By Chris Snellgrove | Published
“The Bonding” is one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The next generationWhoever deals with exhilarating subjects such as death, loss and extreme trauma. And part of what makes it such an emotional punch is that it deals with something that we almost never see in this franchise: the fallout on the ship when someone dies on a mission outside. According to the writer and the future of the episode Battlestar Galactica The showrunner Ronald D. Moore, he wrote this episode because he noticed that the program had never approached the practical problems of the ship having families who live there while going on a dangerous mission after the other,
“The Link” teaches Star Trek on death
If it was a hot minute that you saw “The Bonding”, this episode of Star Trek presents a young boy who has faced the sudden death of his mother, a security guard under the command of Worf. The Klingon wants to carry out a liaison ritual with the boy because they are both orphans, but his plans are defeated by the apparent reappearance of the mother, who turns out to be an extraterrestrial manifestation of the planet below. According to Moore, he wrote this episode because “it never seems that the series has dealt with the front with some of the questions that a family ship would inevitably raise”.
Part of what made Moore such an asset for The next generation is that it was a superfan in the original series and could provide a certain canonical coherence between the two shows. For example, he was the resident expert in TOS Klingons and was accused of having increased a large part of the mythology of this race for TNG.
Consequently, he knew better that most of the basic foods of the franchise that the poor red shirts die bizarre on the outside missions, but these deaths were generally nothing more than keeping Kirk alive and helping Spock to analyze the situation. But as the new show had families aboard the ship, “The Bonding” is the first episode of Star Trek to carefully explore how team deaths affect surviving family members.
“What triggered the idea is that we have this charge of a thousand people, and this time, they brought their family,” said Moore. In this case, the deceased security officer (Marla Aster) had a young son (Jeremy), and we look at him facing the heartbreaking trauma to lose his only surviving parent (the father died previously from an infection). The wounds of this trauma open again when a foreigner based on energy from the planet below claims to be the mother of the child as an act of kindness, not realizing that this effectively prevents the boy from going on top and accepting what happened.
The intrigue of “The Bonding” may seem crazy, but what makes it a big episode of Star Trek is that Ronald Moore did something that would be his later Battlestar Galactica Show so effective: examine science fiction concepts through the icy objective of reality. He correctly illustrates that having families aboard the Enterprise-D can make fun stories but that it would be a logistics nightmare For the families of officers who die on outside missions (and such officers die like that all the time).
And the addition of the powerful foreigner who tries to improve things for the orphan boy shows how the “new life” that the crew is still looking for can actually worsen the trauma that comes to raise it a family on a ship which is deadly in danger almost every week. Moore recalls the dark point that the officers who brought their families to the Enterprise-D actually chose to risk their lives on a constant basis rather than leaving them safely on earth or elsewhere. It is a terrible game, and in this episode, we see what is happening after he is not paying for a poor young boy.
Incredibly, after “The Bonding”, we never had another episode of Star Trek which has so completely explored the emotional fallout from an outside team mission that went wrong. It was a painful lesson in reality, which struck our favorite characters as strong as it struck those of us who looked from home. And unlike the young Jeremy Aster, it will take path more than a liaison ritual with a grumpy klingon to help us go from an episode that always knocks us in the guts every decades later.
