Memory Alpha Entry
Chrissie's Transcript
Legacy. It's the closest thing to immortality that one can hope for. To be remembered long after you have passed. Some will strive to achieve such a position while others are just happy to have lived a life that has given them the chance to experience emotions, a sense of accomplishments, ect. When Star Trek became very popular, Gene wanted to ensure that his legacy would live on through his visions of humanity's positive future. Only problem was that his insistence on these visions would be things that were dictated and forced rather than discussed in a creative manner. When writers wrote simple dramatic stories, he said it didn't work. When writers wrote the heroes as flawed, he said there are no flawed characters. For Gene, if the writers got what they wanted, it wouldn't be his Star Trek. That's how business usually went down when it came to the stories that the writers managed to get into the show. They were never the stories that the writers originally intended because the story had to go through Gene himself. For Gene, this was his act of cementing his legacy. For the writers, it was a prison they called...
RODDENBERRY'S BOX
Due to every writer from season one leaving the show by Season Three thanks to this box, Michael Piller had to figure out ways of coming up with stories for episodes since writers were in short supply. He turned to one fan submitted script called "The Bonding" written by the than unknown Ron D. Moore. He liked the script because it dealt with a boy who lost his mother and how, because of his grief, spends his time with a holographic recreation of his mother rather than letting her go. It was a nice, simple set up that treated the technology of Star Trek in a way that hasn't been done before. So when Michael Piller submitted the script to Gene, he was about to experience what many writers have tried warning him about since he came onto the show. I mean, how can Gene not like this story when it has so much emotional potential when it deals with elements that was making TNG unqiue?
“In the Twenty-Fourth Century, no one grieves. Death is accepted as part of life. All the problems of mankind have been solved, Earth is a paradise.”
And with that, we get the very problematic episode version of "The Bonding" that we know today. Instead of having a child grieving over his deceased mother, we have a child who promptly accepts his mother's death as a stern adult. It's so out of place and inappropriate in the final product because throughout the entirety of this episode, all of the main characters who are stern adults are grieving over the loss of this unknown character in many different ways. Riker laments to Data that even though he didn't know this officer all that well, her death shouldn't be considered any less serious than the death of someone close to you. It's also nice seeing Worf dealing with her death not as a sign of weakness in her part, but for what it actually was. A senseless death from a war that was over centuries ago. Picard is dealing with the fact that part of his duty in dealing with the death of an officer is informing the family of their passing. He even has a nice moment where despite his argument over letting children stay on the ship which Troi informs him would have resulted in someone else telling him of his mother's death anyway.
See the problem? The best parts of this episode all involve the characters grieving over the loss of a crew member who is essentially a nobody. A bona fide Star Trek red shirt, yet her death carries weight to the crew. It's reassuring to see this kind of behavior in Star Trek where our characters actually care about crew members who have died in the line of duty rather than brush it off and forget they were ever there.
As I read Michael Piller's unpublished "Fade In" book regarding this episode, I couldn't help but feel he missed one of the biggest opportunities that would have not only adhered to Gene's vision, but at the same time making it a story that could still have a lot of emotional weight. You see, Jeremy was literally dictated by Gene to not act emotionally over his mother's death. Tell me, when you put "Star Trek" and "unemotional" together, what's the first thing you think about? I know when I thought about it, the first thought I had was Vulcans. Why wasn't Jeremy turned into a Vulcan child? Not only would it have made sense in universe, it would also work perfectly with the rest of the characters. We have all of our main emotional feeling characters grieving over someone they hardly knew, yet this Vulcan child who is the son of this casualty seems unmoved by it. You could have the crew discuss how aliens deal with loss differently than humans, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, and learn a bit more about these said aliens as a result. Heck, you can keep the alien mother plot thing and still make it work.
If I was to throw in my own little pet peeve, it's that this episode is another one of those "kill the female character off for the male characters' growth" kind of stories that TNG has been getting accustomed to as of late. We'll be seeing something like this happen not once, but two more times in season three and it unfortunately won't get any better in the long run. The next season especially when Ron D. Moore would revisit this episode's premise involving Worf with him taking on a son who's mother was killed, only this time the mother is an established character that I and many others here really liked.
CONCLUSION:
As one of the most tangible victims of Roddenberry's Box, "The Bonding" is a very hard episode to recommend. It's such a pity that the best parts of this episode are essentially scenes that were meant to pad out the episode in order to run it's full length. Not only is the main hook of this episode not good at all, it's further downgraded by some pretty bad guest actors. Gabriel Damon is almost a two by four, and Susan Powell is just.... bleh. I would only recommend this episode if you have Ron Moore's commentary track on, or if you're just curious to see how one man's attempt to solidify his legacy wound up hurting a potentially interesting premise.
STINGER:
Jerrreemyyyyyyy! That was piercing.
