“The Bonding”
Written by Ronald D. Moore
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 3, Episode 5
Original air date: October 23, 1989
Star date: 43198.7
Mission summary
An Enterprise away team is rummaging through the remnants of yet another alien civilization that destroyed itself, the Koinonians, when it stumbles across a booby trap that explodes and instantly kills Lt. Marla Aster, the ship’s archaeologist. The sudden, violent death is all the more tragic because she leaves behind a 12-year-old son, Jeremy.
Aster’s death triggers unresolved issues for several of the crew. Wesley Crusher is reminded of that time his dad died on a mission and Captain Picard broke the news to him. Worf kicks into extra-Klingon-mode, upset over losing someone under his command and making Jeremy an orphan, just like he was. Picard once again questions the wisdom of allowing families on a starship–children who may understand their parents’ duty but never signed up to be placed in jeopardy themselves. Typically, Data questions human behavior: Whether knowing someone “well” places more value on their death than someone they didn’t know.
Captain Picard tells Jeremy his mother won’t be coming home, and the boy takes it pretty well actually. However, Counselor Troi is concerned that he’s taking it too well and not allowing himself to process his emotions the way textbooks in her psychology classes said he should. Eager to justify her existence on Enterprise, she encourages Worf to reach out to him and asks Wesley to induct him into Starfleet’s dead parents club.
Jeremy’s coping just fine, watching home movies on his iPad, when his mother suddenly appears in their quarters. He’s a bit skeptical because she’s supposed to be dead, but hey, mistakes happen, especially in Starfleet. He starts to come around, while everyone else on the ship responds to Troi’s assertion that an alien presence has just come on board.
Aster brings Jeremy to the transporter room to beam down to the planet with him, which causes Chief O’Brien a moment of confusion. Worf arrives in time to stop them–he snatches Jeremy away from her and she vanishes. But she’s persistent: When Troi returns him to the Asters’ quarters, they’ve been converted into his old home on Earth, complete with creepy art on the walls and their cat, Patches. Aster insists she’s just trying to help the boy, to give him what he needs.
Data and La Forge discover that an alien power source on the planet is drawing energy directly from the ship to create the illusion, so they fiddle with the shield and cut off the signal. Aster and Jeremy’s house disappears, but the alien zaps the ship and tries to assume control of Transporter Room 3.
Picard goes to talk to Jeremy himself, and he brings in Wesley and Worf so they can all have a group therapy session together. Wesley admits that he was very angry at Picard because he survived when his dad didn’t, and Troi tells Jeremy he must also be angry at Worf. Jeremy plays along. The alien Aster explains that the planet below was home to both the Koinonians and incorporeal beings like herself, who are cleaning up the mess they thoughtlessly left when they all died off. She wants to atone for their technology killing the real Aster.
PICARD: I appreciate your motives, but his mother is dead. He must learn to live with that.
ASTER: I will be every bit his mother.
PICARD: But not his mother.
ASTER: Your philosophy is curious, Captain. What is so noble about sorrow? I can provide him an existence where he will feel no pain, no anguish.
PICARD: It is at the heart of our nature to feel pain and joy. It is an essential part of what makes us what we are.
ASTER: He is alone now in your world. A child, alone. How can you know he won’t be happier with me?
PICARD: For a brief moment in time, he surely would be. Any of us in his place would be.
TROI: What would Jeremy do for friends in your world?
ASTER: He will have any friends he needs.
TROI: And will you provide for his education, his health, his growth, a career, a wife?
PICARD: Yes, it’s quite an undertaking you’re proposing, isn’t it?
ASTER: It is our duty to make him happy again.
PICARD: Do you honestly believe he would be happy in this total fiction which you wish to create? What reason would he have to live? What you’re offering him is a memory, something to cherish, not to live in. It is part of our life cycle that we accept the death of those we love. Jeremy must come to terms with his grief. He must not cover it or hide away from it. You see, we are mortal. Our time in this universe is finite. That is one of the truths that all human must learn.
The alien realizes maybe she hasn’t thought this through, and when Worf offers to bond with Jeremy to make them brothers–so he is never alone again–she figures he’ll be all right and takes off again, this time for good. Worf and Jeremy complete the ceremony and the boy gets a neat little Klingon sash.
Analysis
I think I understand what Ron Moore was going for here, and I’m thrilled at the attempt to highlight the tragic consequences of being in Starfleet and having a family–even if the execution is somewhat wanting. At first it seems to be reversing the A and B plots, with Jeremy’s story taking precedence over the mysteries on the planet, until the two plots merge. Once the alien appears, the episode takes on a sinister quality and they try to ramp up the stakes, but it’s never quite as engaging or tense as I think it was meant to be. Mostly, it feels overwrought and plodding to me, and I feel that other episodes and films have dealt with the same issues in a more compelling way in shorter amounts of time.
In this instance, I wonder if they might have done better to play it straight, without the alien mother trying to help Jeremy, especially considering how it feels sort of slapped on. So this planet had corporeal and incorporeal beings living alongside each other–that’s kind of interesting. But really it’s just some low-rent Talosians who understand enough about humans to create people and things from their minds, but not enough to realize they’re totally out of line. She tries to trick Jeremy, tries to kidnap him for his own good, and then just sits back at the end and watches their group therapy play out before disappearing again.
It’s interesting that Data asks, “Does the question of familiarity have some bearing on death?” Because I think this episode ultimately doesn’t work because we’ve never seen Aster or Jeremy before. We’re being asked to care about some random crewmember’s random death and the effect on her son–who in turn is meant to represent what every child must go through when faced with the death of a parent. (On the other hand, in all likelihood, the senior crew didn’t even know who Aster was until she died, which is another angle they could have explored.)
The thing that bugs me most about the episode is that Deanna Troi maintains that there is only one way to deal with a tragedy like this, that Jeremy has to follow some scripted stages of grief, that his experience is identical to what Wesley Crusher went through. But Dr. Crusher points out his situation was different, because he still had a mother to help him through it. And we’ve also learned that Jack Crusher’s death was an accident resulting from a command decision Picard made. Aster died senselessly on a routine away mission, but what if she had saved someone’s life, or the mission had been more important? People are just too complicated to assume they will all handle tragedy in the same way.
It was nice to see more of what Troi must have to do on the ship, even if I still think she’s terrible at her job, as well as see how everyone processes death and their duties. I just view the effort as weak, and it doesn’t help that we’ll never see or hear from Jeremy, Son of Mogh, again.
Random thought: Does Enterprise only have one archaeologist serving at a time?
Eugene’s Rating: Warp 2 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: Aster’s outfit gets all my ridicule, but I’m more shocked that Jeremy’s outfit wasn’t that bad, considering he’s a Starfleet kid and all. In fact, his costume reminded me a lot of Captain Sisko’s vest in the style of the First Contact grey uniforms. What do you think?
Best Line: WESLEY: How do you get used to it? Telling them?
RIKER: You hope you never do.
Trivia/Other Notes: This marks Ron Moore’s first script for TNG, which was rescued from the slush pile and rewritten by Michael Piller and Melinda Snodgrass. In Moore’s original story, Jeremy recreates his dead mother on the holodeck. Apparently they didn’t want to do another holodeck story, and Roddenberry insisted that kids in the 24th century would handle death better because, you know, the future.
A scene cut from the episode had Deanna Troi working out her own daddy issues to help Jeremy.
Previous episode: Season 3, Episode 4 – “Who Watches the Watchers.”
Next episode: Season 3, Episode 6 – “Booby Trap.”
Yeah, this definitely would have worked better if they had dropped the alien mom thing and simply told the human story. At least they had something reasonable and non-soopergenius for Wesley to do. That’s probably worth a warp right there. They kind of did this episode again later and had the kid focus on Data, because Data has no emotions. It worked a lot better.
I can’t say much about the costumes, though Aster looks like she wandered out of the 50s. I wonder, though, who in the makeup department was responsible for hairstyle design. Whoever it was should have been fired. This was the season of Wesley’s helmet hair (which Wil Wheaton really, really hates to this day) and I don’t know what’s going on with Jeremy’s hair here. He’s got enough gel in there to make Pat Riley jealous, but it’s combed flat and he’s got those weird tubular bangs (I can’t seem to get either a Mike Oldfield or a surfer dude joke out of that). He does have kind of a young Bill Mumy thing going. Like he’s going to send somebody to the cornfield.
Not much to add–Eugene pretty much nailed this one–but it’s interesting to note that the name of the Koinonians may have been influenced by koinos, a Greek word indicating ‘that which is common/shared’ (and in some circumstances, by implication, ‘that which is not sacred’). Perhaps RMoore was labeling the corporeal beings as corrupted and the APPDEBs of the planet as the sacred angels? Or perhaps it has to do with them causing the child to experience an event which is shared by a surprisingly large number of people aboard the Enterprise and in Starfleet?
As noted, gets points for being one of the only shows in memory that actually deals with one of the central themes pushed in the updated ST franchise: A ship with active duty personnel and children aboard, and the consequences thereof. I mean, what was the point of pushing that if it was seldom going to be used?
And it is remarkable how quickly that idea was mostly shelved and seldom again mentioned, particularly after Wesley departs the series.
Rightly so, IMO. The folly of it is starkly laid out in “Best of Both Worlds,” where I very much doubt Cmdr Riker would have actually deployed the saucer section for creative combat duty had 1,000 children actually been huddled aboard it. The next several episodes to follow, in fact, underscore the folly of sending children into hazardous duty. But, if you’re going to introduce the idea, run with it. Happens here, and that deserves some credit.
…
I love the director’s snark about “Clark Gable, Jr.” Once that visual is introduced, you can’t get it out of your head. What they eyes see, the eyes do not forget.
If they’d dropped the alien Mom, would it still have been a science fiction story?
@3 Lemnoc
I don’t know, to stop the Borg from destroying humanity I might be able to sacrifice a few children. Didn’t they evacuate a bunch of families beforehand? I don’t recall.
@4 S. Hutson Blount
If they’d dropped the alien Mom, would it still have been a science fiction story?
Yes, because they’re on a starship in the future. :P
But they also could have kept everything else about investigating the dead world, to build the context of the mission that killed her.
But that’s an interesting question, whether a show that is defined as science fiction needs to explore a SFnal plot in every episode.
I know this is my mantra, but this episode didn’t have to be so terrible. The story is a good one and needed to be told. What DOES happen to all these kids left alone in the Enterprise after a parent dies? But I think this goes way too far into melodrama. One parent’s already dead. I think once your husband dies in the line of duty, you might ask for a desk job, or at least make arrangements for his care in the event of your death. I love that they just leave him alone in the apartment with all his dead mom’s things. Really sensitive.
But like Eugene, my major problem was with the extremely narrow vision of what grief looks and feels like. This kid already lost his dad, so I don’t see how Wesley can add absolutely anything to this story. What Jeremy is facing is completely different. And who is ANYONE to say how he should grieve? I just can’t stand the way Troi helicopters around him telling him his feelings are wrong. Feelings aren’t wrong, and everyone grieves in their own way.
I also think that the whole fake world thing is a story that should never be told when a child is involved. If it were an adult who KNEW it was fake but didn’t care, I can kind of see that story. It’s a holodeck story. But this kid? This kid is seriously going to have a psychotic breakdown. Mom’s dead! No she’s not! Mom wants us to live in the past! This kid is going to have no concept of reality vs. fiction and will probably never recover from this. It’s just ghoulish to do this to him and it makes me really uncomfortable watching a kid who has already dealt with enough trauma in his life experience the even that will in all likelihood permanently destroy his ability to recover and live a normal life.
And what’s up with Worf? Why is any of that even in there?
Warp 1
@ 1 DemetriosX
I love this comment.
I was actually thinking as I watched it how bad the make-up just generally is in this episode. Dr. Crusher in particular looks greasy, Troi’s blush infection progresses by the day, and Data’s face looks really uneven. Must have been an off week.
Who could forget Jeremy’s hair? It looks glued on.
—– DemetriosX lolol!!—-yes, i agree this is only a fair episode–warp 2 is fine by me–i would characterize it as somewhat spooky, and mildly interesting–not a piece of dreck though–the best parts of this installment are the scene between riker and data, troi and worf–to be charitable this is a vehicle for further fleshing out the relationships between the individuals we have come to respect on this program, this for me would be the only highlight–not ms. aster– who is a “red shirt” featured after her death–her wardrobe says a lot about her tastes–{charlie brown comes to mind after he eats coconut}–the episode would work better i think, if this kid jeremy could act– it would make a huge difference–now, did anyone here notice, when the entity was first discovered–the viewscreen showed Valles Marineris, the canyon on mars?–hmmmm—-and if we are talking about make-up–do you remember this gem?—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lvG0jm0B5Y
That’s Gabriel Damon playing Jeremy. They say he had been in a lot of commercials earlier, but the first thing I noticed him in was as the somewhat creepy youngest son in the military series Call To Glory. He gave a kind of creepy but mostly forgettable performance as a little crime boss in one of the Robo Cop movies and according to his film & TV listing, he had guest parts in some series that I’ve watched. I don’t remember him in any of them. His only role that I do remember is Spot Conlon in the Disney Musical Newsies. He was a young punk in that one, but he wasn’t creepy. If they cast him as Jeremy because they wanted the character to have that kind of edge, then it’s a shame this episode wasn’t done a few seasons later when Jarrett Lennon would have been the right age. He had looks that could be made to look creepy and (more importantly) he could act the part.
That we didn’t see, or hear about, Jeremy anymore in the series was sad but that we didn’t see any more of Gabriel Damon as Jeremy was not such a bad thing.
I agree with the comments about Troi expecting Jeremy to follow the textbook schedule for grieving. While it is true that everybody has to come to terms with a loss, it is unrealistic to expect everybody to do it in exactly the same way. One way they might have shown him venting grief / anger might be that he went to his mom’s office / lab. He’d have looked around then all of a sudden got angry that the job took her from him.
I find it funny that some of the bad episodes of the first two seasons have stuck with me longer than these ‘better’ episodes of this season.
@ 8 Ludon
Jeremy looks seriously children of the corn to me. That blank expression… the glued-on hair… the soulless eyes…
Speaking of depictions of grief, if anyone hasn’t seen The Descendents, I thought that had the most realistic depictions of grief I’ve ever seen. I remember watching it and thinking about how true it felt, because the grief came in waves and spurts, sometimes overwhelming, and sometimes dull and deadening, and with everyone responding differently.
Troi irritated the heck out of me in this episode too. “Five stages of grieving” was a theory by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. To her, it was more a theory to be explored, but it’s been standardized by the psych industry. These experiences must now occur in a certain order and — worse — within a certain time frame. If you are still processing a loss after two months, it’s time to “get over it”, or be charged with a Serious Mental Disorder.
You also have to behave a certain way — you can show that you are suffering a deep loss but you have to do it in a restrained, quiet fashion. Something like Jacqueline Kennedy. At the Oklahoma City bombing, some mothers who came to identify their kids fell to the floor and cried or prayed loudly. The church fathers and ministers who were there actually had to stop the mental health team from reaching for the needles to sedate these women. If the parents were grieving longer than two weeks — two weeks! — they were diagnosed with PTSD.
This statute of limitations on mourning constitutes disenfranchisement of grieving. You’ve not only lost someone you care about but now you’ve got creeps telling you how you must experience it.
… just wait till you’re a parent, buddy.
I like this episode better than the rest of you, and gave it 4 out of 5 stars along with “The Survivors” (I’m watching in order, so I have only see the first five episodes of Season Three–the contrast from seasons one and two is palpable; it really feels like a different show). I’ve been irritated since early TOS with episodes that gloss over danger and crew deaths (those poor redshirts!) as if they don’t have any impact on the crew they leave behind, or the families of the dead. It was high time to stop and explore this and take the time to do it. And this episode does, exhaustively, from the point of view of everyone on board except for Geordi, and those scenes are never boring.
Also, if you’ve been watching TNG from the beginning, and not remembering future episodes, you may not realize the extent to which this is the first episode of TNG to show that exploring space is still dangerous, and that Starfleet officers are aware of this, take their work seriously, and view it as a vocation. “Jeremy, on the Starship Enterprise, no one is alone. No one.”
I agree with Torie that the recreation of his past has the potential to be extremely traumatizing for Jeremy, but that just makes the stakes of the episode high. Even though we’ve never seen Jeremy before, he’s a child, and they are playing around with very powerful stuff. The discussion of grief and healing that comes out of this, in the climatic scene, as the whole community pulls together around Jeremy, is cogent and profound. I did believe that this show of support, with Worf’s extra show of dedication through the bonding ceremony, were enough to pull Jeremy through this experience and show him that Picard’s words were not empty. He is indeed not alone on the Enterprise, and there is a meaningful path forward into the future. I cried while this was happening.
The alien means well, but it wants to turn Jeremy into Charlie X. We have seen echoes of this idea in other episodes, with the Talosians and Trelane and his parents. I found this satisfying to be a satisfying new variant and an answer back to all those previous episodes. The crew saved this one child, and as a consequence, didn’t make a new monster in the universe. In the process, we learn new things about nearly all of the main characters, and the ship itself, that make each one of them more noble.
There’s a full-length episode commentary on the Blu-ray set with Ronald D. Moore and the Okudas where they discuss this episode very seriously, with great sensitivity. I agree with them, and would call this one of the best episodes of TNG so far, and a very promising beginning for Mr. Moore’s television and Star Trek career.