I do remember being very unimpressed by the fight choreography. A word on that…
Years and years ago I remember being embarrassed when my father came into the room while I was watching some episode or other of Babylon 5 just when a typically clumsy fight scene was going on. He just started laughing and made some joke about how the more futuristic the show was supposed to be, the greater the chance that we’d be treated to hand-to-hand combat. He was right and I wonder why that’s so. In the ’80s and ’90s, at any rate, it never looked any good in any show. I happen to think that Lt. Yar is especially bad at it but I’m quite prepared to admit that I’m letting my general dislike for the character color that judgment.
Wish I could edit comments…forgot to add this at the bottom:
Because there’s a common belief that, I daresay, is widely prevalent throughout the Star Trek universe and especially in TNG, that all useful drugs come from some exotic herb or flower or spice melange that can only be found in the middle of nowhere. It’s almost a mystical belief: Nature Provides. Nobody believes that drugs are very often designed and synthesized from scratch.
@6 etomlins
At least this time they made a halfhearted attempt to explain why they couldn’t just replicate the vaccine.
One of the things I hate most about this episode is how much explaining there is. Picard goes on and on about the Prime Directive and why it’s important but how it would make things so much easier without it. (Contrast with similar discussions in the upcoming “Justice.”) Picard even acknowledges how ridiculous it is:
PICARD: I’m sorry, this is becoming a speech.
TROI: You’re the Captain, sir. You’re entitled.
PICARD: Not entitled to ramble on about something everyone knows. Carry on.
That’s some bad writing right there.
And somehow I never caught on to the whole similarity between the names “Yar” and “Yareena.” Is this implying that his First One is just like Yar only more tribal or something?
I knew this episode was bad. I dreaded it. But it was so much worse than I remembered. I’m sorry, I feel like every comment I make is going to turn into a mini-rant. You’ve been warned…
I’m confused. Was this a first contact situation for the crew of the Enterprise or was this a First Contact situation for the Federation? The Ligonians seemed to have had basic knowledge of the Federation and Star Fleet though no real understanding of its culture. If the Federation had already established contact with this society, the Prime Directive shouldn’t apply. How the crew responds to the situation should be weighed against other rules of diplomacy. If it is truly a First Contact situation, why are there no dedicated diplomats involved with the mission. (That’s something that also bothered me about that later First Contact episode.)
Torie is right that the ending is confused. It is confused because the concept of the episode rests on poor world-building. This culture has an abundance of this vaccine. Why? If they have the vaccine that should mean that they are at risk of catching the plague. They should be fearful of this ship coming from a society that has a deadly plague spreading among its citizens. Yet, we see no concern for personal health among the Ligonians. Why make a vaccine that has no benefit to yourself unless you are able to trade with people who do need it? That suggests either the Ligonians have spaceflight beyond their system or that they’ve already been trading with a space traveling culture. Either way, this leads back to the Prime Directive not applying.
Even with trying to ignore the race problems with this story, it is still a bad story.
I still use “NO VACCINE” as a verbal shorthand for blatant racial stereotypes. I seem to recall at the time making a lot of 7-up commercial jokes about this episode.
And as for “The worst and most embarrassing and one that even Gene would have been embarrassed by was that horrible racist episode from the first season… Code of Honor, oh my God in heaven!” — wasn’t Rodenberry still very much alive at this point? Did Frakes just forget that?
@9. Yes, in fact Gene in a pique of mincromanagement basically rewrote all of the early episodes and so his greasy hamfisted pawprints are all over this mess.
It was at this point in the original viewing I really started to get an intense dislike for the character of Yar and the actress who portrayed her. Everything about the character is forced and poorly portrayed, some noob’s notion of a “liberated woman.”
Troi was becoming laughable at this point, with her magical abilities to observe the completely obvious. I recall one episode with a Romulan commander played by Andreas Katsulas, one of the most bombastic and scenery chewing actors of all time, openly sneering and threatening the Enterprise crew. Troi focused her awesome powers and observed, “There’s menace behind his smile.” Ya think?
Remarkable that this series survived the first episodes.
It’s easy to overlook, amidst the offensive “African-tribe” stereotypes, how offensive this is to Native Americans. With the “female property ownership” (kind of like the Wampanoag or other peoples of the American northeast) and the “counting coup” thing (like Plains Indians), it’s like some writer (convinced, no doubt, of the existence of an undifferentiated, monolithic “Native American” culture across the whole continent) cracked open the Big Book of Ethnological Stereotypes, and the director just happened to get the skin color and dress code wrong. And of course all Others are bound to be the same, so obviously a people who believe that only women can own property are going to be totally cool with polygamy and the abduction method of gaining a spouse. If they have, y’know, obsessive honor codes, surely they’ll also have cage fights and poisoned hand-to-hand weapons. Even if these traits work at cross-purposes.
I think there’s also a connection to a trend in Western historiography here, particularly of the late-19th/early-20th century, that assumes that foreign cultures are always “Just Like Us But 150 Years Ago.” Which is why you have historians looking for Why The Ming Chinese Never Developed Capitalism, assuming that Western Europe is the one true development path for all cultures everywhere, and people who are different are just like how we were Back Then. It’s that kind of context in which Picard gives them the pottery horse; his message is basically just “Here, it’s something that, just like you, is from ancient Earth history! You’ll like things like this!” (Though really, doesn’t that artifact Belong In A Museum or something?)
For those of you who’ve been missing this Ten-Forward thread, I found it kind of amusing the way the Ligonian leader talks like the head of a rival Civ in the Civilization series… down to the mannerisms. Well, at least he seems to have a clear conception of himself as the leader of a people.
Finally — the Ligonian leader dude obviously had the whole plan from the beginning! About having Yar kill off his wife I mean. He practically says so to his buddy during the first act. So they must have known something about the Federation having some woman warriors — but then all the assumptions the Enterprise crew operates off of are wrong from the beginning; he isn’t trying to prove himself a big man, he’s intended from the beginning not to return Yar…
Gah, I’ve given this too much thought already.
Despite its cosmic awfulness, this is still not the worst, most dreadul episode of all time, in my book. That would have to be Season 2’s Riker clip show. Gah.
Ha, @9 knows what I was talking about with the kola nuts.
@12 Lemnoc, at least there was an excuse for the clip show. The series was way over budget for the year and Paramount insisted they do a show that could be shot in 3 days. Sure the result sucked, but they were forced into it. There’s no excuse for this abomination.
@DemetriosX #13
Wow, googling [“No vaccine” Kola nut] just gets me a bunch of anti-vax websites. Sigh.
There’s a tennis term, “unforced error,” which per Wikipedia is an error that “cannot be attributed to any factor other than poor judgment and execution by the player.” I think that pretty much sums up this episode.
Yeah, this is an icky episode from beginning to end. I know that the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs is very racist/sexist and on the whole riduclous, but it can at least be argued that his work was a product of its time, and at least had a great deal of inventiveness. The same could possibly be argued for TOS and its many transgressions on this front. There is absolutely NO excuse for this hot mess of an episode.
The ‘forced feminism’ of this episode has cropped up in later incarnations of Star Trek, and it always feels so self-conscious. You can usually tell that there is an effort to make a really blatant statement about equality that is undermined by some kind of regressive remark, framing a shot from an obviously leering male POV, or ensuring that a female character is wearing a skintight body suit. I’m usually able to reconcile that and move on, but in this episode, its completely unavoidable how awful, conflicted, and forced the gender roles are. I agree that Yar’s character was pretty much unsalvageable at this point, between this episode and the previous one.
It blows me away that somebody made the conscious decision to cast the alien characters as all black actors…and in the late eighties! Ugly stuff, that…I’m pretty sure TOS represented race relations a thousands times better than this.
Ugh.
I think I’ve only seen this episode twice (and sorry, but I’m not watching it again) and I really don’t remember it all that well. Thankfully.
I swear, just when you think it can’t get any worse, they throw in a fight to the death between two women with poles. I bet that when Nichelle Nichols saw this episode she thanked her lucky stars that she didn’t marry Roddenberry. Why didn’t Majel Barrett just kick his ass?
I wanted to mention that this episode also feels like a throwback to TOS because of Fred Steiner’s score, which seems strangely out of place in this episode. It isn’t bad music per se, but I was annoyed by the lighthearted musical cues that tell us we should be amused at the Ligonians’ quaint ways and primitive ideas. And the overall music is just way too dramatic for what occurs on screen.
I remember thinking someone had just watched “Coming to America” and wanted to create a space version of Zamunda. With an “Amok Time” ripoff set on the monkey bars. But terribly executed.
This was so bad I didn’t notice the Prime Directive stupidity. I never picked up on it later because I never rewatched this one. Not because it was boring (like most early TNG), but because it was terrible. “Naked Now” and “Code of Honor”, back to back, were awful remakes/ rehashes/ hashups of good Star Trek episodes that may have been intended to bridge old fans to the new show, but almost killed it instead. I wonder if the rest of the season was already in the can when these were aired.
Blech.
@14 DeepThought, the “No vaccine” isn’t part of it. Back in the late 70s/early 80s, 7-Up had ads featuring the guy who played Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die where he rambled on about cola nuts. I’m sure the ads are out there somewhere.
This show was so lucky these episodes aired before the Internet Age had begun. There was a lot of grumbling among fans, but it couldn’t build into a groundswell they way it could have even 10 years later. If nothing else, the next episode would have killed it dead. Even then they had done a decent job of building up word about the new bad guys that were going to finally be revealed. But more about that next week. I think what saved was a) there was still a mood in those days to let a show find its feet before it got cancelled, b) Paramount had invested a lot of money in it and wanted to see some sort of return, and c) it was syndicated and the stations that were airing it had paid a lot of money for it, some of which probably would have had to be paid back if Paramount had pulled the plug.
@ 2 DemetriosX
The whole thing just makes me think of those pulp covers where big black monsters abduct white women. But at least those demonstrate some fun artistry…
@ 5 etomlins
Well, that’s what the various man-wrestling (and now, woman-wrestling) tags are for! I think it’s a relic of pulpy adventure stories. Someone’s gotta punch Hitler in the jaw, you know.
I gave B5 the good college try, watching most of the first season, but the costumes and sets there make TNG look like the Oscars.
As for the vaccine, the plant thing would be fine, but they’re not there for plants. They’re there for ready-made VACCINE. As in, synthesized and produced. That just… what??
@ 7 Eugene
I never noticed the Yareena/Yar thing. Ew.
That line of dialogue you pointed to actually made me cringe. It reminded me of the metatext of Data in Farpoint, saying “I seem to be commenting on everything.” The attempts at humor here are so sad.
@ 8 Ludon
I was also confused about how the Enterprise knew all this stuff about these people if it’s a first contact scenario. I think you’re right it’s not. It couldn’t be.
@ 9 S. Hutson Blount
He must have forgotten, since I found that trivia about Gene firing the director.
@ 10 Lemnoc
Yar is a great example of a really unfortunate trend of “strong female characters” whose entire character is defined by some past sexual trauma. So, since Yar was from the rape gang planet, she seeks love… in the form of android sex? The ass-kicking women who are secretly fragile little dolls thing still crops up all the time. Yar was a shit character from day 1. At least Troi improved a little with time. She never became a paragon of awesome ladyness but at least she didn’t constantly talk about the rape gangs. Crosby didn’t have a lot to work with but she also just wasn’t very good.
@ 11 DeepThought
I don’t think he has the plan from the beginning. I think he’s on the up-and-up until he meets Yar. He becomes intrigued that she could be a possible solution to his problems, and then decides to go through with it. But I don’t think the whole thing is a scheme.
@ 12 Lemnoc
I’m STILL voting for Dr. Crusher inheriting her grandma’s Scottish incubus. Worst. Episode. Ever.
@ 15 glorbes
The forced feminism thing was what drove me so crazy about DS9. Every attempt to be feminist was ham-fisted and self-conscious, and in the end it just legitimized whatever it was set out to challenge. TNG never even got THAT far, though. The women aren’t well-written enough to legitimize the patriarchy!
Back when I first saw this episode in 1987, I actually liked the idea that everyone on the Planet of Hats was black. It bothered me that alien races on TOS were always played by white actors, and I was hoping that this episode would be the first of many where an alien race would be played by nonwhites. And maybe they would have, if “Code of Honor” hadn’t been so awful. Now, though, the episode is an anomaly, the only one of its kind. All future episodes had alien races either be all white actors (like the Ferengi and Trill), or racially mixed (like the Klingons and Bajorans), or so heavily made up that the actor’s race didn’t matter (like the Cardassians and Bolians).
OK, I finally found my notes, which remind me of another issue I had with the ending of this episode. Yareena’s death is supposed to transfer her land to Lutan, regardless of whether she comes back to life, but instead, her death ends up meaning that their marriage has dissolved… She gets to keep her land, and marry an awesome new guy, and keep her old husband around to boot? How does that work? Why would they have a subclause in this ancient mating agreement that provides for cases where someone dies and returns to life? It seems like a last-ditch effort to surprise viewers and punish Lutan for his misdeeds–actions which the episode goes to pains to point out are perfectly acceptable in his culture.
I also resented the forced attempt at making Data and Geordi good friends right off the bat. I would love to see how that friendship developed, like O’Brien and Bashir’s. And our only real clue is that Data keeps addressing Geordi as “my friend.”
There were however two lines of dialogue that weren’t completely atrocious. When Lutan says he’s heard that the holodecks are used for training, Picard adds, “And used for many other things too.” I can’t help but crack up at the subtle creepiness of that statement; at least it didn’t come from Riker. I also enjoyed Data’s explanation of the Ligonians’ transporter technology: “It reads similar to early Starfleet efforts but uses the Heglenian shift to convert matter and energy in different. Which is actually not important at this time.”
Speaking of transporters, is there any reason why Enterprise couldn’t track Yar’s commbadge and beam her up at any time? Other than wanting to make concessions to a dangerous, savage child race?
17 Eugene
“…the lighthearted musical cues that tell us we should be amused at the Ligonians’ quaint ways and primitive ideas…”
Well, shucks, it worked whenever Buckwheat was introduced on the Li’l Rascals.
@Eugene #22
re: the death thing, YEAH SERIOUSLY! It seems to me that Lutan would be perfectly within his rights to complain that the whole thing was a farce — that his wife never died, thus no harm no foul. And I’m having a hard time with anybody on the planet accepting “oh, she was dead but now she’s not, trust us” without at the very least some kind of
Council of Tribal EldersSupreme Court ruling. Unless, you know, rule of law is one of those modern innovations that these simple folk haven’t yet invented, with their honor codes that are oh-so-much-more flexible.Eugene @ 22
The ‘commbadge/beam her up’ question was one of the first items that my wife and I remarked upon after rewatching this…but I guess that would somehow violate the prime directive for some stupid reason.
OK, just finished watching it again…it was hard going at times.
Judging from this episode and from a glance at some others coming up soon, particularly the vomitous “Justice”, the purpose of the first season of TNG Trek was twofold. First, to show us that Wesley Crusher was the gift of the gods to an otherwise cold and barren Universe, and second, to drum the notion of the superior morality inherent in the Prime Directive into our heads–even though it turns out to be pretty damn evil in practice (Eric Burns at Websnark has written ably about this) and which in any case is never consistently defined or applied.
Leaving aside all the other problems with the episode, it feels like it contains enough material for maybe a half-hour show, but at an hour it feels padded. We’re treated to stuff like the strained, artificial-seeming interchange between LaForge and Data on the nature of humor. Oh, brother…now there’s gonna be a source of deep, deep hurting in the future. If there was anything funny in that scene at all, it was the hilarious way that LaForge backs up slowly as Data advances menacingly on him and tells his “joke”. The Captain’s pompous speechifying is more padding, even though they try to hang a lampshade on it by having Picard stop himself.
So Dr. Crusher stresses the urgency of the medical situation and the horrible death that awaits those afflicted…then brings up Wesley. And Picard looks suddenly tired–or maybe the weariness was Patrick Stewart’s. I also had to chuckle at the image of Wesley lurking just behind the doorjamb of the turbolift. I wonder if he does this a lot, taking the lift to the bridge and then just staring at everybody. (After all, it’s not like he’s actually on the bridge!)
And finally everything looks like it’s settled and the vaccine is ready for the transporter. Wait…so one device for duplicating matter ruins the vaccine, but another device that duplicates matter is fine?
#20, Torie:
I must admit, while “man-wrestling” is an amusing expression (it reminds me a little of Barton Fink), for some reason I just died when I read about all the “man-fighting” in “The Omega Glory”. “Man-fighting”. Heh.
Man, Babylon 5…maybe I’ll go off on that tangent in Ten Forward some day. I gave it a bit longer of a try than you did but started skipping episodes after a while and quit altogether after the anticlimax of “Into the Fire” in the 4th season.
I think that the writers of “Code of Honor” used the word “vaccine” as though it were interchangeable with other words like “drug” or “antidote”, not quite grasping that it’s something a bit more specific.
You know this episode make me happy. I can’t think of this episode withot a smile spreading across my face and a warm happy glow radiating out from deep inside. The recap of this episode has allowed me sleep quietly and whistle while I work bceause I know as long as the piece of crap is around I am not the worst writer in the world. (see, if horrid writing is good for something!)
Everyone has already covered why this episode is so craptasic on so many vector. Really this is like 26 dimensional crap.Athiests use this episode as prrof that there can be no all powerful loving god.
Why did people keep watching after suffering the torments of these 60 minutes? (I’m counting commericals cause they were pretty craptasic in teh 80s too.) Because it was Star Trek and there was an irrational hope that somehow bottled-lighting would be for sale again, because we were tired of watching and re-watching TOS epeisode that we could, and did, quote in our sleep. (It was just a few short years ealier when I mumbled about StarFleet battles in my sleep, for which my GF punched me in my slumber.)
@26 etomlins
Wait…so one device for duplicating matter ruins the vaccine, but another device that duplicates matter is fine?
*smacks forehead*
Another very good point: I forget that this show was the introduction to Star Trek for many people, so it did have to establish or revise certain rules that those who had seen TOS would already be familiar with. It’s just a shame that even with the history and detailed world building already in place, they couldn’t convey this information to new viewers in a better way.
#27, bobsandiego:
I think you’re on to something there but let me surmise that, for somewhat younger viewers (I’m inferring that I’m a relative youth here), there was something else at work.
TNG came out when I was in junior high. I’d watched plenty of old “Star Trek” reruns and enjoyed the show but…well…I felt a little guilty about it, mostly because the show looked goofy and cheap. Then I heard about “the Next Generation” and I was a little excited. Someone was taking Star Trek seriously again! Improved effects! Real actors! Prime time viewing! (Although that meant I couldn’t watch the show when I wanted for a while, since my folks controlled the TV.) I don’t think I ever put it to myself in so many words but I believe that I was willing to give the show a few breaks not just because it was a Star Trek show but because I hoped it was a Star Trek show that I wouldn’t feel slightly ashamed about watching because it was modern and respectable.
I’m going to veer off into deep and dangerous water to make an analogy…I was astonished a few years ago when it seemed like I was the only Tolkien fan I knew who wasn’t entirely pleased with Peter Jackson’s…uh…novel interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. I’d wanted to like it, really. So did just about every fan, and I think the same mechanism was at work: all the respect that Tolkien had hitherto received from the mainstream media was a disappointing Ralph Bakshi cartoon and some horrible Rankin-Bass stuff, and now here LOTR was getting the full-on blockbuster treatment. I think it dazzled a lot of people who were so thrilled that finally their favorite book was getting taken seriously, with a huge budget and Hollywood stars and state-of-the-art computer graphics and a well-known director, that they would have enthused over the movies and tolerated their flaws no matter what Jackson did.
hmm comparing Jackson’s LOTR triololgy to TNG season one, that’s a bold challenge my friend.
I shan’t derail the topic by getting into LOTR but I think faithfullness aside it a strecth to put these two things into my head at the same time. Make my brain hurt.
LOL
My favorite story about this horrible piece of shite comes directly from the lips of Michael Dorn, seen by yours truly at a convention in 1990 ( The week that “Deja Q” aired – I remember this because he asked those of us in the audience if they had kept bit with the Mariachi band in the final cut ).
For some reason, the subject of “Code Of Honor” came up, and he related that during filming, Patrick Stewart actually came up and apologized to him for the episode. I thought this was a lovely gesture on Stewart’s part, since he truly had no control over the script or casting of the episode and it showed that SOMEONE on the show was instantly aware of how insensitive the whole production was.
I really was excited by the prospect of new Star Trek, and gave the fledgling series the benefit of the doubt during those early days, even there was so much wrong from the beginning. In the end, I’m glad I stuck with it, because it did improve as time went on and Gene took a step back from production. But most of season one is hard to slog through for me now.
@10 Lemnoc:”@9. Yes, in fact Gene in a pique of mincromanagement basically rewrote all of the early episodes and so his greasy hamfisted pawprints are all over this mess.”
Also remember that many people ( cast and crew ) blame the general awfulness of the early years to Gene’s friend/lawyer/sycophant Leonard Maizlish who bid his best to keep people at arms length from Gene, and did a lot of uncredited ( and unauthorized ) re-writing of many scripts, in flagrant violation of guild rules. I would bet that this is one script with his stink on it. A lot of people quit because of Maizlish’s interference, and the show didn’t get better until the studio gave Gene an ultimatim that Maizlish had to go.
@Eugene:”I also resented the forced attempt at making Data and Geordi good friends right off the bat. I would love to see how that friendship developed, like O’Brien and Bashir’s. And our only real clue is that Data keeps addressing Geordi as “my friend.”
It seemed like a throwback to other series where relationships would just be rushed along for the sake of plot. Another example was Riker’s initial mistrust of Data, seen in “Encounter at Farpoint”, and almost immediately dropped thereafter ( which was funny because I remember reading the first licensed TNG novel, in which the writer – obviously not having actually seen any filmed episodes, but having worked from the “Farpoint” script – really exaggerated the character quirks, such as Riker being openly hostile towards Data ). I also thought the pairing of Geordi and Data, while eventually just fine, seemed a bit inorganic and a bit of a cliche… you know, the handicapped kid and the geek hang out together because they can’t make other friends easily. Their pairing would have made more sense if La Forge had been the chief engineer from the beginning, and it had evolved out of his fascination with machinery.
@Dep1701 #32
“Their pairing would have made more sense if La Forge had been the chief engineer from the beginning, and it had evolved out of his fascination with machinery.”
Interesting… see, I always interpreted this from the perspective of Geordi being a geek, and correspondingly socially awkward. One of the things that’s always seemed to go with that territory (at least in my own life) is that, knowing one is weird & being shunned for it, one tends to take friends where they can be found & be more accepting of social awkwardness in others. So, it makes sense for Geordi-as-geek to befriend and accept Data-as-socially/empathically-damaged.
But then this early on we didn’t really know that Geordi was a geek. He was just a pretty chill guy.
@DemetriosX – I first saw this episode about six months ago. When Lutan first spoke, I immediately said “These are kola nuts.”
The smell of success is NEVAH too sweet! Hah hah hah hah hah hah…
@etomlins – You’re not alone. My interest in those films faded out about midway through the second one. I could tolerate a lot of screaming gaffes for the sake of all the things Jackson got magically, marvellously right, but the further he went along the less the films were about Middle-earth and more about Jackson. Star Next was the same way in reverse: at first, there was little or no devotion to story, just a lot of ego trips and bad fan fiction, but then it improved season by season.
Was watching The San Pebbles the other day, and it struck me how the incidents there make hokum out of this episode.
Commanders of the U.S. patrol fleets are under orders not to involve themselves in the Chinese rebellion, but are still free to protect the crews from attack and are under no obligation whatsoever to surrender people under their flag and protection. The idea that some kind of non-interference directive compels Starfleet Command to meekly accept the idiotic tyranny of local jurisdictions is laughable nonsense of the highest order.
“We must abandon Lt. Yar to her fate. Otherwise an entire society could be diverted from its correct path! Consider her a Casualty of Peace!”
Absolute humbug.
Having just re-watched this episode through the lens of knowing the director arbitrarily hired an all black cast, I don’t think the episode was racist at all. It just reads that way because of casting and costuming choices. Had they had a multiple races, we wouldn’t consider it racist. However, it is a pretty illogical episode and should be considered one of the worst TNG episodes for myriad other reasons.
@ 36 Mark
That’s precisely the point. If the episode didn’t have those things that were racist, it wouldn’t be perceived as racist.
In any case, it doesn’t matter if those elements were “arbitrary” or “choices.” The combination of dreadful (or merely unfortunate) casting, costuming, and the “barbaric” cultural stereotype don’t have to be intentional (and more often than not, aren’t!) to be racist.
Am I the only one who doesn’t see the racism? I think people see racism where they want to see it, and moreover especially where they THINK other people will see it.
The ruling party of this planet (in far-away lands) has a singular ethnic background.
This is not a surprise. Can we think of any other organizations in history that were completely (if not the vast majority) dominated by one ethnicity?
Yes. We can easily think of several…hundred examples.
So that makes sense.
If the ethnicity was not chosen to portray their actions as commonplace, as clearly no other “black” “African-americans” in the TNG universe are so bigoted, it is actually more offensive to suggest that they cannot experience or exhibit these wide ranges of beliefs and views.
To me it is perfectly plausible that there is a backwards planet that is male dominated (Does this one ring a bell?) and has a ruling class that prefers one form of social enslavement over another.
Good day.
Wow, I feel so much more enlightened. Here we were thinking that the opinions of people who actually were hurt and/or offended by this racist bilgewater might count for something, when really it was all in our/their silly little heads, and it was THEM being racist for even thinking about it.
Gosh, I’m sure glad we got The Real Dope-splanation on that one.
/ apologies for breaking your snarkometer, T & E.
I know I’m behind the time here, but I just saw this episode (first time ever) on BBCAmerica and Googled to see if it bothered anyone else as much as me. I won’t rehash what everyone else has said here, but I’m so glad I stopped watching TNG after Naked Now bored the life out of me. Seriously, the next episode I saw was Galaxy Child in 1991, because I was dating a girl who liked TNG.
The writer of this show also wrote an early season episode of Stargate SG-1 generally considered the worst the show ever had.
It’s about Sam Carter, the show’s female lead, being kidnapped by a Mongolian-esque race. She is attracted to the leader due to his power and, in the end, must kill his wife in hand-to-hand combat. (Admittedly, I think it’s a straight up knife fight on a stone floor this time.)
Sound familiar?
@41 Andrew
Yuck! And that reminds me I need to finish watching SG-1…