3x05 The Bonding

[7.6/10] “The Bonding” is a messy episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It juggles the emotional reactions to the death of a crewmate by Captain Picard, Worf, Wesley, Dr. Crusher, and most importantly, the officer’s son, with all of them shepherded by Counselor Troi. It’s a very talky episode, with the more traditional Trek mystery and problem not arriving until fairly late in the story. The show tries to tie it all together in the end, with one long group therapy session that lasts a while and takes a few shortcuts to reach its conclusion.

But you know what? Grief is messy. It’s multifaceted and complicated. “The Bonding” is not the tightest tale TNG ever spun, but the form matches the function here. It conveys the winding, uncertain path from mourning to acceptance, with all the little cuts the loss of someone you care about takes along the way. I don’t love every minute of it, but I love the big ideas and complex emotions it’s trying to capture in that effort, which makes me apt to forgive its wobbliness in places.

It’s also, not for nothing, the first episode by Ronald D. Moore, one of Trek’s best writers who would go on to create the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, among other sci-fi shows. It’s hard to say how much he might have been rewritten here, but “The Bonding” hits on some themes and ideas that would be with him through later TNG episodes and other projects.

One of them is a glimpse of Klingon culture. I like Worf’s story here. There’s always something compelling when the strictures of Klingon honor don’t align with the realities of the universe’s tragedies. His guilt at having led the mission where Lt. Aster died, his frustration at her coming from a booby trap left by a long-dead civilization leaving him no enemy to fight, his desire to perform a Klingon bonding ritual with her orphan son as duty and recompense, all give the Klingon plenty to chew on. Situations like these challenge Worf’s preconceptions and show his innate nobility, particularly when he himself was an orphan comforted by veritable strangers.

There’s also the presence of powerful, ethereal beings forcing us to reflect on the human condition and what it entails. In truth, that’s not a wholly novel development by Moore, at least not in Star Trek. But there’s a particular flavor of it here that feels true to his style. When an energy being takes the form of Jeremy Aster’s mother, offering the young boy an escape from sorrow and visions of the home he’ll never get back, there’s poignance to it. She struggles to understand the crew’s objections to her fantasy world, wondering why they won’t let her take away his pain, even if it’s through a comforting falsehood.

But therein lies the thesis of the episode -- that escape from the painful truth of loss may be tempting, but that it’s also self-defeating. Living a good life means honoring the memories of the people we’ve lost and processing our grief, not pretending that those losses never happened or denying the sort of future the loved ones who’ve died would want us to have. It puts “The Bonding” in a similar place to the current grief-processing show du jour, WandaVision, and both shows draw strength from touching on these themes.

But it’s also just interesting to see the different characters processing these notions individually. It is, as Captain Picard notes, more than a little nuts that there are children on his starship. You can write that off as a product of his discomfort around kids, but he’s right that while Starfleet officers make the choice to put their lives on the line, knowing that confrontation with hostile aliens could be around the corner, their offspring do not. He’s frustrated at the situation, and he has reason to be. (Incidentally, noting the craziness of having families aboard is one of the few solid gags from Star Trek: Enterprise.)

But that doesn’t stop him from showing compassion and understanding to Jeremy. The moment where he holds the child’s hand and tells him that no one is alone on the Enterprise is such a powerful moment. It doesn’t just show the empathy behind the steel of the captain who seems practically poured into his uniform, but it vindicates the way the ship is a community, not just a group of professionals on a continuing mission. It makes this floating beige Holiday Inn feel like a more communal and welcoming place.

At the same time, Jeremy’s loss allows Wesley to put this into perspective. He’s understandably reluctant to talk to this orphaned child because it brings back memories of his own father’s death. Wil Wheaton’s acting isn’t perfect in the scenes that follow, but you still feel his difficulty when he talks to Beverley about worrying he’ll forget his father’s face. You feel her stiff-upper-lipped wound reopening when she says that some days she can’t get her dead husband’s face out of her head. And you understand the psychological journey Wesley’s been on, and continues on, when he tells Picard that he was angry at him for a long time over the fact that he survived when his father didn't, but that the anger slowly drained away. (And Patrick Stewart’s subtle facial reactions are masterful.)

There’s no good way to lose a parent, and “The Bonding” doesn’t gloss over the ways that the trauma of it is still something with him. But he’s also a success story, living proof that you can suffer one of the most devastating losses there are and not only go on, not only flourish, but even forgive the people you once hated. Jeremy ultimately forgives Worf in the same way Wesley forgave Captain Picard, and their closing bonding ceremony, replete with words to honor the dead and make their families stronger together, is uplifting and cathartic in the best way. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s probably the closest we'll ever get to a Chanukah scene in Star Trek.)

The only catch is that while, symbolically, there’s great utility to the energy being from the planet wanting to make up for their fleshy counterpart’s mistakes and help Jeremy, it makes for a pretty mild crisis for the rest of the Enterprise to have to solve. The alien attack portions are fairly weak, and while there’s a nicely unnerving creep factor to Jeremy’s mother reappearing (adding to the sense of wrongness to what she offers), the Treknobabble solutions and tinkerbelle-dodging sequences feel perfunctory.

That’s because “The Bonding” is ultimately a very internal, character-based episode. There’s room to dramatize that through a powerful creature offering you refuge from grief in a fantasy world. But ultimately the episode comes down to the best way to process sorrow, the bumpy road from loss to healing, and the glimpses of recovery and healing that kind folks like Worf and Wesley represent. The episode is more than a little messy in putting all those pieces together, but the results are beautiful and spiritual, in a way that Ronald D. Moore and writers like him would continue to cultivate throughout the franchise, and science fiction overall.