“Binding” gives Star Trek: The Next Generation a painful lesson

Chris Snellgrove | publishing
“Contact” is one of the best plots Star Trek: The Next Generationinvolving delightful subjects like death, loss and extreme trauma. Part of what makes it an emotional intuition is that it deals with something we almost never see in this franchise: the consequences of the ship when someone dies on a road mission. According to the plot writer and future Space Fortress Karatica Entertainer Ronald D. Moore (Ronald D.
“Binding” teaches Star Trek about death

If you’ve seen the “Binding” already hot, this Star Trek plot is a little boy who has to deal with his sudden death, a security officer under Worf’s command. The Klingons wanted to bond with the boys because they were all orphans, but his plan was thwarted by the reappearance of his mother, which turned out to be an alien manifestation on Earth below. According to Moore, he wrote the episode because “it seems like the series never communicates with some of the questions that the family ship inevitably raises.”
Make Moore a part of such an asset The next generation It’s him a huge fan of the original series that can provide some normative consistency between the two shows. For example, he is a resident expert on the TOS Klingons and is accused of augmenting most of the TNG myths of the contest.
So he knows better than most that the franchise’s staple is to let bad red shirts die on escape missions, but these deaths are usually nothing more than keeping Kirk alive and helping Spock analyze the situation. But, as the new show brings family to the ship, “Binding” is the first Star Trek plot to thoroughly explore how team death affects surviving family members.

“The idea that inspired the idea was that we had a ship of a thousand people, and this time they brought their families,” Moore said. In this case, the late security officer (Mara Aster) had a young son (Jeremy) and we watched him cope with the trauma of the stomachache of losing his only surviving parents (the father died of an infection before). The wound of this trauma is reopened when the energy alien on Earth below pretends to be the child’s mother as a good behavior, rather than realizing that this effectively prevents the boy from moving on and accepting what is going on.
The “Binding” plot sounds harsh, but the “Star Trek” plot that makes it great is Ronald Moore Space Fortress Karatica Show so effective: examine sci-fi concepts through the cold lens of reality. He correctly states that having family members boarded Enterprise-D might be for interesting stories, but it would be logistical nightmare To the families of officers who died away from the mission (those officials seemed to die in this way). Always).
The increase in powerful aliens trying to make orphans better shows that the “new life” crew members are always looking for may actually exacerbate the trauma caused by raising their families on a ship who is in deadly danger almost every week. The officers Moore will lead their family to the business effectively choose to risk their lives constantly rather than leave them safely on Earth or anywhere else. It’s a horrible gamble, and in this episode we see what happens after a poor little boy has no reward.

Incredibly, after the “Binding”, we never got another Star Trek episode that explored the emotional consequences of the visiting team mission so thoroughly. In fact, it was a painful lesson, and it hit our favorite characters, just like the ones among us who were watching at home. Unlike young Jeremy Aster, this will require Way More than just a ritual of union with a random Klingon, it can help us move forward from an episode still After all these decades, slam us in courage.