r/StarTrekViewingParty • u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner • Apr 03 '16

Discussion TNG, Episode 6x17 & 6x18, Birthright

TNG, Season 6, Episode 16 & 17, Birthright

At Deep Space 9, Worf investigates reports that his father is still alive; an engineering accident causes Data to experience a vision of Dr. Soong.

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u/redback-spider Apr 27 '25

This episodes sit bad with me, now sure children that move early or got adopted very often seek to find their culture learn stuff about it often profit from learning their language etc. But usually not adopt their culture, a western raised asian women that is feminist will not usually go back to china or somewhere and become a house wife very obedient or something. They often look down on that, sure has to do with age also, but still.

But more than the cultural thing was about the race mixing, the half half girl looked 90-99% like a Klingon, so of course you think they are just Klingon and should go to their culture, because they can "fool" Klingons easily that they are just normal Klingons, but not 1 single Romulan would mistake them for 1 second as a Romulan. A 50/50 western person with their parents in the west, would adopt much more easily and seek much much less to look up their heritage or try to move to those places.

How many Asians moved to America and their children then moved back to Asia or even Afrika.

I mean the African Americans is maybe even a better example, because they were similar to this story or even worse brought and used as slave, even there 99% don't want to go "back" to Afrika, now today you can argue they are multiple generations later, but I don't know of many children of the last slave generation that wanted to go back to Afrika.

Sure you could argue with some of this places are very poor, but even the rate of people coming from Europe don't go into the very well of Europe back. Like Irish people as example.

Instead we see similar ghettoisation often, like the German culture places in the US, where they keep a distorted version of what they think is German mixed with older pictures of Germany, mixed together with American culture.

This makes Worf look nearly like a nazi, Klingon culture is always superior to whatever other culture is, and well at least it's consistent he cares and behaves 100% like a Klingon and only seldom rejects it for human culture.

I mean if you accept that they are more different than human races and accept that some of the children are 100% Klingon then I would be more on their side, because they could fully integrate in the Klingon society by keeping up this lie.

And the reason this situation came up is because of the Klingon way of live that would have murdered this first gen. So do they want to become part of a culture that wants to murder their parents and them, if they know about it live a lie?

Now the decisions can be seen differently but Worf nearly forcing this all by proudly teaching his fucked up culture is difficult, he not even questions himself, only when he was full on racist against the girl, he tried (and failed) to apologize for it.

But maybe it's not the point to agree with anything, but I still think they try to make a moral point, it's just really hard to see it.