First post from me, Jason! Two nights ago Hannah and I watched the Next Gen episode Sins of the Father, in which Worf's father, Mogh, is charged with conspiring with the Romulans and betraying the Klingon Empire. Honor demands that Worf and his brother Kurn challenge the ruling, and through their efforts we discover that the Empire knew Mogh was innocent all along. They laid the blame on Mogh because the true traitor was the father of one of the council members. In the end, Worf accepts a kind of 'dishonorable discharge' to preserve the integrity of the Empire's ruling council.
This episode did a great job of revealing the tension between the demands of honor and the demands of more practical concerns. Klingons purport to value honor above all else, and they hold that one is responsible for the actions of his/her family, and the family is responsible for the actions of the individual. Their warrior code sort of parallels the notion of the 'noble savage,' and their culture was originally based on the Samuri of Japan. This all sounds very impressive, but the episode reveals some problems with this system of justice.
Worf is the fully honest Klingon - he seems to take his honor as seriously as he says he does. Duras is the council member who's father betrayed the Klingons to the Romulans. It turns out later in the series that Duras is just as treacherous as his father, but in this episode all we know is that he's a bit of a sleaze bag. K'mpec is the ruler of the Klingon Empire, and he's the ultimate pragmatist. He's a fat guy who drinks too much, and while he's got a bit of pride himself, he only really cares about mantaining a stable Empire and mostly views honor as a populist obsession that has to be carefully navigated by savy politicians.
What I found most interesting was the end of the episode when Worf discovered the conspiracy. The entire episode - and really the entire series - Worf is portrayed as a brick wall of honor. He would rather die than lie, and when he first discovered the coverup he was naturally furious. However, when it was explained that revealing the truth could cast the Empire into civil war, Worf went along with K'mpecs coverup. The whole conundrum is summarized by an exchange between Picard and K'mpec:
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: You admit the truth? And yet expect him to accept punishment? What does this say of an Empire who holds honor so dear?
K'mpec: The Empire will not be destroyed for one family's honor!
In the end, I thought it was interesting because typically you expect honor based cultures to view honor as an end in itself, but in this situation you see, when push comes to shove, both Worf and K'mpec embrace, if reluctantly, a more pragmatic solution.
