You realize that is she had been security chief there would be no Worf effect, don't you?
In S2, after Geordi is promoted to Chief Engineer, Worf could've slipped in at the Conn and gotten all the same stories that focused on his Klingon honour--none of which had anything to do with him as Security Chief--whilst being on hand for added muscle to an away team if/when needed.
Problem solved.
Here is what i mean by the Worf Effect:
Want a quick way to show how dangerous one of your unknown characters is? Simple, make them do well or win in a fight with a character that the audience already knows is tough. This establishes them as willing to fight and marks them as sufficiently dangerous. For new villains, it's common for them to pick up the toughest character among the heroes and hurl them across the room or otherwise take them out in one blow, thus showing that they are the real deal. When used sparingly and appropriately, this is a powerful way to establish said villain as a serious and credible threat, leaving the audience thinking, "Wow, they just beat up
Worf! They must be bad news!" But if the same character is repeatedly used as the target of displays like these, then the character
begins to look weak, and if abused, their
Badassery begins to look more like an
Informed Ability than anything else.
Worf Had the Flu is sometimes used to
justify Worf's poor showing.
The Worf Barrage is when an "ultimate" attack or technique is defeated this way instead of a character. If a new villain introduces themself by beating the previous villain, that's
Make Way for the New Villains (a
subtrope). When Worf gets beaten
emotionally rather than physically, that's
Break the Badass. Applied to an entire military? You may get a
Red Shirt Army. Compare
Badass in Distress and
The World's Expert on Getting Killed, both of which can overlap. Killing off a
Red Shirt or two is a slightly different method for achieving a similar effect. If the character beats up a whole
army's worth of Worfs,
Conservation of Ninjutsu is probably at work. Contrast
Fight Dracula, in which a writer has a pre-established character (as opposed to a new one) demonstrate their awesomeness by fighting Dracula (but not necessarily winning). See also
the analysis page for some side analysis of this trope. Named for the tendency in
Star Trek: The Next Generation for hostile creatures
to do that very thing to Worf.
From:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect
More:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TheWorfEffect/LiveActionTV
