Sons of Mogh

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Dax is sweet on Worf! Dax and Worf, sitting in a tree, H-I-T-T-I-N-G! While they play stabby stabby and stare at each other's cleavage, there's somebody with much, much worse cleavage. He's drunk off his ass out by the airlock. It's the other Son of Mogh: Kurn the Disgraced.

The only honour Kurn has left is in death. He demands Mauk-to'Vor from his brother. Since Worf is not Alexander or Riker, Kurn gets exactly what he asked for. That is to say, a knife in the chest. It doesn't look like Worf even thinks it over.

But since Dax is quick on the uptake, Kurn is saved. Bashir seems to have made the man more comfortable by turning off all the lights in the infirmary except the handy interrogation floodlights and some kind of serrated metal torture frame like a Cardassian Iron Lung. But- hooray! He's forced back to life.

Sisko has reached his limit on "cultural diversity". You'd think it'd go without saying that he's miffed when his officers stab their families.

Kurn dumps all responsibility for himself on Worf. So he gets a dead-end job as one of Odo's deputies. Which Odo demands have fewer dead ends than Kurn is used to.

His first day on the job is his last. He lets a twitchy little Boslic smuggler get the drop on him with a disruptor- and is revived from the dead by Bashir again.

Dax's scheme to save Kurn by killing him without killing him is more than a mite sketchy. How Bashir wiggled past his 'Do No Harm' oath I'll never know. But he removes Kurn's memory, features and DNA. Now there is only the amnesiac Rodek son of Noggra wandering off to a new life.

When 'Rodek' asks, Worf says "I have no family." Huh. Yup, no Russian parents. No adopted brothers. No son. No Enterprise-D chums. No family. A proud moment for self-loathing stoicism.

"Sons of Mogh" is the first overt kick off in what felt like Trek's 'YEAR OF SUICIDES'. We already had noble self-sacrfices from miserable alternate universe Jake Sisko & Tom Paris, but now we begin to be miserable in earnest. I was at an extreme low point myself in 1996, but I began to wonder why episode after episode had a death wish. Join me again tomorrow for "Death Wish"!