When the Bough Breaks

A planet with members of historic artistic ability has become sterile and is on the verge of extinction. They decide to stock the planet with children from the Enterprise. They choose the most talented, including Wesley Crusher, and treat to a paradise of perks, including instructions from masters. The parents, of course, are horrified. These people have the ability to do amazing things with their technology, including sending the Starship three days out into space. These people are so superior and yet are quite out of touch, with their own abilities and future. It is an episode that goes nowhere and is so dull. That they could bond with these children is their hope, but they are actually rather kind can see the handwriting on the wall, even before Picard and the crew act. The ending is so pat as well and not very satisfying.

While the setup is silly and their leader comes around too quickly at the end, this is a wonderful episode. This is Star Trek through and through. An antagonist that isn't two-dimensional but likeable and understandable. Both the technical and emotional side get plenty of attention. Wesley is finally used appropriately and has a great moment with his mother. Picard is shown as both determined and awkward. They took a risk by having many interactions with young children and it paid off.

Writing in 2021, it is great to see that I am not the only person taking a retrospective look at Star Trek, the Next Generation. When this series was first released in 1987, a little less than twenty years after the end of the Original Series, many people thought that, without Captain Kirk and his crew, it couldn't really be Star Trek. However, original creator Gene Roddenberry, was fully invested in the casting, writing and overall look of the new series, so let's see how it shaped up:

This is the episode where the Enterprise visits the environment destroying/child stealing world of Aldea. It is so heavy with Allegory it barely manages to get off the ground. I don't think the writers could possibly have foreseen the damage that the residents of Planet Earth would do to their own habitat in the ensuing thirty plus years or how heedless they have been to such warnings.

As for child stealing, that's another very serious issue that has not necessarily been eradicated. As the New Life Children's Refuge from Idaho found out in Haiti in 2010 to their eternal dishonour.

The guest actors did a reasonable job, though, and I believe I heard somewhere that Will Wheaton was a kindly shepherd to the younger child actors off screen as well as on.

Some "issue" episodes don't stand the test of time but I seem to remember that this one NEVER worked all that well.

(Senior Trekker scores every episode with a 5)

Definitively worst than the others, even if its rating is 6.4/10 it is to me a 5.5/10 , worst episode in a fantastic TV show ( one of the all time best show) Only light in the episode was one sentence by data, the enterprise beeing push back from the planet and a little Comedy in the end, enough to save it from beeing a 5/10. But yeah Season 1 is really the weakest even with some great episode like" we'll Always have Paris"

Another soft peddled episode that looks at a form of child abduction. I say soft peddled because real child abduction, at least in the news, usually deals with sexual abuse and murder of said child. Not always. I think I heard tell that disaffected or divorced parents comprise a good number of abductions, though I can't recall exactly.

The result is that you get an episode that looks at negotiating a way to get the children of the Enterprise back on board, yet in the end captain and crew resort to a Captain Kirk solution but without the action you might expect from Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Bones, et al.

So, again, it's a show designed for a broader audience overall; both sexes both younger and older than the audience for the old show produced in the 1960s.

I guess my real gripe here is why any of the producers decided that slapping on the Star Trek name was a good move for this TV show. Personally, had I produced it, given the themes, I would have situated it on a colony world in a space oriented civilization, but in a purely different fictional setting, or if it was to be the same fictional setting, then Star Fleet would be service that only rarely came to visit.

In this episode children are given everything they want, even a no-need to go to school desire is satisfied. It's allegorical for the abuse such victims suffer from their abductors, and again the show is geared towards not just a broader audience but one that has the female viewer in mind. In my opinion when you try to satisfy everyone you wind up satisfying no one. But perhaps that thinking is erroneous, as this show did develop a huge following in spite of its obvious flaws. Which tells me that the catering to both a broader and younger audience, with a stronger emphasis on female characters, served this show's function.

But, for all that, like I say Picard and crew rely on a Captain Kirk solution, but without the derring-do of neither Kirk, Spock nor the rest of the Enterprise's crew. That's because the emphasis wasn't on the plot as such but how the parties might talk or interact with one another to get the kids back to where they belong.

If you like that sort of thing, then more power to you. But, like I say, I stopped watching after the first season because of episodes like this, and their execution. Like the producers stated, "This is not your father's Star Trek", and they kept true to their word.

I'm done being angry about it, and now shrug my shoulders at the whole thing. No amount of protesting would change their minds nor magically alter the show to something I think I would have enjoyed. But it is galling to finally discover, after all these decades, the true agenda behind TV, why it's so hard to get into the film and TV industries, knowing that there are a few million writers and would be producers out there who would have done a better job, but were kept at arm's length for the afore mentioned reasons. And that in spite of the altering of the fiction, because the show had the Star Trek label on it, people ate it up regardless.

Child abduction is no laughing matter, but this episode is almost laughable. It keeps a serious tone but keeps the abduction and what happens to the children in G-Rated territory. Is that a good thing? I don't know. Again I never became a fan of this show, so you'll have to decide for yourself.

And I think that's all I have to say about this TV series.