During the week of March 19, 1990, Star Trek: The Next Generation boldly sent the USS Enterprise somewhere it had never gone before — at least not on screen. In the pivotal episode “Sins of the Father,” Worf (Michael Dorn) has to head home to attempt to clear his family name from accusations of his father’s treason which would have happened when he was just a kid. The script was penned by Ronald D. Moore and W. Reed Moran, from a story by Drew Deighan. To this day, it remains one of the most canon-defining episodes ever when it comes to the famed Klingon Empire.
While it seems like the Klingons were always fully formed in Trek canon, “Sins of the Father” did way more heavy lifting than may seem reasonable. Yes, we’d never visited the Klingon homeworld before, and no, we didn’t know Worf had a brother, and yes this was the first time a ton of rules about the Klingon governance and rules of honor were laid out. But a quick dive into various Star Trek books (The Fifty-Year Mission or The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion) or Wikipedia or Memory Alpha can tell you that. It’s a big Klingon episode, which influenced not only the rest of The Next Generation, but Deep Space Nine, and, at the time, the next Trek feature film, The Undiscovered Country, which hit a year later in 1991.
