Code of Honor

The Ligonians are an interesting alien culture - they look Human, but they have their own culture and rules which they follow rigorously for the most part, whilst bending when they think they can get away with it. Given the "primitive" nature of their culture it is perhaps a little unfortunate that the Ligonians were played by exclusively black actors. I'm somewhat torn over this. Technically, it's pretty absurd that aliens would ever evolve to look like humans, especially right down to matching our racial distinctions. So really there shouldn't be "black" and "white" aliens, because they should all be green with tentacles or whatever. We can't do that, though, at least not at the time and on the budget that TNG had to work with. So it's inevitable to accept that aliens will end up looking like us, even though that makes no sense. But that raises the question... which part of "us" should they look like? If it's already silly that an alien species could look human, it's even sillier that they would also match all of our racial variations. Alien species might have races that vary in appearance, but those variations aren't really likely to match our own variations. So it is, technically, reasonable to posit an alien culture where everybody is white, or everybody is black, or everybody is the same shade of green.

The issue, then, is not one of "it's unlikely there would be a culture where everybody is dark skinned". That's reasonable, at least by Trek standards. it's about the perception it creates within the audience. Unfortunately, though, when the end product is they you have a bunch of black folks on screen behaving as "primitives", well the perception it creates within the audience is a rather unfortunate one, to put it mildly.

Some of the production values aren't really up to scratch, too. Whilst the sets and costumes are pretty good, the staging of the fight is just abysmal and some of the dialogue is rather clunky. Still, the episode does manage to at least hold the interest all the way through.

Take a look at the planet Ligon in the remastered and updated version of the episode. The clouds are visibly moving across the surface in just a few seconds! Assuming Ligon is even close to the size of the Earth, that equates to a wind speed in the region of 300,000 miles per hour - that's one windy planet they have there!

When asked about the metal poles in the yard, Data states that "joined together, they would make a rectangle or square enclosing one hundred twenty one square metres. If put end to end vertically they would make a pole 44 metres high. Or two of twenty two." Now, the area Data gives for a square is correct - there is 44 metres of poll, so they would make a square with four sides of 11 metres each, for an area of 121 square metres. Great! But... he states that a rectangle would also have the same area. And that's not true. In fact, the area of a rectangle depends not only on the total length of the perimeter but on the ratio of the lengths. To illustrate, consider if the 44 metres of pole were split into two sides of 15 metres each and two sides of 7 metres each. That would make a rectangle 15x7, or 105 square metres. Or if they were split into two sides of 20 metres and two sides of two metres, that's a rectangle 20x2, or 40 square metres. In fact, the only rectangle that gives an area of 121 square metres is that special case where the sides of the rectangle happen to be equal - the square. NO other rectangular shape would give that area, so Data should simply have said "a square enclosing..." with no mention of rectangles at all. Bad show, Data!