No, Worf probably isn't a pacifist
In Hollywood, people of peace are just another excuse to depict violence.
I love Star Trek.
It’s probably the central pop culture element in my life. I started watching it when I was a young kid, probably around 1979 or 1980, on a black-and-white TV whose channels we changed using pliers. It came on in the late afternoon — after Gilligan’s Island and Leave It to Beaver and I Dream of Jeanie and other 1960s reruns — and I was smitten immediately. My sister and I would play in my room with a makeshift bridge; I was Kirk and Spock and Scotty, and she was Uhura. I used a flashlight as my phaser. We made energizer sounds with our mouths. It was fun. And I’ve watched most of the series that have come out since then, even when I didn’t completely love them: Voyager was boring, and Enterprise could be a real stinker, Discovery is too deep into its feelings, but I’ve seen just about every episode of them all.
Picard is another show I’ve watched end-to-end even though I’ve found it a bit of a drag. I can feel it trying desperately trying to press my nostalgia buttons, and sometimes it works, but I always resent it. But there’s one more — supposedly final — season coming up, and the gang is getting back together.
Oh, and Worf is a pacifist.
If you’re not familiar with the backstory:
* Worf is a Klingon.
* Klingons are a warrior race.
* He’s the guy in the trailer who says “I now prefer pacifism to combat.”
And of course it’s played as a joke. “We’re all going to die,” Riker says as they beam away.
Here’s a guess: Worf is going to end up doing combat anyway.
The background to the following complaint is that I came up among Mennonites, a doctrinally pacifist people. In the area where I grew up, the folks around me were not-so-far descended from Germans who had fled Russia to avoid being pressed into military service, then had fled Russia to the United States for the same reason. During World War II, their neighbors in surrounding towns resented the hell out of the German-named (and, often, German-speaking) pacifists who sat out the war while their sons went off to die in combat. Even 40 years later, there were still hard feelings.
And my observation is that when pacifists show up in movies and on TV, almost invariably they’ll be dealing out violence by the end1. Righteously, of course.
There’s Sergeant York, the true story of a conscientious objector turned combat hero:
There’s Gary Gooper again in Friendly Persuasion, the story of a Quaker family drawn inexhorably into the Civil War:
There’s Clint Eastwood — not a pacifist, exactly, but a reformed gunslinger who is trying to walk away from the path of violence only to be called back — in Unforgiven:
And there’s Harrison Ford, of course, teaching the Amish the benefits of redemptive violence in Witness:
Just off the top of my head, I’d say that the only movies that tend to depict pacifists as worthy, even heroic in their own right, are biopics about such obviously heroic figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Otherwise, the guy at the beginning of the movie who has forsworn violence will be bloodying the noses of a few punks by the end.
Star Trek has sometimes been a exception to this rule, but not always. Kirk in the original series was a Cold Warrior, and not always cold. Even when he helps bring peace to the galaxy in the final movie starring the original cast, he only does so after explosions and blood. But often — often enough to be noticeable — the shows and movies have presented an obvious opportunity for the Federation to commit violence, only to have good will, understanding and diplomacy win the day in the end.2 Hell, The Voyage Home ends with the world being saved because Kirk and crew time traveled with a couple of whales.3
I get this pattern. Explosions are fun. Life-and-death drama only has meaning if there are deaths. And we don’t exactly live in a pacifist society, do we?
But we don’t often see a movie featuring pacifists that takes them seriously enough to let them live out their ideals from beginning to end. It’s not flashy, but there’s real drama to be had in that German-speaking young Mennonite who finds himself blacklisted in the community for decades afterward because he refused to go fight a war.
Maybe Picard will subvert my expectations. Maybe it will deal with Worf’s journey toward pacifism, and wrestle with how hard it is to maintain that commitment in a society that valorizes violence. It’s not like there aren’t thematic possibilities there. Look around! But I’m not optimistic. If Worf really is a pacifist, I’ll eat my bat’leth.
Unless they’re patsies and fools meant to make our violence-loving hero look even more heroic because look at what he’s got to deal with.
Possibly, this is the result of not-huge special effects budgets. In Hollywood as in life, violence is expensive.
Spoiler alert your own damn self. The movie is nearly 40 years old.