1.03 Code of Honor

Rating: 1

The Enterprise must make first contact with an alien race in order to procure a much-needed vaccine. But the aliens, with a culture steeped in ‘honor’, kidnap Tasha Yar and will not give her back until she fights to the death against one of their females.

Comments

This is one of the weakest NextGen episodes in season 1. The aliens don’t look alien at all – their appearance and the music chosen is a throwback to TOS and seems old-fashioned. They appear to be Africans wearing ceremonial African robes (perhaps there’s something to be said for VOY aliens with forehead ridges).

As mentioned regarding the episode The Naked Now, the choice of episodes to establish characters is strange. Yar’s choice as a security chief is finally partially established here, as she shows her fighting ability on the holodeck. (She gets kidnapped too, but that’s another matter). Up until now, she had been frozen by Q in ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, and had been one of the first to succumb to the intoxication virus in ‘The Naked Now’.

Nits

The strategy for dealing with this culture jumps back and forth. Immediately after Yar is kidnapped, Picard hails the planet and demands to speak to Lotan. Then he fires a series of photon torpedoes set to disperse just above the planet’s surface. Then Troi and Riker tell him that their study says that this culture values patience above all else, and they should just wait. Perhaps they should have studied the culture first before making demands and firing torpedoes? This ‘respect for the Prime Directive’ is used when convenient for the script too. Picard gives a speech about how they could very easily beam Yar out and take what they want except for the Prime Directive. In the end, he does beam Yar out. I would say he is very lucky that the aliens accepted his resolution to the problem.

After the ‘first one’ brags about how well-trained she is in fighting, she then proceeds to mostly just lunge at Yar wildly, often ending up lying prone over the support bars and wide open to a return blow (which for some reason Yar takes a long time to execute, despite her rigorous martial arts training). In short, it’s a very poorly executed fight scene, devoid of excitement and choreography.

Memorable Moments

•    Data being warned by Riker that it probably wouldn’t be wise to get into an argument with Picard about whether or not French is a dead language

Quotable Quotes

"It reads similar to early Starfleet efforts and uses the Nygelian Shift to convert energy and matter to different…which is actually not important at this time."
– Data, realizing that he is giving Too Much Information