“The legend will die, but the people will live.”
I get this episode mixed up with its predecessor, “Too Short a Season;” they both deal with the notion of age in one way or another, and they both have particularly generic Star Trek titles. This is the one, though, where Wesley and the kids get kidnapped by the Space Atlanteans, who can’t have children of their own. Bland and inoffensive overall, the best that can be said for it is that it could have been worse.
The presence of children and families on the Enterprise was one of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s key conceits, and – second only to Roddenberry’s assertion that no one in Starfleet would ever argue with anyone else in Starfleet – is one that the writers on the series would forever carry uneasily. While Roddenberry’s design strove towards a notion of the Galaxy-class starship Enterprise as a kind of Ark in space, a vast mobile village carrying the torch of humanity into the darkness as a living exaltation of our complete nature, the inevitably easier code to which the franchise’s presentation of Starfleet life hews is that of a military vessel. (For unspoken, but highly pointed, commentary on the subject, look at the Starfleet uniforms in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which Roddenberry actively produced, vs. the exceedingly militaristic redesign of the uniforms for The Wrath of Khan, where Roddenberry was little more than a powerless adviser. There sure as hell weren’t any kids on Old Man Kirk’s Enterprise.)
I quite like the family idea on Next Gen, and think Roddenberry was on to something. Explored in the mind, the things that the family contingent on the Enterprise says about Starfleet, the Federation, and the mission of the ship, are intriguing. If there was an opportunity, though, to make the notion of families a key differentiator for the series over its predecessor (and, more importantly, the movies, which ran concurrently with the spinoff show), it was never found. The day-to-day writers rarely find a way to adhere the omnipresent dangers of space and Starfleet’s naval trappings with the kind of fuck-it-all pioneering optimism that would see parents choosing to make their lives on a space ship; kids and families are brought into stories on a need-to-be-there basis, but the concept of childrearing in space is scarcely discussed beyond basic talking points. The series’ core parent-child relationship – Wesley and Beverly – is straightjacketed by Wesley’s appointment to the bridge crew, and the only domestic relationship on The Next Generation that ever gains any real weight comes years later, when Chief O’Brien marries Keiko.
In the meantime, we have “When the Bough Breaks,” and the creepy Aldeans, who appear out of myth to gobble up seven Enterprise children because the ancient Aldean civilization has become infertile. A purportedly super-advanced race, the Aldeans must have vastly different ideas of what constitutes a gene pool than I do – three boys (including Wesley, who at fifteen towers over the rest of his prepubescent co-kidnapees) and four girls. I like Jerry Hardin quite a bit (who plays the lead Aldean, and would return to the series several years later to do quite a good Mark Twain), but the episode might have been helped if he weren’t such a pale middle-aged white man, with all the consequent Severe Pedophile Alert vibes he naturally gives off, given the subject matter. Where’s the tickle basement, Uncle Touchy?
The episode does contain the first instance of one of my favourite reusable Next Gen special effects, when the Enterprise is flung away from Aldea, depicted by spinning the ship on its vertical axis like a receding top. There is also an odd bit of meta-text when the young girl Katie, given an instrument that will allow her to play music out of her feelings, plays the Traveler’s theme from Ron Jones’ score for “Where No One Has Gone Before.”
Like its predecessor, “When the Bough Breaks” is worth two and a half Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.