149 – Rightful Heir

Grade: C+

Summary

Lt. Worf has been questioning his faith lately. Today, he did not arrive on time for his shift on the Bridge. Captain Picard allows Worf some extended time off, so he spends some time in a Klingon monastery. There, he meets Kahless, the legendary Klingon warrior. How is this possible?

Commentary

This episode is quite an improvement over Suspicions, but it still isn’t that great. It was a nice idea and a good try, but I didn’t like it much. Klingon episodes just aren’t my thing. I’m not sure why it is, exactly, but it could be because I hate the way the actors talk. Maybe the writers just try too hard to make things different, and they end up focusing on that rather than on good storylines. I don’t know. All I know is that I was usually bored during this episode.

The religious aspects of the episode were actually pretty annoying. Worf says that since he rescued the Klingons in Birthright, Part 2, he’s been questioning his faith. And yet we’ve never seen any evidence of that in the five episodes that preceded this one. OK, so he had very little time in those other episodes, but it would have been really nice if there had been something there. It’s a bit of a stretch for me to think Worf would need something like this. I wish they could have found some other reason to get him into that monastery.

But other than that, I don’t like the way this episode treated faith. It really put me off when Worf went from doubter to believer only based on the DNA test. This doesn’t seem like legit faith to me, but what do I know?

Finally, this episode ends with the clone of Kahless becoming Emperor just so he can unite the Klingons and make things better for the Empire. OK, so what happens now? How come we never hear of him ever again in the entire Star Trek franchise? Bottom line – it’s a good idea, I guess, but the episode ends with a cop-out. I didn’t like it. It could have been so much better.

Of Note

The exterior of the monastery looks really fake in this episode. It’s as bad as some of the worst Original Series effects. They showed it three times, and it was 3 times too many.