6x03 Sons and Daughters

[6.3/10] There’s a running joke in the fandom that Worf is a terrible father. I never really bought it. There’s nothing wrong with fans’ inside jokes being founded on exaggerations. (Kirk didn’t bed that many women, after all.) But this one always bothered me a bit. Because one of the things I enjoyed most about the later seasons of The Next Generation were the stories of Worf being an uneasy and unprepared, but ultimately loving father.

As Gilmore Girls fans know, there’s something heartwarming about seeing someone who’s normally gruff and grumpy being attentive and affectionate, even if they weren’t necessarily ready to be a dad. Worf certainly had his bumps (ridges?) in the road when parenting Alexander, but his love for his son always seemed to win out over his rigid Klingon pretensions.

But then, the powers that be ported Worf over to Deep Space Nine, where the writers never really liked writing for kids. (Note how many episodes Jake is absent from despite Cirroc Lofton being in the main cast, and how rarely Molly factors into Chief O’Brien’s life.) So Alexander is sent back to Earth to live with the Rozhenkos, a convenience for a show that already struggled to service Jake, Nog, and Molly, and wasn’t about to throw another moppet into the mix.

I don’t mind that necessarily. Shows get to be about what the creative team wants them to be about, and we get a respectable quotient of parenting stories involving Benjamin and Jake. What I mind is turning that narrative convenience for the writers into a blemish on Worf as a character. And that’s exactly what “Sons and Daughters” does.

The episode sees Worf still serving as General Martok’s first officer aboard the Klingon vessel Rotarran. His role and duties aboard the ship are suddenly complicated by the arrival of none other than Alexander as one of the replacement crewmembers. There is emotional distance and bad blood between father and son since apparently Worf hasn’t seen Alexander in five(!!!) years.

Now on the one hand, I want to admire Deep Space Nine for that choice. The easy thing to do would be to just throw in off-handed lines of dialogue about Worf being off to visit Alexander off-screen now and then, and continue avoiding having to actually write their relationship. After two seasons with Worf in the fold, it’s about time the series picked up where TNG left off and tackled our favorite Klingon’s complicated relationship with his only son.

On the other hand, I low key hate where they go with it. Worf was always a reluctant father, but him having minimal contact with his son for half a decade (a.) doesn’t really jive with the timeline and (b.) feels wildly out of character. The show tries to justify it, between Worf’s general stubbornness and his overall dismay with Alexander not always following the war of the warrior. But it feels like character assassination to take things that far after all the progress the two made on Worf’s former show.

I’m not a big fan of the actor who plays Alexander either. Brian Bonsall was twelve years old and came across as younger when we last saw him as Alexander on TNG. The actor who takes over the role on DS9 was twenty-one and seemed older.

We don’t know how Klingon aging works exactly, so you can justify it in-universe. But on a psychological level, it means there’s a discontinuity between the character that viewers already knew and the version they’re supposed to accept here and now. This guy doesn’t feel like the Alexander we knew and watched for multiple seasons, which only makes the disconnect from where we left his relationship with Worf and what it is now seem even greater.

Now charitably, you could say that’s a feature, not a bug. Many kids feel unrecognizable once in the throes of teenage angst, and recasting could help sell the fact that his son feels like a different person to Worf as well. But the new actor isn’t great on his own either. He huffs and pouts and overemotes, and overall doesn’t cut a convincing presence as the determined but overwhelmed young Klingon trying to earn his father’s respect but finding himself in over his head.

Speaking of frequently recast characters, we’ve mostly settled on an actress for Ziyal, which is good because she’s back on Terok Nor! As with Alexander’s last appearance in Star Trek, “Sons and Daughters” kind of brushes past the significant events from the last time we saw Ziyal. Dukat basically left his daughter to die, and now she says, “Oh, it’s fine, he just felt betrayed” and everything’s all hunky dory between them.

At least that has a little more basis in reality. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of folks who make excuses for their loved one’s hurtful choices. It’s especially easy for a child who dreamed of her father coming to rescue her from her misery for years to excuse and justify mistreatment in the name of maintaining the relationship. Dukat is nothing if not a manipulator, and while his love for his daughter seems genuine (if in his own self-serving terms, as usual), he wields it with his mercenary bent.

That’s my favorite part of this episode. Kira has rightfully kept her guard up around Dukat, rebuking him for the disingenuous smile that hides a poison-tipped tongue at every turn. But Dukat loves Ziyal. He knows that Kira loves Ziyal. And he hopes that by bringing her back to the station, he can bring Kira and himself together too.

It’s downright diabolical. And what’s worse, for a while, it works. There’s a moment in the episode, where Dukat and Kira sit on either side of Ziyal, admiring her artwork, that they feel like her mom and dad. She is something that unites them, someone they both care about, someone whose very existence represents a melding of Cardassians and Bajorans. Dukat’s somewhere between obliviously sincere and unctuously Machiavellian in using her as a bridge between him and Nerys.

You can imagine Kira going for it, though. Not Dukat, of course. But her love for Ziyal prompts her to tolerate the girl’s father, the same way that divorced parents can set aside their differences and work together for the good of their children. You can see it working, with her once again looking in the mirror, blithe in the warmth of it all, before she once again wakes up and reestablishes her boundaries.

I like her arc there. Dukat tries his most manipulative move yet to wrangle Kira, and she shuts it down, even if it means losing Ziyal, knowing the girl can’t choose a friend over her father. It too is tragic, given what the connection between Kira and Ziyal means to them both. But it’s also a sign of Kira’s strength, that even seeing Dukat’s doting fatherly side, even wanting to maintain a relationship with a young woman she cares about like a mother, isn’t enough to convince her to break bread with the ultimate enemy.

It’s the opposite story on the Rotarran. Nothing, even five years of distance, Worf’s exacting standards, and Alexander’s failure to meet them, can keep the father and son apart. No principle will stand in the way of their reconciliation.

My favorite part of their storyline is, oddly enough, Martok. He has, unexpectedly, become the Klingon father figure that Worf never had. Especially with Kurn having been extricated from Worf’s house, it’s nice to see Martok step into a familial role, giving Worf some place he feels he belongs in the Klingon world for once. The way he provides paternal advice to Worf, and even steps in as a grandfather might with Alexander, is wholesome in the best way, and a nice sign that him welcoming Worf into the House of Martok at the end of “Soldiers of the Empire” wasn’t just a one-episode sop.

So there is power when Alexander tries time and again to be a proper Klingon, so as to earn his father’s respect, and fails each time, only for Worf and Martok to nonetheless welcome him into their house. The ceremony they perform is of a piece with the one Worf performed with Jeremy Aster in TNG’s “The Bonding”, a sign that Worf and Alexander will be bound not just as father and son, but as Klingons, no matter what path Alexander follows.

(Though it’s worth noting that we never saw Jeremy Aster again, so question what that oath is worth. Come to think of it, I might be detecting a pattern here...)

It’s all suitably heartwarming, or at least meant to be. There’s just one big problem. Star Trek already freakin’ did this with Worf and Alexander in The Next Generation, and it did in a much better and more affecting way!

The whole point of “Firstborn” from TNG’s seventh season was Worf seeing the man Alexander became due to the usual time travel shenanigans, and validating his path as a noble and worthy one, even if it didn’t fit Worf’s preconceived Klingon notions. When we last left Worf as a dad, it was in a state of pride and acceptance of his son, with him being willing to give up his own life in service of the person his child will one day become. It was a moving, stirring affirmation of Worf as a father and Alexander as his own type of Klingon.

“Sons and Daughters” kinda sorta pays lip service to that idea. But its central concept is that Worf has neglected his son for five years because Alexander rejected the ways of the Klingons, and only now comes to accept him as a true part of his family again. Except that for any of that to make sense, you have to handwave away everything that happened with Worf and Alexander in their last joint appearance, when Worf seemed to get over that particular hang-up and, if anything, show that much more pride in his son for walking his own path.

Deep Space Nine gets to be its own show and do its own things. But if you’re going to pull from elsewhere in this storytelling universe, bring back species and alliances and characters that began in other shows, then you need to respect the character journeys that led them here. Nobody made the writers bring Alexander back. I’m glad they did, because he was an important part of Worf’s life on the Enterprise. But by turning Worf into a standard bad absentee dad after all of that reads like a betrayal not of Alexander, but of the stories that Star Trek had already told about the two of them.

The road for fathers and sons is often a rocky one, where breakthroughs can devolve back into breakdowns. If Deep Space Nine had included Alexander from the beginning, showing him and his father still struggling over these issues, growing apart, until a distance emerges, that would make some sense. By contrast, leaving our last vision of Worf and Alexander together being one of love and acceptance, and spackling in five off-screen years of estrangement and disapproval in the interim, comes off as cheap, even disrespectful, to what had been achieved between parent and child to date.

If you can’t tell, I like Worf and Alexander. I’ll admit my bias. I want to see them grow closer and forge a healthy relationship. It’s exciting to see the DS9 creative team finally take a crack at that important connection. But by recapitulating a conflict and resolution that we’ve already seen in the franchise, one that makes both characters look worse from the storytelling choices, “Sons and Daughters” affirms that Alexander isn’t a disappointment, but this episode is.