“The Bonding” gives Star Trek: the next generation is actually a painful lesson

By Chris Snellgrove
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“The Bonding” is one of the best episodes of Star Trek: Next GenerationOne that deals with topical subjects such as death, loss and extreme trauma. And part of what makes it a gut punch so emotional is that it deals with something we almost never see in this franchise: the fall on the ship when someone dies on a mission away from home. According to the writer of the chapter and the future Battlestar Galactica Showrunner Ronald D. Moore, wrote this episode because he noticed that the show had never tackled the practical problems of the ship in living families while continuing to go on one dangerous mission after another,

“The Bonding” teaches Star Trek for death

If it’s been a hot moment since you saw “The Bonding,” this Star Trek episode includes a young boy having to deal with his mother’s sudden death, a security officer under an order Worf. The Klingon wants to perform a bonded ritual with the boy because they are both orphaned, but his plans are ruined by the mother’s apparent re -appearance, which turns out to be alien Exposure from the planet below. According to Moore, he wrote this episode because “the series never appears to have dealt with some of the questions that a family ship would inevitably be rearing.”

Part of what Moore did such an asset to The next generation is that it is a superfan from the original series and could provide some canonical consistency between the two shows. For example, he was the resident expert on Klingons of Tos and was accused of expanding on much of the mythology of that race for TNG.

So, he knew better than most that a staple of the franchise got poor red shirts dying in freak ways on to flights away, but those deaths usually did no more than keeping Kirk alive and helping Pig analyze the situation. But as the new show has families aboard the ship, “the bonding” is the first Trek Star A chapter to thoroughly explore how away with team deaths affects surviving family members.

“What fired the idea was that we had this ship’s load of a thousand people, and this time, they have brought their families,” said Moore. In this case, the deceased security officer (Marla Aster) had a young son (Jeremy), and we watch him deal with the gut-wrrenching trauma of losing his only surviving parent (the father previously died of infection). The wounds of that trauma are torn openly when a foreign energy from the planet below pretends to be the child’s mother as an act of kindness, without realizing that it is effectively keeping the boy from moving forward and accepting what has happened.

The plot of “The Bonding” may sound bonkers, but what makes it a great Star Trek episode is that Ronald Moore did something that would do it later Battlestar Galactica Demonstrated so effectively: Explore sci-fi Concepts through a cold-ice reality lens. It rightly shows that having families on board the Enterprise-D could create fun stories but it would be logistical nightmare To families of officers who die on offspring (and such officers appear to die in this way Through the time).

And adding the powerful alien trying to make things better for the orphan shows how the “new life” can always look for the trauma that comes from raising a family on a ship that is in deadly danger almost every week. Moore is driving home the bleak point that the officers who brought their families to the Enterprise-D effectively dared to venture their lives regularly rather than leaving them safely on the ground or anywhere else. It’s a terrible gamble, and in this chapter, we see what happens after it doesn’t pay off for one poor young boy.

Amazingly, after “The Bonding,” we never had another Star Trek episode that explored so thoroughly on the emotional result of an away team mission gone wrong. It was actually a painful lesson, one that struck our favorite characters just as hard as he hit those of us who were watching from home. And unlike Jeremy Aster young, he’s going to take way more than bonded ritual with Klingon Cranky to help us move on from an episode that calm Our punch is in the gut all these decades later.