The Bonding
Worf wants to adopt a small boy, but an energy form would rather bribe him with furry animals
The Enterprise has stumbled upon another ancient civilisation that destroyed itself - the galaxy must be littered with them! Suddenly, Troi cries out a warning far too late to do anyone any good. After the credits, Worf explains that a bomb went off right next to Lieutenant Killed-Off-Screen. It seems she had a son, Jeremy, who is aboard the Enterprise so Picard has to have a rant in the turbolift about why it’s a silly idea to have children on board in the first place. Worf is feeling especially furious at having lost an officer under his command, but Troi makes herself useful for a change and serves as a sounding board. Worf suggests to her that he wants to make the R'uustai with Jeremy, which at first sounds like something that would get you put on the sex offenders register but turns out to be merely a Klingon adoption ritual.
Troi senses a presence on the planet - then Jeremy's mother appears in his quarters! That's not creepy. Worf gets to pull his phaser on her, but manages to avoid losing a fight with her at least. There follows a custody tug of war between Worf, who offers the fun-free upbringing of Klingon tradition, and the Koinonian energy form pretending to be Lieutenant Killed-Off-Screen, who offers a cat.
It all leads to a game of abduction tennis as the energy form keeps trying to nab Jeremy while Picard and the crew repeatedly thwart her attempts. Eventually, Picard is forced to use his ultimate weapon - Wesley Crusher - who manages to dispel the fake mother largely by pouting. Worf is victorious, albeit not in battle, and can light scented candles and speak ponderous Klingon in order to adopt Jeremy as his brother.
…and he was never seen again.
Words
You wouldn't know from watching this episode that this is the start of the Golden Age of TNG. With the departure of Michael Wagner as head writer after just four episodes (most of which are more memorable than this one), Michael Pillar takes the story conn, and remains there under Rick Berman in the captain's chair all the way to the end of TNG - and beyond. What's more, this episode is written by Ronald D. Moore, the writer who will make the Klingons into the most vibrant and fascinating culture the Trek franchise had ever seen, having dropped off this particular spec script while visiting the studio during the filming of “Time Squared” last season.
All the pieces are in place for greatness... so why does this episode fall so flat?
One reason is that the entire story is self-negating. The entire premise of the Klingon bonding ritual is that Jeremy will join Worf's family (soon to be named the House of Mogh by this very episode's writer)... but we will never see Jeremy again. That undermines the meaning of the story by making it a self-contained tangent that fails to connect to the wider arc it ought to belong to. Perhaps if we saw Jeremy again, if he aged into a meaningful role as Alexander is allowed to do in DS9, we'd feel differently about this story. As it is, while Marla Aster is mentioned once, Jeremy is brushed under the narrative rug and disappears forever.
Obviously 'the R'uustai' does a lot of work in the story... except it really doesn't because there's nothing distinctively Klingon about this ritual, which is nothing more nor less than a bog standard adoption process without the bureaucratic oversight typical to such matters. Okay, there's the backstory about it being Worf's right as commander of the killed officer at the time of her death, but it's really not a very unique contribution to Klingon culture that they can adopt.
Other than that, the big word of the weak is 'Koinonian', not to be confused with 'Iconian', 'Tkonian', or any one of a hundred other civilisations that destroyed themselves - indeed, the very next episode features the 'Promellians' in exactly this role. That the one Koinonian we meet is that most tediously overused TNG cliché, an energy form, really contributes to the disappointing averageness of this episode.
Acting Roles
The major guest star this week is child actor Gabriel Damon... despite only being thirteen years old (and looking much younger), this is Damon's thirtieth performing role - mostly one-shot guest star roles in shows like Diff'rent Strokes and Webster, although he voiced the dinosaur Littlefoot in Land Before Time the year before this episode was shot. Damon does a great job with a frankly dull role, and unlike many child stars went on to pursue acting as a career until he was thirty before finally packing it in for good.
Less impressive is Susan Powell as both Marla Aster (as a corpse, and in family movies Jeremy watches) and ‘Koinonian Energy Form’.
This was her third sci-fi appearance after a one off appearance in both Otherworld and Airwolf (okay, not the most sci-fi of shows, but it's hardly reality TV!). However, her career really went nowhere. Her only major role was as Warden Grayson in the short-lived Dangerous Women, which was an attempt to export the Australian prison soap Prisoner: Cell Block H to the US. Watching her in this episode makes it quite clear why her career never went anywhere.
Meanwhile, Colm Meaney gets to do one of the things he does best - react. Here he is reacting to Marla Aster being brought back to life.
And here he is reacting to the energy form in the corridors.
Zero speaking lines, infinite screen presence - you go Colm!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
There's no new studio miniature shots for the special effects team this week, and all of the planetary mattes are reused from earlier episodes. But there is this brilliant Okudagram of the planet's surface to enjoy.
There is, however, the debut of something we will come to take for granted. Remember how Wesley kept everyone out of engineering with his widget in “The Naked Now”?
And how Klingons were kept in the Brig in “Heart of Glory”?
Well say hello to the newest upgrade: the security forcefield, which can now go anywhere on the ship. We'll be seeing a lot of this little fella in the episodes to come.
Other than this, the big special effects moment is the energy form zwooshing around the decks of the Enterprise-D, which is more attractive than the equivalent effects in “Lonely Among Us”, but hardly enough to rescue this episode from being a damp squib.