Chris Snellgrove | Published
“Bonding” is one of the best episodes Star Trek: Next Generationdealing with difficult subjects such as death, loss, extreme trauma. And what makes it such an emotional gut punch is that it deals with things we rarely see in this franchise. According to Episode Writer and Future Battlestar Galactica Showrunner Ronald D. Moore, he wrote this episode because he realized that the ship never dealt with the family living in it continuing to do dangerous missions one after another.
“Bonding” teaches Star Trek about death
If it’s hot after watching “Bonding,” this Star Trek episode features a young boy who has to deal with the sudden death of his mother, a security guard under Worf’s command. The Klingons want to perform a bonding ritual with the boy, as they are both orphans, but his plans are thwarted by the reappearance of their mother’s appearance. According to Moore, he wrote the episode. I wrote because “the series doesn’t seem to address head-on with some of the questions family ships inevitably raise.”
Some of the things that made Moore such an asset Next Generation That means he is a super fan of the original series and can provide standard consistency between the two shows. For example, he is an expert on the Klingon residents of TOS and was accused of expanding many of the TNG race myths.
So he mostly knew that the franchise’s staples would die in an unusual way on missions leaving the poor red shirt, but those deaths usually only kept Kirk alive and helped Spock analyze the situation. However, as the new show had families on board the ship, “Bonding” is the first Star Trek episode that thoroughly explores how the team’s death affects surviving families.
“What sparked the idea was that we had this 1,000 people on board. This time, they brought their families,” Moore said. In this case, the deceased guard (Marla Aster) has a young son (Jeremy) who watches him deal with the courageous trauma of losing his only surviving parent (his father had previously died of an infection). That trauma wound effectively moves and prevents the boy from accepting what happened when the energy-based alien from the planet below opens freshly as he pretends to be the mother of the child and pretends to be a kind act.
You may hear the plot of “bonding” is weird, but what makes it a great Star Trek episode is that Ronald Moore did something that would make him later Battlestar Galactica Show that it’s very effective: Examining the concept of sci-fi through a real ice-cold lens. He shows correctly that having a family in Enterprise D might create a fun story, but it could be logistics nightmare For the family of officers who die in the away mission (and such officers appear to be dead like this everytime).
And the addition of powerful aliens that tries to make things better for the orphan boy shows that the “new life” that the crew is constantly looking for may actually exacerbate the trauma that comes from raising families on ships where they are in real life at deadly risk. Moore sends home the dark spot where officials who brought their families to the Enterprises effectively chose to risk their lives on a certain base rather than leaving them safe on Earth and elsewhere. It’s a terrible gamble and in this episode we see what happens after being unrewarded for a poor young boy.
Incredibly, after “bonding,” we never got another Star Trek episode. That was a painful lesson in reality. It was something that attacked our favorite character as violently as it attacked us as we were watching from the house. And unlike the younger Jeremy Astor, it would take method More than a ritual of bonds with the Cranky Klingons, to help us move on from the episode. still These decades later, we will punch us with courage.
