The Bonding by: Ronald D. Moore and directed by: Winrich Kolbe

 

“The Bonding” is written by: Ronald D. Moore and is directed by: Winrich Kolbe.  It was produced under production code 153, was the 5^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3, the 53^rd episode overall, and was broadcast on October 23, 1989.

 

The first 22 minutes of “The Bonding” is perfect.  It’s a straightforward dramatic examination of the grieving process and how easily that process can be stunted, or how when children have to grieve they can easily be overwhelmed by the well-intentioned adults who are only trying to help.  The pre-credits sequence of the episode is the inciting incident: an away team on a planet that once had people living on it goes wrong, a landmine detonates, the chief archeologist is killed leaving her son Jeremy behind to grieve.  Jeremy is played by Gabriel Damon and Ronald D. Moore’s script is very good at not overloading the dialogue on the child actor, meaning that a lot of his grief can be portrayed as suppressed, a child being left alone with nothing but the memories of his parents in the form of home movies that he just continually watches.  From a production standpoint it is an understanding of how to use a child character on one hand even when the dialogue given to Jeremy does fall into the tendency of adult writers to write children as adults, but smaller.  Keeping him mostly silent and letting his actions speak means that it’s far more powerful.  It also does help that his introductory scene is Picard giving him the bad news where Patrick Stewart just perfectly embodies the man struggling with his duty.  There’s a lot with Picard in this episode on how a starship might not actually be a great place for children to be raised.  There is also Picard’s own hangups on children in general, he does not like them but he also is a human being who has the basic empathy of dealing with the loss of a crewmember and a mother.

 

The character moments processing grief are the best scenes of the episode.  Moore remembers that Deanna Troi is actually the ship’s counselor so Marina Sirtis gets to act as mediator throughout, understanding that Jeremy’s mental state is precarious.  It’s the best material Troi as a character has been given so far in the series, there’s an actual purpose and person the script gives unlike previous Troi centered episodes and this isn’t even an episode that focuses on Troi.  Gates McFadden and Wil Wheaton as the Crushers also have to relive the death of Jack Crusher in this episode, metaphorically.  There is a conversation paralleling how Wesley slowly forgets the face of his father as he ages while Beverley can never get his face out of hers.  It’s a beautiful image about the pain of memory, aging, and growing through the grief.  Wheaton further gets a powerhouse monologue near the climax working through his feelings towards Picard’s responsibility in the death of his father that feels like a side element in a packed episode.  Brent Spiner as Data gets a scene examining why grief is more powerful when it is someone you know versus someone you don’t know, in Data’s mind all death should be seen as equally tragic and worthy of grief.  The scene doesn’t quite land on any conclusion towards where it is going, instead leaving it for the audience to muse on for the rest of the episode.  Worf is the crewmember most affected outside of Jeremy: he led the away team that killed Jeremy’s mother, as part of Klingon culture he is the one responsible.  The title refers to a ritual Worf offers to Jeremy, bringing him into his own family as almost recompense and as part of Jeremy’s own grieving process, it allows Jeremy the clarity and connection to someone else now that he is truly alone.

 

The back half of the episode for me doesn’t quite hold up, at least when the actual alien threat plot, an alien life form from the planet takes the form of Jeremy’s mother to tempt him to live life with them and not find acceptance.  This is a great little addition to the plotline and all, it’s about grief holding you back as an aspect of the process, the alien lifeforce does offer basically an eternal distraction from grief in the form of a simulacrum of his own mother.  It’s a great idea and is executed mostly well, the alien impersonating her is its own lifeform that also clearly needs connection and a symbiotic bond with a physical body that feels like a missed opportunity due to being introduced in the back half of the episode.  There’s also the trouble of Susan Powell in the role of Marla Aster sadly being one of the more stilted performances.  Director Winrich Kolbe who is great when directing Gabriel Damon, doesn’t seem to know exactly how he wants to shoot Powell, a lot of it is shot to read as at all sinister which is clearly what the script wants.  It's not episode breaking, far from it, the episode is still an incredibly strong one, but it is just one addition that either needed more time or a rewrite to avoid the intrigue of what the creature is and deserves (as it kind of comes down on the side that the creature doesn’t deserve to exist because it is predatory despite really just looking for companionship).  It’s just another example of those little unintended consequences of what the episode is doing and in a way adding an alien threat that didn’t necessarily need it, just an idea to explore.

 

Overall, Ronald D. Moore’s debut Star Trek: The Next Generation despite having a rougher conclusion, is an incredible examination of grief and works best when it is playing out like a standard television drama and not an installment of a science fiction show.  It really does allow the cast to explore how their characters grieve and give space to someone else through the grieving process, while working within a script that remembers that Worf is in fact an alien, Data is an android, and both of them would be grieving in completely different ways from the rest of the cast.  It even has a child character that feels particularly great.  8/10.