SDS9 – S4E9: "The Sword of Kahless" (Audio + Transcript) (Patreon)

This episode was recorded on May 20, 2024.

Sam and Scott discuss "The Sword of Kahless," where Kor returns to the station to recruit Worf and Jadzia Dax to help find the ancient Sword of Kahless.

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Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

We are back with Southpaw Deep Space Nine Season 4. If you don't know what SDS9 is, it's Southpaw's completest DS9 watch-along show, where we watch every episode, recap it, and analyze it. We are your hosts, Scott and Sam. And today, we are discussing the Sword of Kahless. Scott, can you recap this episode?

I would be so happy to, man. Um... So we're at Quark's, and we see Dahar, Master Kor. He's telling war stories. Every story is getting more complicated and interesting. People are entranced, and they're also questioning the veracity of these stories. But look, he can't let truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Kor tells the story of Kor, Kana, and Koloth, and the forces of Tanakh. Tanakh. which if you've seen previous episodes, this is part of the lore. Jadzia introduces Corder Worf, and Worf has always looked up to this guy, but he's worried that he will not be received well due to his complicated past, his honor,

his bad standing with the Klingon Empire, all that stuff. But the thing is, Kor hates Gowron, so he's like, you're cool. He makes some jokes about him. He's very prosaic in his talk. And he decides to tell him the plan. He's going to find the legendary Batleth.

Batleth is basically the Klingon sword, the cool double thing that kind of looks like a brass knuckle. He believes that he's found the legendary Bat'leth, the sword of Kaelas, and Kor has this leather that he believes held the sword. They agree to look into the pedigree of the leather and in the morning,

and then they will search for the Bat'leth together. Walking to his quarters drunk as hell, Kor is attacked by a Lethean and has his brain scanned. Jadzia finds her friend Kor unconscious after the attack. She just assumes that he's hungover because Kor doesn't remember what happened.

He just recalls being thrown out of corks and drinking special yidri and brandy that Worf gave. And Jadzia is able to verify the provenance, the pedigree of the Shroud, the leather, and noting Herc DNA, which... they apparently were involved in this and asks core when he got it. So we, we see, we see Ben,

he hears the story in the quarters and he hears about this Vulcan survey that, um, basically found the shroud, the leather, in an ancient ruin in an uncharted Gamma Quadrant planet that was left by the Kirk. So Ben sort of sees that this is a great way to improve the relations right now between Federon and Klingons Federation.

I don't know. I said Federon Federation and Klingons. So he's like, look, you can use the Rio grant. This is, this is actually good for good for us. This is great. Um, on the Rio grand core poetically basks in the glory of stepping forth into the eye of destiny or the wormhole core is nothing.

If not poetic, um, Worf is doing his kata, and thanks Jadzia for introducing him. And Kor explains that he dreamt of the success of this quest. And the squad reaches the planet, and using the maps that were provided them by the Vulcans,

Kor is able to go through the tunnels and the mazes to get through the former Herc Central Museum. Again, the Herc were... In the stories, they had the sword and they were beefing with the Klingons. So they get to the Central Museum, and Jadzia is working on a force field that's stopping them from getting in.

They beam down, they do the force field, they destabilize, and they get through the subterranean vault. And unfortunately, the chamber is empty. It's been ransacked, and all the artifacts are gone or not there. The team is disappointed, but Worf believes that there's more going on. So...

They're able to find another room hidden by a hologram that needs proof of Herc life to open. So they use a tricoder trick to pretend to be Herc. They get in and they find the sword. Worf lets Kor hold it first.

On the way out, they run into Tural, son of Duras, who hired the Lethean to mine steel Kor. Tural wants to reclaim the Klingon High Council, seek for his family, lead the Empire, yada yada, get his honor back. And he taunts Worf about sparing his life, which... is the Next Generation episode. It's awesome.

But we're not the Next Generation podcast. But it's a great episode. Despite being outnumbered, obviously Worf, Kor, and Dax are going to fight the team and get out of the caves. But their comms are jammed. And Worf is like, look, if we get to the surface, we can get out of here.

And Kor's like, I'll make sure no one's following us. But then later, Kor's curious why Worf would... not kill Toral, you know what I'm saying? Because again, in the TNG episode, Redemption 2, Toral is a kid. So Worf felt there was no honor in killing a kid, but Kor's doubting Worf's acumen.

And then he starts blaming Worf for the trouble, and Worf fires back, saying Kor's public boasting led this to them, and he's just a drunk. There's a lot of nastiness there. And Kor basically says that Worf is a bad Klingon and chides him for not killing

this guy when he had a chance because the right of vengeance in Klingon law allows you to do this sort of stuff. And Worf decides to move on and Kor kind of confides his regret to Jedzia. They try to escape the maze and tunnels. They eat some food. Kor writes a poem about the food.

He does all this exaggeration. Worf thinks exaggeration is gross. He's a very serious guy and is disgusted that Kor is using the sword to eat. And it's like, But Kor's like, this is a weapon, not an artifact. It's to be used. And Worf is like, what are we going to do with the sword?

And both of them are not happy with the current Klingon government, with Gowron and the Emperor. And again, this happened in stuff that we're not really privy to in the Deep Space Nine world. We just know that the Klingon Empire is not very cash money right now.

And both Worf and Kor are having visions that they should have the sword. Kor thinks he could take over the Klingon Republic, the Klingon Empire. And Worf talks about he had a vision when he was a kid because he was an outsider. He was raised by humans, but he's Klingon.

He was too Klingon for humans, too human for Klingons. He's always sort of felt like an outsider. And when he was a kid on Kronos, he had a vision about challenges. So he thought that the vision was about going to the Federation, but now he believes that it's about him leading the Klingon Empire.

Like something funky, like the sword has a funky, you know, effect. The journey leads them to this ledge, and Kor slips holding the sword, and Worf saves him by grabbing the other end. But Worf urges Kor to drop to a small ledge below, but Kor doesn't, and eventually... With Jadzia's help, they pull Kor up,

but Kor and Jadzia both feel that Worf was trying to kill him, and they have a tense standoff. Jadzia takes the sword, and Jadzia tells Worf that he's being whacked. During a rest, Korn and Worf continue arguing. So Dax goes to sleep holding the sword, holding a blaster, and is just frustrated.

And then Jadzia wakes up to Korn and Worf arguing and just being miserable. And they're about to fight when Tyrell's people show up. And Korn makes pretty easy work of them with the sword. And Worf uses the sword. And then they start fighting.

about the sword and Jed Zia stuns both of them and they beam back up to their ship and Worf and Kor basically realize that the sword is not meant for them and that if the sword would do this to just him and Kor and make them just really act in a way unbecoming of them that

The Klingon Empire is not ready for the sword to show up again and that it'll cause more disharmony. So they beam it out to space and hope that it's found another day.

It's a Klingon adventure story with Worf, Dax, and Kor. And outside of the season premiere, this is our first Worf-centric episode. Yeah. What underpins this episode is a story about looting and how much it damages our culture. It scars a culture. But there are other elements.

There are religious motifs from the shroud that covered the sword to the sword itself. Very much Jesus and the Holy Grail vibes and how the chase for religious relics causes destruction and bloodshed. And that it's not really about God or the people, but personal glory.

Basically what Europeans and Christians did to what was then known as the Orient and what frames modern Orientalism. And the geopolitics of this is still playing out with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. But this story about the sword also works as a nice metaphor for capitalism. The sword causes a Klingon squid game,

if you're familiar with that Netflix series, where the Klingon currency is glory rather than money. That scarcity makes even good people do regrettable things. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity where not only can you be lacking in currency, but you can also have negative currency known as debt. The Klingon equivalent of debt is losing honor or negative honor.

Capitalism plus debt is our current hell. And debt is one way the US runs the world because it is the world's primary lender with its currency being the reserve currency. And debt as far as honor or lack of honor or losing honor is another way to control Klingons, which we see how it shapes and controls,

warps actions and behaviors and views. Going back to the reserve currency for the US, because it prints the money, it can never run out of it. It could always print more, which in my lifetime, I've seen play out several times. It also becomes a means to justify oppression. Debt, that is.

You oppress people because people owe you money. You oppress people to protect your currency. You oppress to protect the capitalist money lending and printing system. Remember in Squid Game, the main baddie was a moneylender. People in poverty and debt all feel the sword of Calus dangling over their heads, and it affects their behavior.

Worf has negative honor and glory. Capitalism sees itself as a part of nature, so it argues that it doesn't affect behavior, but rather that all behavior is human nature. But there's nothing natural about our behavior under the burden of poverty and debt. There was nothing natural about the way Worf was acting.

Westerners like allegories about power corrupting an individual rather than looking at scarcity and debt and capitalism corrupting society. Or they like to make it about belief systems like religion rather than material conditions. It's so lazy to look at individual actions, which is what the West often does. It's all Trump.

It's all just one person rather than looking at the circumstances. As far as we know, the audience, there's nothing magical about the sword. And looking into its lore and what the writers intended, there was also no magical or supernatural elements about it. The material conditions of the sword just made people act this way.

The material conditions are more powerful than magic because it is not something intangible. It is material. It shapes your behavior. So to make things just about individual actions and power corrupting, And not looking at the material conditions and just looking at individual behavior and just thinking about belief systems or power corrupts, which you can,

but just making everything about just that, that being the explanation for everything. It's just a very cynical depiction of people and very indicative of Western writing. There's a lot of us who live in this capitalist hell and we try to do good instead of That chase for more money making us all bad actors.

And in this episode, Dax was still trying to do good. But Scott, I am curious what you thought about this episode, especially the behavior of Worf and how he was written.

You know, as I was watching this episode and writing about it, I was also been sort of like rereading The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, which is sort of the book that radicalized me in many ways. There was just like one sentence in it that just made me really rethink all of my outlooks.

And the writings of CLR James has sort of been a big, important part of my leftism. And I was just thinking of this quote, the cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. And so just like that, yeah,

I think it would have been really silly if they had made the sword actually have mystical powers or something, some sort of DNA that made you act crazy. And it's just the presence of this tool was enough to drive that. people corrupt. And there, you know, it's just a very interesting how you were saying the currency,

the currency of, of Klingons is glory and power and, and just like ferocity. So this is bigger than any piece. And it also makes me think of this bit by the comedian, Hari Kondabolu, where he makes fun of the queen of england's owning of diamonds that came from

india and the first time he does it someone like gets offended in the crowd and he's like it's the queen of england son chill out she's holding my grandma's diamonds fuck you um it's just like it just makes me think of just yeah this idea of imperialism colonialism and what it does to things of importance or,

or just like if you follow art world, so many paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were stolen from Jewish owners during the Holocaust. And then only now are the families being able to get access to it. But as an episode, I loved it. I love Klingon episodes. Without giving away too much about Deep Space Nine,

Deep Space Nine has some of the best Klingon episodes. And that is something that we're going to see now that Worf is here. We're going to... Episodes like this are going to come. This episode is sort of self-contained, so I don't know whether I consider it a mythology... I mean, it's a mythology episode because of the story,

but as far as the further story, it just develops... this sort of camaraderie between these three characters.

It almost seemed like a mythology episode for the next generation where wrapping up a story started there.

Exactly. So we've met Gowron on Deep Space Nine, the show, but we don't know a lot about him unless you watch the next generation. When this show came out in the 90s, they were back to back on each other. So it was very likely that People who watched Deep Space Nine had also watched The Next Generation.

Whereas now, I think a lot of people that pick up this show, it's their first Trek show. Because people hear about how it's unlike any other Trek show and is the most radical Trek shows. Though Discovery has some moments, but I never fully finished it. So I don't know. But it does some cool stuff.

I forgot who wrote the episode, but if I were to guess, it was Moore, who also created the remake of Battlestar Galactica. He came on the show and loved Klingons. So it was his presence that also created the interest to make more Klingon stories. But Worf was good. He played his character.

It was true to what I think of his character. Very serious, somewhat sanctimonious, a little uptight, and doesn't know what to do with a character like Kor. I really enjoyed Kor's writing, and I enjoyed the sort of... between Kor and Jadzia, even though a lot of it comes from Jadzia being Curzon.

So this was like a better execution of some of the elements of Hippocratic Oath. Oh, yeah. This episode, you had Worf breaking bad, and in the Hippocratic Oath, you had Chief O'Brien breaking bad. But that, I remember you were saying, was not well executed, whereas this was done well.

I really enjoyed it.

So it's a good contrast of when they do it well and when they don't.

Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of memes about this relationship that Jadzia has to the crew of these Klingons. And there's a really great meme about how easy it is to... sort of like love and respect your trans homies because there's, it's, you know, Curzon, my beloved old friend and Jadzia is like, I'm Jadzia now. And he's like,

Jadzia, my beloved old friend, like just how easy it is to just, to just respect people's names and pronouns and shit. And I think the Klingons are often allies in ways that we don't expect.

In a way, because they are so honor bound, they look inside you at your spirit or your honor rather than the outer surface.

Exactly.

All right. But you didn't give us your rating.

Oh, it's a four. I think it's a solid episode. I'm not going to go 4.55 that often, but there's way more fours on this season. And just because it does well as a standalone, but also as a piece of the puzzle, it's just awesome for me.

Can you tell us about the next episode?

I'd rather not. Scott has a panic attack with all this transporter fun.

Until then...