From Chris Snellgrove
| Published
“The Bonding” is one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The next generationOne that deals with intoxicating topics such as death, loss and extreme trauma. And part of what makes it so an emotional belly beating is that it deals with something that we almost never see in this franchise: the failure on the ship when someone dies on an away mission. According to episode writers and the future Battlestar Galactica Showrunner Ronald D. Moore, he wrote this episode because he noticed that the show never had the practical problems of the ship in which families live while making a dangerous mission after another.
“The bond” teaches Star Trek about death
When it is a hot minute since they saw “The Bonding”, this Star Trek episode shows a boy who has to deal with the sudden death of his mother Worf. The Klingon wants to carry out a binding ritual with the boy Foreigner Manifestation from the planet below. According to Moore, he wrote this episode because “the series never has to do with some of the questions that a family ship would inevitably address.”
Part of what Moore made a capital The next generation is that he was a super fan of the original series and could offer a canonical consistency between the two shows. For example, he was the local expert for the Klingons of TOS and was accused of extending a large part of the mythology of this breed for TNG.
Therefore, he knew better than most of the others that a staple food of the franchise in a frequent manner was to die from away missions, but these deaths normally did nothing but to keep and help Kirk alive and help Spock Analyze the situation. But since the new show had families on board the ship, “The Bonding” is the first Star Trek Episode to explore how the deaths of teams affect surviving family members.
“What the idea triggered was that we have this ship’s load of a thousand people, and this time they brought their families with them,” said Moore. In this case, the late security officer (Marla Aster) had a little son (Jeremy) and we watch how he deals with the intestinal trauma to lose his only surviving parent (the father died of an infection beforehand). The wounds of this trauma are re -opened when a foreign -based alien specifies from the planet below that the child’s mother is an act of friendliness, and not to recognize that he effectively keeps the boy from continuing and accepting what happened.
The action of “The Bonding” may sound Bauner, but what it makes a great Star Trek episode is that Ronald Moore did something that would do it later Battlestar Galactica Show so effective: investigation Sci-fi Concepts through the ice -cold lens of reality. It shows correctly that families on board the Enterprise D can provide funny stories, but that it would be logistical nightmare For the families of officers who die during away missions (and such officers seem to die in this way all the time).
And the addition of the powerful alien, who tries to do things better for the orphaned boy, shows how the “new life” that the crew always is looking for, the trauma that arises from the upbringing of a family on a ship that is fatal almost every week. Moore drives the bleak point home that the officials who brought their families to the Enterprise-D effectively risk their lives on a constant basis instead of letting them safely on earth or somewhere else. It is a terrible game of gambling, and in this episode we see what happens after it does not pay off for a poor, little boy.
Unbelievable, after “The Bonding” we never got another Star Trek episode that so crookfully researched the emotional fallout of an away team mission. It was a painful lesson in reality that our favorite characters hit as hard as those of us watched from home. And in contrast to young Jeremy Aster it will take Away More than a binding ritual with a moody Klingon to help us get out of an episode that Despite it beat us all of these decades later.
