Ligon II is a planet that has a vaccine that is desperately needed elsewhere; they're also tribal, and played entirely by black actors, many of whom have donned a pseudo-British "African" dialect for the performance that is not their customary mode. Tasha Yar is stupidly macho aggressive, in what turns out to be (we later discover) an atypical move for her. The ruler of Ligon II takes a fancy to her and kidnaps her (yes, you've seen this in B-movies from the 1950s). There's political machinations, of course, and all sorts of offensive cultural assumptions, a completely lame "oooo look a cat-fight between assertive women!" and a resolution that's right out of ST:OS's "Amok Time." Here, go read a plot summary.

This one was hard to watch when it first aired in 1987; it's miserable now. It's racist, sexist, and, not surprisingly, stupid. It was the warning that there were worse things to come. You know it's bad when a you look at episode reviews and find, repeatedly, that people searching for something nice to say resort to praising the theme music. You can tell Roddenberry is still the guiding light because this is an old-school episode that focuses on the "Prime Directive." There are two interesting highlights though. First, there's an intelligent bit of writing (and smarter acting from Stewart and Frakes) as Picard and Riker discuss the difficulties inherent in honoring the Prime Directive, and in Picard's desire to be part of the "Away" team, despite Riker's rational objections that a Captain stays with his ship. The costumes in this episode for the people of Ligon II were, well, just bad. A pink cat-suit with glitter and a matching hat worn in a fight-to-the-death?

There are hints in the cultural roles assigned to the sexes on Ligon II (women control the wealth, men control political power) and the polyandry and polygamy (wives and husbands may each have multiple hierarchical spouses) that someone somewhere wanted to be all socio-political, but their own biases bit them in the ass. Repeatedly. I think they must have been watching Mandingo or something. Wil Wheaton notes that he's heard the original director, Russ Mayberry, was offensively racist and treated the actors so poorly that Roddenberry fired him before the episode was completed. The episode was finished by Les Landau, at that point the First AD.

The trailer for "Code of Honor"

The previous episode was "The Naked Now"; the next episode is "The Last Outpost".