100 – Redemption, Part 1

Grade: B

Summary

Captain Picard is en route to Gowron’s installation ceremony as the next leader of the Klingon High Council. Additionally, perhaps Worf can finally clear his father’s name and regain his honor.

Commentary

OK, so I realize this will probably put me at risk of losing a lot of credibility with my fellow Star Trek fanatics, but I can only give this episode a B grade. The story is pretty engaging, and the acting is better than it has been recently, and the script has definitely improved, but the episode itself is a bit stilted. I’m not sure what it is about this episode that makes me feel this way, but it just doesn’t seem very natural. Maybe it’s because it relies so much on Klingons, and they all have that weird over-projecting style of speaking. It just doesn’t seem normal. But it’s more than that. The entire episode doesn’t seem authentic, for some reason.

Personally, I don’t particularly care for Klingon politics. Yes, I definitely wanted to see Worf get his honor back, but only because he’s such a wonderful character. But it doesn’t really matter to me who leads the High Council. I guess we’ll find out sooner or later why that’s important, but for now, I honestly don’t care.

Captain Picard really annoyed me in this episode, but maybe that’s by design. Up to this point in the series, he’s been fairly willing to mess with other planets, but since the inquiry in The Drumhead, he’s been much more rigid in his obedience to the Prime Directive. In this episode, he tells Worf that he can’t have access to the information that the Enterprise uncovered about the Khitomer massacre, but then he changes his mind when he realizes he’s being a bit hypocritical. Later, he refuses to come to Gowron’s aid after he’s been installed as the High Council Leader, and that seems really strange. He’s going to great lengths to not do anything. It doesn’t seem like the Picard we’ve come to respect. Again, that could be by design, but it just seems weird, and I didn’t like it much.

As a cliff-hanger episode, this one doesn’t work nearly as well as Best of Both Worlds, which has been widely recognized as one of the very best 2-part episodes in the entire franchise. The Redemption cliff-hanger seems very weak in comparison. We know there’s a Klingon Civil War about to happen, and we also know the Romulans are behind it. Then all of a sudden, a Tasha Yar look-alike appears out of the shadows for some inexplicable reason. It will become obvious in the next episode, but for now, it’s just odd.

Of Note

Back in 1991, after this episode originally aired, it was known that Michael Dorn had no plans to leave the series. Maybe that weakens this story’s climax a bit, but at the end of this episode, we’re not sure what Worf’s plans will be.