By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
“The Bonding” is one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, one that deals with heady subjects such as death, loss, and extreme trauma. And part of what makes it such an emotional gut punch is that it deals with something we almost never see in this franchise: the fallout on the ship when someone dies on an Away Mission. According to episode writer and future Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore, he wrote this episode because he noticed that the show never addressed the practical problems of the ship having families living on it while still going on one dangerous mission after another,
“The Bonding” Teaches Star Trek About Death
If it’s been a hot minute since you’ve seen “The Bonding,” this Star Trek episode features a young boy having to deal with the sudden death of his mother, a security officer under the command of Worf. The Klingon wants to perform a bonding ritual with the boy because they are both orphans, but his plans are foiled by the mother’s seeming reappearance, which turns out to be an alien manifestation from the planet below. According to Moore, he wrote this episode because “it never seems the series has dealt head-on with some of the questions a family ship would inevitably bring up.”
Part of what made Moore such an asset to The Next Generation is that he was a superfan of The Original Series and could provide some canonical consistency between the two shows. For example, he was the resident expert on the Klingons of TOS and was charged with expanding on much of that race’s mythology for TNG.
Therefore, he knew better than most that a staple of the franchise was having poor Red Shirts die in freak ways on Away Missions, but those deaths usually did nothing more than keep Kirk alive and help Spock analyze the situation. But since the new show had families aboard the ship, “The Bonding” is the first Star Trek episode to thoroughly explore how Away Team deaths affect surviving family members.
”What sparked the idea was that we have this shipload of a thousand people, and this time, they’ve brought their families,” Moore said. In this case, the deceased security officer (Marla Aster) had a young son (Jeremy), and we watch him deal with the gut-wrenching trauma of losing his only surviving parent (the dad previously died of an infection). The wounds of that trauma get ripped open anew when an energy-based alien from the planet below pretends to be the kid’s mother as an act of kindness, not realizing it is effectively keeping the boy from moving on 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 make his later Battlestar Galactica show so effective: examining sci-fi concepts through the ice-cold lens of reality. He correctly illustrates that having families aboard the Enterprise-D may make for fun stories but that it would be a logistical nightmare for the families of officers who die on Away Missions (and such officers seemingly die like this all the time).
And the addition of the powerful alien who tries to make things better for the orphaned boy shows how the “new life” the crew is always seeking out may actually compound the traumas that come from raising a family on a ship that’s in deadly peril almost every week. Moore drives home the bleak point that the officers who brought their families to the Enterprise-D effectively chose to risk their lives on a constant basis rather than leave them safely on Earth or anywhere else. It’s a terrible gamble, and in this episode, we see what happens after it doesn’t pay off for one poor, young boy.
Incredibly, after “The Bonding,” we never got another Star Trek episode that so thoroughly explored the emotional fallout of an Away Team mission gone awry. It was a painful lesson in reality, one that hit our favorite characters just as hard as it hit those of us who were watching from home. And unlike young Jeremy Aster, it’s going to take way more than a bonding ritual with a cranky Klingon to help us move on from an episode that still punches us in the guts all these decades later.
