“Go on. You’ve wanted to tell him for a long time.”
I really hated this episode back when it first aired. It’s better than I remember, but still skeeves me out – something in the execution is way, way off. There’s too much going on at an emotional level, for one thing – three major characters (Worf, Wesley and Beverly) and one guest star (Jeremy Aster) processing variations on the grief of losing a family member on a Starfleet mission; the de rigueur alien-menace-of-the-week driving the back half of the plot; and Counselor Troi flitting about, acting as Greek chorus to the entire affair, describing aloud (often to the captain) what each of the characters is going through.
“The Bonding” is most notable for bringing Ronald D. Moore into the Star Trek: The Next Generation fold. Moore would go on to be one of the era’s signature Star Trek writers – concocting the entire Worf/Klingon mytharc that dominated much of the remainder of the show; writing Generations and First Contact with Brannon Braga; and writing for Deep Space Nine from soup to nuts as one of Ira Steven Behr’s dirty half-dozen. He’d also reboot Battlestar Galactica, which means I probably oughta get around to watching that show at some point. Moore is, all in all, probably my favourite writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, or at least the one whose work I most consistently enjoyed. “The Bonding” was a spec script that Moore wrote during Next Gen’s second season, which was fished out of the slush pile by Piller several months later – and got him a permanent job in Next Gen’s writing room. Pretty amazing origin story there, Ron.
The episode is shot really weirdly by Winrich Kolbe, who favours complex pans from character to character on relatively long lens shots for much of the first half of the show, as the crew deals with the death of Marla Aster. I can see the theory behind what the director is doing, but it doesn’t work at all, rendering the episode with such a profoundly surrealist veneer that it almost seems, at times, like the cast is doing black box theatre. It doesn’t help that the new blu-ray presentation of the episode reveals that many of those shots were just slightly soft of focus, victim of the short focal range of lenses of that length.
The only major takeaway from “The Bonding” for me is the material with Wesley, Beverly, and Picard which touches on the death of Jack Crusher, and the lingering feelings of resentment that Wesley carried towards the captain for surviving the death of Jack. It’s a nice series of beats, and I particularly like the fact that (either empathically or through actual counseling sessions) Troi is well aware of Wesley’s feelings before he gives voice to them, and encourages his catharsis here.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Three is available now.