6:17-18 Birthright Parts I & II – Worf gets a tantalizing tidbit of rumor: Maybe his father did NOT die in the Romulan raid on Khitomer. Could it be true? He follows up on it, to discover a remote planet on which Romulans have guarded a prison camp of dishonored Klingon survivors of Khitomer, one in which (from a certain point of view) Romulans and Klingons are living in peace for the first time ever. But how much of that is because these dishonored Klingons have nowhere left to go? How much of it is because they have hidden their heritage from the children they birthed in captivity?
Unfortunately, like most “Klingon heritage” episodes, Worf becomes even more bombastic in his pronouncements on what it means to be Klingon. Even compared to other Klingons, Worf seems like a humorless hardass, probably because he’s a deliberate, book-learnin’ Klingon who had to intentionally (re)discover his heritage after being adopted by humans. But all that really means is that “Klingon episode = speechifying.”
When this episode idea was expanded to a two-parter, the powers-that-be cast around for a thematically related secondary storyline to help fill it out, and settled on Data discovering a subroutine in his programming which had been deliberately hidden: one that allows him to “dream.” It actually doesn’t amount to much (although it shows Brent Spiner playing a young Noonian Soong without appliance makeup), but it is a great setup for a memorable episode later.
6:19 Starship Mine – Die Hard on the Enterprise! When the ship has to undergo its periodic “baryon sweep” to remove subatomic buildup in the hull — a process which is deadly to organic life, so the whole ship is evacuated for the duration — Picard is accidentally trapped on board with a “cleaning crew” who are actually arms dealers, harvesting the explosive “trilithium resin” waste product from the warp drives to sell to terrorists. All alone, Picard has to take out the bad guys one by one, while staying ahead of the baryon sweep as it inches forward from the nacelles.
This seems to most people to be simply an action episode, not a character one — and it is a great action episode — but I think it’s also a necessary corrective to our conception of Picard’s character. We so often see him asking for opinions and alternatives in conference with his senior staff that he almost seems unable to act without a committee meeting. In contrast, isolated here and with no one to bounce ideas off, he’s clever and decisive, beating the best that the bad guys can throw at him because he’s just that canny.
Worf’s relation to the other Klingons has always struck me as being kinda like a recent religious convert as compared to long-time believers: the new guy often tries to follow what he perceives to be the rules a lot more strictly because unlike those long-time believers, he hasn’t learned which ones are the “don’t you dare cross this line” kind and which are the “well, yes, technically, but in a sort of de facto way, that’s more like a recommendation” kind. Judging by the way it’s portrayed in the various shows, the Klingon way seems to be rife with a lot of talk about honor and glory and the proper ethics of a warrior, but just about every Klingon who isn’t Worf knows a lot better than he which portions of their code they actually put into into action and to what extent.
Deep Space Nine, of course, explored this aspect of Worf much further once he joined the show. When Sisko questions how “honorable” the Klingon tactic of hiding cloaked ships among battle debris near enemy ships in distress in order to prey on anyone trying to rescue the survivors can be, a more pragmatic Worf explains that “To Klingons, there is no higher honor in battle than victory.” We also see how, for all that talk of honor, there was a fair amount of political corruption in Gowron’s regime that apparently didn’t count as “dishonorable” in the eyes of very many Klingons other than Worf (who ultimately took matters into his own hands to depose Gowron and put Martok in charge instead).
We got to see this side of Picard again in Star Trek: First Contact as well: how to deal with some Borg invaders who have already adapted to the phaser rifles with rotating modulation frequencies? Lure them into that one favorite detective holonovel of his with the safeties off, grab a Tommy Gun from a gangster character, and mow those Borg suckers down with a hail of holographic bullets! He doesn’t actually yell “Yippie-ki-yi-ay” at them, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people when watching Picard going postal on the Borg.