5x10 New Ground

[7.8/10] When I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid, I identified with Alexander. Sometimes it feels like your parents don’t care about what you want. Sometimes you don’t know why you do things; they just happen and you don’t have the level of self-reflection at such a young age to understand why. Sometimes it feels like the authority figures in your life are against you. Those thoughts and emotions stood out to me at a time when I wasn’t far removed from Alexander’s age.

But all these years later, I identify with Worf instead. Kids can be hard to reason with. Balancing how to be caring with them while also ensuring they get the discipline and direction they need is beyond tricky. Trying to manage your own life at the same time someone is largely, if not entirely dependent on you is difficult and even scary. Returning to “New Ground” as a grown-up, I see the other side of the equation in a way I didn’t when I first came to TNG.

The beauty of the episode, though, is that it’s about bridging the gaps between parent and child, between adulthood and childhood. Worf is a new dad, unsure of how to raise Alexander and provide him with a father’s guidance. Alexander is in yet another new situation, forced to adjust and afraid that nobody wants him. Those are formidable obstacles for a new family to overcome, and thankfully, “New Ground” treats them with the gravity and rockiness they deserve.

Of course, the episode is still subject to Rick Berman’s reported rule that no Star Trek episode can just be about the characters’ personal experiences. Instead, they all need some kind of sci-fi crisis to make weight. So we get a tale of a local starbase performing an experiment to create warp propulsion without a warp drive. Predictably, something goes terribly awry that puts the Enterprise at risk and requires the ship to race against time to save thousands of lives before simple mistakes turn to terrible ends.

It is a resoundingly fine subplot. Geordi’s giddiness at potentially witnessing the birth of a new form of travel is cute. (Spoilers for Star Trek: First Contact -- It’s amusing to hear him wax rhapsodic about what it’d be like to watch Zefram Cochrane take his first warp flight when it turns out he was along for the ride!) There’s something cool conceptually about Federation scientists studying a new form of propulsion. And the attempt to outrun the energy wave that threatens to destroy a nearby planet, with the deleterious effects on the ship, provide a good excuse for Alexander to be in danger and for his father to rescue him.

But most of the storyline feels perfunctory. The main event here is Worf’s relationship with his son and his struggles to become a new dad. The “warp without warp drive” plan slowly but surely meets the needs of that story -- creating a scenario where Worf proves his devotion to Alexander -- but the sci-fi plot is a means to an end, not a worthy tale in and of itself.

Instead, the time is better spent on Worf trying to explain honor to his son. Alexander has been lying, stealing, and otherwise acting out. Worf responds the only way he knows how -- by trying to give his son the only thing he had in a difficult situation -- a Klingon devotion to the concept of honor. It’s a very Worf approach to setting his child on the straight and narrow, explaining the central tenet of his life and the ideal he adopted at Alexander’s age. But it also reveals part of why Worf is more doctrinaire and stoic than his more extroverted Klingon brethren. He viewed honor as the only thing he could recover from the tragedy of his parents’ death, and so became hidebound to an almost caricatured version of it.

There’s a story in the novel The Big Short where Michael Burry (Christian Bale’s character in the film adaptation) didn’t realize he was autistic until his son was diagnosed. The description of this event works as a parable not just of seeking to help your children and provide the help they need, but also in how providing that to them can help you reach your own epiphanies, ones that may have gone undiscovered but for seeking them out in someone you love.

Counselor Troi has a minor role here, but a strong one (and one of Marina Sirtis’s best) in helping Worf realize that. She guides him toward seeing that between K’Ehleyr dying, the Rozhenkos being too elderly to care for their grandson, and Worf wanting to send his son off to a Klingon school, Alexander is dealing with abandonment issues. At the same time, though, she also guides Worf to realize that he has his own unresolved feelings about K’Ehleyr abandoning him, about her introducing a son he never knew about into his life and then leaving it, even if he rationally understands that this wasn’t her plan. Trying to understand Alexander and what he’s going through helps Worf to understand what he himself is going through, in a way he likely would never have confronted were it not for his son.

They’re joined by K’Ehleyr and complicated emotions about her death. It’s a chance for Worf to learn empathy, to understand how his part-human son feels in a way that Klingon honor cannot accommodate or solve for. Having a child forces Worf to step outside himself and consider different views and needs, which dovetails beautifully with him seeing his own unfed needs in the process.

Of course, the plot provides Worf the chance to prove to his son that he loves him, that he suggested Klingon school because he thought it was what Alexander needed, not as part of a bid to get rid of a child who’s already struggled with feeling left behind. The score, production design, and direction for Worf rescuing his child from a dangerous lab results in a thrilling and emotional climax. There’s powerful symbolism in Worf single-handedly lifting a massive metal beam in order to rescue his child. And it’s just as telling that Alexander displays empathy of his own, wanting to save the endangered lizards, themselves far from home, whom he identifies with.

In the end, Worf speaks of the challenges that Klingon school would create for his son, the discipline and character-building difficulties that Klingon students face by design. But he also acknowledges continuing to navigate the path of father and son is an even greater challenge, one he gives Alexander the choice to embark upon or not. It’s a very Klingon way of acknowledging emotion and parenthood and the needs of a child, speaking to Worf’s growth in “New Ground” in a way that feels true to the character. Naturally, Alexander decides to stay with his father, and the two Klingons lock arms in a stirring show of solidarity and love.

Maybe I’m just a sap in my comparatively old age. The coming together of parent and child is moving and earned, the product of genuine psychological difficulties and just as genuine growth in the hidebound Starfleet officer who feels unprepared to be a father but ready to learn and grow. Worf’s journey carries a complexity and evolution in his understanding and being that was all but lost on me when I watched this episode as a kid, one much closer to Alexander’s perspective than his father’s.

As an adult, I recognize those sorts of struggles: to step outside of ourselves, to understand other people’s needs, to realize the psychological underpinnings of frustrating behavior. I see the desire to care for others, particularly the children in our lives, while not always knowing how to communicate our ideals and principles to them.

And yet, I also recognize the beauty of how those two perspectives come together here, in a way I didn’t when “New Ground” first aired. The beauty of Star Trek is that it’s not just an excuse for flashy adventures. It’s a series with values of empathy and consideration and understanding. Those ideals eventually join Worf and Alexander together, bridging the divide of parent and child, and connecting our appreciation for these characters and their shared journey, whichever role we may fall into.