the voyager crew's condemnation of b'elanna's actions in barge of the dead is really interestingly similar to the enterprise crew's condemnation of the Hegh'bat in ethics and the ds9 crew's in the sons of mogh. there have been several notable occasions when klingon values demand that a character kill someone else, and those ruffle some feathers but are ultimately allowed, whereas in these three instances the idea of suicide according to klingon culture is met (initially) with a hard No. i think the only reason they allow b'elanna to induce a coma and return to the barge of the dead is that she doesn't want to Die, just induce a death-like state that the emh can resuscitate her from, unlike worf or kurn requesting to be flat out killed and being flat out denied.
to clarify, i'm not trying to say that anyone on next gen or ds9 was necessarily wrong for how they reacted to these situations, and i'm not trying to weigh in on any kind of debate about the topic of assisted suicide itself -- i'm more interested in the fact that the desire for vengeance, like jadzia's in blood oath or worf's in reunion, is a much more easily accepted example of culture demanding death. i think that the human/non-klingon crew are more ready to understand the desire to kill someone who's done bad things and hurt innocent people because it's a desire they've, if not felt, then at least considered before, the aspect of klingon culture isn't so important because they can fundamentally relate -- but the desire to die in the name of values they don't understand or place equivalent importance on is significantly more foreign, they don't relate, they see it as alien. that's the desire that gets equated to lunacy, despite coming from the same place culturally as the need for vengeance. it isn't necessarily that one is more morally acceptable than the other, that's impossible to objectively judge, but the fact that one is less foreign and more explicable in human terms. the other is an uncomfortable reminder that klingon culture, the culture of crewmates, friends, partners -- is, ironically, alien.
