This week’s exercise in idiocy is When the Bough Breaks. In this episode with extended negotiations and a captain who’s a diplomat by reputation, nobody shows any awareness of the concept of diplomacy. The Aldeans say, “We’re taking your kids, and that’s that!” The Enterprise says, “You can’t have our kids, and that’s that!” They scold each other a lot and resort to brute force and deceit to get their ways. At no point does anybody say, “Let’s put our heads together and try some creative problem solving.” There are almost certainly win-win-wins to be had. That would make little difference to anyone looking for it. The real trick is cloaking the gravity. The lights can be dimmed, you know. They took an odd number of kids and dealt a real-life game of Old Maid. Yes? Sure. She’s what, four? Putting little children on hunger strike for reasons they can’t possibly understand is child abuse. I don’t want to be too hard on Wesley since he’s just a child himself, but the episode shows no awareness that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s creepy. Evidently, Data can fake Picard’s voice but not Wesley’s. Coincidentally, Spiner is known for his impression of Sir Patrick, but I haven’t heard of him doing Wheaton.
Picard: "You've kidnapped our children." Kidnapper: "You're not being very diplomatic about this." Captrek, you're joking right? They kidnapped children !!! .
Deep Throat, yay! Other than that, Wesley was surprisingly well written considering the rest of the episode (and again showed what Wheaton can do when thrown a bone) very forgettable. Seemingly an episode born out of someone realising they'd got these families onboard and should probably do something with them and failing to find anything interesting.
Anybody suggesting such a thing in a real child custody case would be asking for having his eyes gouged out or her face made over with acid. ...But that would remove a perfect excuse to retire from an inconvenient discussion. Well, everything is child abuse nowadays. In the future, they have probably developed a somewhat more rationalized system where abuse at level 4.7 is okay to counter abuse at level 4.8. Indeed. Are we in fact seeing a bona fide Wesley vehicle in motion here? The "utilizing the families" angle oddly suffers from the omission of said families (that is, the parents) from the entire process. Timo Saloniemi
Having not watched this since its original airing, I was again pleasantly surprised - granted, it's probably just the excitment of seeing a seemingly "new" TNG episode. Who was the guy who surrogated "Harry"? I recognise him, has he been in other Trek? I hadn't realised that the "throw the Enterprise far-far-away" effect, that we see at least once a season, had originated here. And agreed with others here - excellent use of Wesley. His finest hour?!