10 Best Riker Episodes In Star Trek
6. A Matter Of Honour
The episode was introduced in the second season as a chance to do what the Original Series did so well and that was to use the show for social commentary. Producer Maurice Hurley wanted to have a show that highlighted the struggles that someone like Worf might find with being on board what was essentially a ship full of humans everyday.
Sending Riker to the IKS Pagh was his way of flipping the script. For him, the key scene occurs when Riker sits down to dinner with the rest of the Klingons.
Riker is essentially the only white boy in town here. He is totally out of his comfort zone and does his best to get along. However, the focus is not so much on how he gets on here but rather how they see him. A Klingon officer says to him that he's surprised Riker has a sense of humour. Riker responds that he had been thinking exactly the same thing.
While the Klingons were extremely familiar to audiences who had watched the Original Series and the movies, as a culture they had still not been fully explored. This episode was one of the first to really get inside the workings of a Klingon ship. Once Ronald D. Moore took over writing duties for most of the Klingon episodes that followed, the Empire as we would come to know it was truly born.