Episode-a-week: Code of Honor

[Captrek]

The thread’s a day late this week because I was otherwise occupied yesterday.

In the future, you don’t have to wait for me to start the thread each Tuesday. Anyone can do it.

On to the episode. This week it’s Code of Honor.

It’s generally considered one of TNG’s worst episodes, and rightfully so, but I enjoy it. Its badness has a certain charm. Despite things like the good production values and music, in many other ways it feels amateurish, almost like a fan film. The incompetence is forgivable only because it’s such an early episode. Forget about the great show that TNG will become later, and imagine a group of plucky fans in the 80’s trying to bring Star Trek back.

Crosby’s performance is especially amateurish, as is the entire guest cast. The writing seems almost intentionally campy. Cribbing a story idea from Amok Time, after the remake of The Naked Time, isn’t such a good idea since it invites comparisons to TOS, and comes up very short in the comparison. Some of my favorite so-bad-it’s-good moments are:

YAREENA: I challenge your right of supercedence!
HAGON: No woman has challenged supercedence for over two hundred years!
YAREENA: The right is mine and I will have it!

PICARD: Tell me what you know about this?
TASHA: Nothing, sir.
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!

TASHA: I think you should know that there is no physical training anywhere that matches Starfleet, especially its security people.

YAREENA: It has everything to do with Lutan. Lutan wants you to be his First One.
TASHA: Impossible, Yareena. I am a career Starfleet officer.
YAREENA: How could you not love him? Every woman loves him.

(during the fight)
HAGON: Careful, Yareena!
(later)
YAREENA: Even as I battled, Hagon, I heard you calling out for me.
HAGON: Yareena, be my First One.
YAREENA: All my land and all my goods, all I have is yours to rule.
​

Another favorite moment is when Picard and the other officers watch Yareena practicing, and we get a closeup on Picard and dramatic music to demonstrate their worry at Yar facing such an intimidating opponent... except Yareena’s moves fail to impress. The fights in this episode are terrible.

A curious moment is when a spectator gets killed during the match, played (intentionally or not) for laughs. Despite Riker’s earlier statement that the poison is “split second lethal,” it takes this guy considerably more than a second to die; he removes the weapon, looks down, sees the wound, reacts, and then dies. Nobody seems concerned with the death, everybody just resumes doing what they were and the Enterprise doesn’t bother to help him the way they do for Yareena. It would be pretty funny in a YouTube video, but of questionable propriety in family entertainment.

A moment where I really like the HD treatment is the Red Alert lighting on the bridge. Neat.

 

[Trekker4747]

Ugh, this episode is a lot like being skull-fucked by a donkey.

I really don't know that there is anything redeeming in it or even really worth watching or even talking about.

 

[BillJ]

Not as bad as Angel One. I think there was a story in this one somewhere but it's buried under terrible casting and poor acting.

 

[inflatabledalek]

The thread’s a day late this week because I was otherwise occupied yesterday.

In the future, you don’t have to wait for me to start the thread each Tuesday. Anyone can do it.

I actually just came on here with the intent of starting it if no one else had, I hadn't earlier because of not wanting to step on any toes so I'll remember that (and of course, real life should always come first. Even before Code of Honor...).

As for the episode itself, it's probably the single most dated episode of any version of Star Trek. There are other episodes, and I'm not just talking about the original series but including the later shows as well, where you look at them now and see elements where you go "OK, that's unfortunate when seen now, but in the context of the time it was made it's understandable and if anything it's a great sign of how the world has changed for the better it now looks so iffy".

Code of Honor is however the only episode I can think of that must have had so much stuff that looked so wrong at the time it was made. Certainly watching TNG as a kid in the UK (where, though there is a history of racism, it's not culturely the same as the US) it seemed really... odd.

Hell, it's the only episode I know of where the people making it thought it was hugely racist whilst they were doing it.

The original director seems to have been the cause of most of the problems, and- looking at Memory Alpha- he seems to have already been in his 60's when he directed it. So I suspect what the problem was someone who would never have thought of themselves as a racist because they'd grown up with a certain set of values and opinions as the norm, and whom the world has passed by as attitudes changed. Great for the world, shame for him. And the episode.

Even outside of that though, it's not a very good show. I can enjoy The Paradise Syndrome even though its portrayal of Native Americans is arguably very patronising by modern standards because it's otherwise a very well made piece of TV (certainly by the standards of the season). Code of Honor has pretty much no redeeming features whatsoever. I can't even find it bad-good funny like The Last Outpose because there's a general dullness to it.

Well, apart from Patrick Stewart's unusually poor delivery of (and I'm paraphasing here) "She is a very lovely female" where he suddenly feels all Eric Idle. "Nudge nudge, wink wink. Know what I mean?".

It can't even spell "Honour" properly!

 

[davejames]

Yeah to be honest the racist overtones don't bother me nearly as much as just the hackneyed, unoriginal storytelling. It feels more like a corny old Buck Rogers episode than something written for Star Trek.

 

[inflatabledalek]

Yeah to be honest the racist overtones don't bother me nearly as much as just the hackneyed, unoriginal storytelling. It feels more like a corny old Buck Rogers episode than something written for Star Trek.

That's the irony, without the racism (and some of the side show sexism) there would be nothing whatsoever memorable about this episode. If anything the original director prevented us getting the single most forgettable episode of Star Trek ever.

Which is good, right?

Right?

 

[The Overlord]

It is hard to enjoy this episode as camp, when this episode has racist undertones.

 

[Captrek]

It feels more like a corny old Buck Rogers episode than something written for Star Trek.

Imagine it with McCarthy's original theme music (skip to about 0:40):

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pw0riEEVFQ[/yt]

 

[BriGuy]

To get away from the obvious and often repeated comments...

There's this episode and others where Starfleet seems to ignore its dictate of not contacting pre-warp civilizations.

Guess they hadn't come up with that edict yet.

 

[Harvey]

Not much to say about this one. It's pretty mundane television, "elevated" in our memories because of some unfortunate racist colonialist tropes. Of note, the (credited) director, Russ Mayberry, died a couple weeks ago.

Considering his choices here, which are rather old-fashioned and a racist, it's surprising that he directed several episodes of both The Monkees and In The Heat of the Night -- two series not known for being old-fashioned or racist, respectively.

 

[Trekker4747]

Not as bad as Angel One. I think there was a story in this one somewhere but it's buried under terrible casting and poor acting.

Angel One actually has an once or two of something redeemable and something resembling a story and at least seeing a Matriarchal society was interesting a different to see. (Though they went too far portraying the men of the planet as a weaker sex.) But there is nothing in Code of Honor that is worth noting.

 

[Captrek]

There's this episode and others where Starfleet seems to ignore its dictate of not contacting pre-warp civilizations.

It wasn’t Starfleet that first contacted them. Long before the Enterprise came to their planet, the Ligonians were contaminated by contact with Mickey Mouse.

 

[Jeyl]

Mmm, yes, yes. Code of Honor.

You know, there is a certain "flaw" with the first season of TNG that can only be experienced if you were to watch Code of Honor and Justice back to back. One planet has a race of all white people who are so perfect and so joyful that there is almost no comparison. Code of Honor features an all black planet who's society is so barbaric, so primitive and so offensive that even when the crew of the Enterprise alters things for everyone's favor, they still chastise us on our behavior. Yes, the people who kidnapped a high ranking female officer and forced her into a life and death duel are berating us over our behavior.

And if that wasn't bad enough, this episode also gives us even more reason to hate Wesley, even more so than his drunk antics from the last episode. The Enterprise is stuck in a hostage situation with one of their high ranking officers, we have a colony that's been infected with a plague where millions are likely to die, there is the possibility that we'll be forced to watch our said officer die in a duel, and Picard decides to let an inexperienced teenage boy handle one of the most crucial stations on the Federation flagship. What the heck?

Than you shall have no treaty, no vaccine and NO LIEUTENANT YAR!!!!!!!

And did anyone else find the portrayal of Tasha Yar in this episode insulting? She's the high ranking security officer on the ship who's duty is to make sure everything is in order, and this episode actually attempts to portray her as having some genuine attraction towards Lutan. The man who kidnapped her, lied to Picard and almost condemned millions to die. This is truly a really horrible, racist and sexist episode.

 

[BillJ]

And did anyone else find the portrayal of Tasha Yar in this episode insulting? She's the high ranking security officer on the ship who's duty is to make sure everything is in order, and this episode actually attempts to portray her as having some genuine attraction towards Lutan. The man who kidnapped her, lied to Picard and almost condemned millions to die. This is truly a really horrible, racist and sexist episode.

You mean Yar found herself attracted to a man who was essentially the leader of Ligon III and wielded that power openly? Makes Yar seem almost human.

 

[inflatabledalek]

The sad thing is it's pretty much the only Yar centric episode before her death. She doesn't even get any decent sized subplots unlike the other two characters who don't get an "episode" either, Geordi and Beverly.

 

[Captrek]

And did anyone else find the portrayal of Tasha Yar in this episode insulting?

No more so than her portrayal in the previous episode. Wait til you get to Hide and Q.

 

[Jeyl]

And did anyone else find the portrayal of Tasha Yar in this episode insulting?

No more so than her portrayal in the previous episode. Wait til you get to Hide and Q.

Already did. It's moments like these where you don't even need to ask why she decided to leave the show. I'm just glad that she came back to appear in much better episodes.

 

[R. Star]

Plot Summary: Planet full of black people kidnaps white woman!

Seriously, what were they thinking when they wrote this?

 

[Jeyl]

You mean Yar found herself attracted to a man who was essentially the leader of Ligon III and wielded that power openly? Makes Yar seem almost human.

Uh, not really? My sister never found Vladimir Putin or any other world leaders attractive. Heck, outside of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, she barely knows any powerful business person by their name.

But what really makes this out of place for Star Trek is that Yar and all the human crew members are supposed to represent Gene Roddenberry's "enlightened" humanity of the future. You know? A future humanity where we brag about being better than everyone else who uses a form of currency, mock soldiers and generals of Earth's past by labeling their service uniforms as "costumes" and that one day we will become so powerful and so wise that we will surpass even the power of the Q continuum!.... wait. They praised Riker for letting a little girl die in that episode. Never mind. I take it back. Tasha Yar being enamored by a fiendish, sexist, deceiving and overall backstabbing person is truly what our enlightened women of the future will be like!

 

[Jeyl]

Another point that SFDebris pointed out in his review is how poorly the script is written. And this isn't some plot point that's brought up in the beginning and is forgotten in the end. This is pure contradiction in the span of three minutes.

Hagon: The rules are known. Let combat continue until there is a victor. It will not be interrupted.
*Yareena loses her weapon*
Lutan: Combatants, hold your positions! *they do, Lutan points to the spectator who get hit with the weapon* Return the weapon.

Yep. Can't go three minutes before the script just breaks it's own rules. Oh, and this one I got from youtube. You know how Crusher just cannot stress how awful this plague is and that the colonists need the vaccine now? Well, I think the Enterprise can go a lot faster than warp 3.