Ethics (⭑⭑)

This episode is a total mess. There are some worthwhile conflicts and ideas in it, but it lacks a consistent focus, and it’s full of shoddy characterization and narrative cop-outs. The character drama and cultural rift surrounding Worf’s desire to end his own life, and the negative reactions to same from Riker and others, could have provided the makings of a workable episode, but the medical ethics “issue episode” side of things is a complete bomb. I’m afraid this one would have needed extensive reworking to qualify as a keeper.

Probably the most fundamental problem that I have with “Ethics” is that it just does not work at all to try to simultaneously tell a “Worf considers his life to be over due to his non-repairable injury, so he asks Riker to help him kill himself” story, and a “specialist doctor is called in to try to repair Worf’s injuries, but her methods are dubious” story. The two storylines undercut each other at every turn, beginning with the weird jump from ending the teaser with “I’m afraid your injuries can’t be repaired, Worf” to starting the next scene by beaming a neuro-specialist aboard the ship to try to repair them (?). When Worf makes his request to Riker to assist him with his Klingon honorable suicide ritual, it feels like, okay, here’s the meat of the episode! What will Riker do? But then, the next thing you know, Crusher is shooting down a “revolutionary” treatment proposed by the said specialist (Dr. Russell), which both undermines the stakes of the previous scene (ah, I see, Riker will be let off the hook by medical wizardry) and also feels like it just belongs in a different episode (am I supposed to be engaged with Worf’s crisis and Riker’s dilemma, or contemplating abstract medical ethics controversies?). Then, as the episode moves forward, most of the meaty character stuff that it owes us surrounding the prospect of Worf choosing to end his own life feels horribly abbreviated, presumably to make room for all the medical ethics stuff…while at the same time, the debate over the ethics of trying an experimental procedure that may kill Worf seems academic and stupid, given that the patient plans to kill himself anyway! Just a horrible, horrible pairing of incompatible storylines.

The medical ethics story is also handled pretty god-awfully, even on its own. First off, Dr. Russell’s supposedly revolutionary new treatment just doesn’t seem all that revolutionary against the general backdrop of 24th-century technology as seen throughout the series. Second, the conflict between Russell and Crusher is way too cut and dried, and they reach an explicit impasse over it way too early on (i.e., as soon as they start discussing it). Then, to further underline that Russel is a quack and Crusher is totally right, the episode digresses from anything to do with Worf and shows the two doctors working together to treat a bunch of other people who were injured in an unrelated event. Russel recklessly employs experimental treatments on them, too, killing one of them, and she and Crusher have a (weirdly calm and restrained) argument about it, and the whole thing is just so amateurish and obvious. Okay, so Russel is some kind of rogue doctor who cares more about her research than about the welfare of her patients; we get it. I don’t really buy it (she’s not a remotely believable or compelling character), but we get it. No nuance here at all. (For this story to have any drama to it at all, we would need to be able to sympathize with both doctors’ perspectives; instead, Russel is portrayed as just flat-out wrong.) Plus… I see Crusher’s point that by immediately offering Worf the option of the dangerous experimental treatment, Russell is jumping the gun and guaranteeing that a desperate Worf will grasp at this straw. But it seems to me that the only fundamental issue here is one of timing. Sooner or later, Worf would (one presumes) have pressed forward with his suicide ceremony (with or without Riker’s aid), at which point Russell’s treatment would have become clearly preferable to just letting him kill himself. Thus, the whole conflict over the ethics of the treatment feels manufactured and superfluous.

But more fundamentally, this simply should not have been (even in part) a medical ethics story at all; it should have been Worf’s story, and Riker’s, and once Worf asked Riker to help him to die, there should have been no easy “out” for Riker. Also, all of the stakes in the episode should have been personal. The episode tries to make Crusher a significant player, but there’s nothing at stake for her but dry abstractions. There is a token effort, introduced weirdly late in the proceedings, to bring Worf’s son into the picture, which (notwithstanding that Alexander remains a thoroughly underdeveloped and unconvincing character) makes sense, but the conflicts never gel properly. We should have had Worf arguing his “my life is over” perspective, Alexander representing (with an assist from Troi) the contrary “you still have a reason to live” point of view, and Riker caught in the middle, wrestling with the dilemma of how to respond to Worf’s disturbing request. (Crusher shouldn’t have been a major player at all, and as for the guest character, she can go jump out an airlock for all I care.) Belatedly, the episode does half-assedly try to course correct to something along these lines, but it does so by having Riker “discover” that according to Klingon tradition, the role Worf has asked him to play is actually supposed to be played by Worf’s son. Boo. Riker should have just refused Worf’s request (with no cop-out about it not being “his place”), and there should have been fallout from this that impacted their friendship going forward. Meanwhile, we do of course need the experimental medical procedure in order to not leave Worf permanently paralyzed, but for this to work dramatically, Worf should have refused even this, and if anyone was going to make an ethically dubious medical call, it should have been Riker somehow authorizing the procedure against Worf’s wishes, in order to prevent him from killing himself. That could have made for a coherent and compelling story.

Meanwhile, the episode also does a disservice to Picard in the scenes in which he defends Worf’s position, first to Riker and then later to Crusher. I get that Picard is deeply committed to respecting cultural differences, and I buy that he might empathize with Worf to a degree, but he comes across as having no emotional reaction of his own either to Worf’s injury or to the prospect of his death. He might be an advocate for respecting others’ personal beliefs, but shouldn’t he at least be troubled by the situation? He doesn’t even directly interact with Worf at any point in the episode, and his lectures to Riker and Crusher about Klingon ways are just too comfortable. What if Worf had asked him, rather than Riker, for assistance? Would he be so comfortable then? He just comes across as the episode’s spokesperson for a philosophical point of view, rather than as an actual person with feelings and a relationship with Worf, and that doesn’t work for me at all.

(As for Alexander… While Riker and Troi are right to call Worf out for not considering his son before jumping to the selfish decision to just kill himself, it feels like the episode itself likewise considers Alexander only as an afterthought. When he first appeared onscreen, I thought to myself: “Oh yeah…Worf has a son on the ship. Why is this only coming up now?” I also, it should be added, groaned in dismay that he was coming up at all. That kid just does not work as a character, and the child actor is hopeless.)

The episode ultimately shortcuts its resolution of the various conflicts that it has established just as unsatisfyingly as it has set them up. We jump right from Riker telling Worf that if he wants help killing himself he’ll need to get Alexander to do it, to Worf totally changing his mind, with nothing in between showing him actually struggling with this decision. Or, I dunno. Maybe he had already decided not to kill himself even before Riker refused to help, since he has the experimental treatment option? Again, nothing is at all clear due to the way the episode’s two storylines work against each other. Dr. Crusher still opposes the treatment, and she takes her opposition to irrational levels (seeming to think that she has some kind of right to permanently restrain Worf to prevent him from killing himself, which is just absurd), but Picard persuades her to cooperate. Then we get the scene in which Worf asks Troi to raise Alexander for him should he die on the operating table, which is certainly interesting, but which would be more impactful if his remark about Troi having been helpful in guiding him through his parenting struggles to date didn’t more or less come out of nowhere. (Yes, we saw a little of that in “New Ground,” and granted, it also just makes sense—but this is the first episode to even have Alexander in it since “New Ground”! Of course, on the other hand, the last thing I would have wanted for this season was more episodes about Alexander, given that the writers so thoroughly failed to develop anything interesting about him as a character, or about his relationship with Worf.) Anyway, then we come to the pièce de résistance of this whole embarrassment of an episode: the incredibly cliched, predictable, cheesy, and manipulative death-on-the-operating-table-followed-by-miraculous-recovery climax. Just terrible. (Before the miraculous recovery, there’s a moment when Alexander beholds his dead father in the operating room and dissolves into unconvincing tears. Again, nothing about Alexander works at all—but if he were an even halfway effective character, there could have been a cool scene here. What if, remembering the scene of his mother’s death, the kid had tried to do the Klingon thing here, staring into Worf’s dead eyes and roaring to the heavens? But, being young and emotionally fragile and not fully Klingon either culturally or by blood, he had broken down crying while attempting this? With an actor who could at least sort of act, that could have been really affecting.) The episode also goes out on a note of Worf “letting Alexander in,” and committing to the hard process of recovery with his son’s help, as if to try to convince us that this is what the episode has been about…which, of course, it mostly hasn’t been. Inept. And prior to that, the medical ethics side of the episode has been capped off equally ineptly, with a self-righteous lecture from Dr. Crusher to Dr. Russell that drives home the (obvious) philosophical thrust of that storyline even though it has just been undercut by the actual narrative.

This is probably season five’s worst episode to date. It’s not quite bad enough to earn a one-star rating, but it comes closer to that than either of the season’s other two-star episodes thus far. It’s just really not good.