“The Bining” gives Star Trek: the next generation is a painful lesson in reality

By Chris Snellgrove | Published 16 seconds ago

“The binking” is one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The next generationone that deals with intoxicating subjects such as death, loss and extreme trauma. And part of what makes it such an emotional intestine is that it deals with something that we almost never see in this franchise: the consequences on the ship when someone dies in a mission outside. According to the episodes writer and the future Battlestar Galactica Showrunner Ronald D. Moore, wrote this episode because he noticed that the program never addressed the practical problems that the ship had families that live in it while following a dangerous mission after another,

“The Bining” teaches Star Trek about death

If it has been a minute since you have seen “The Bining”, this episode of Star Trek presents a child who has to deal with his mother’s sudden death, a security officer under the command of Worf. The Klingon wants to make a ritual of union with the child because both are orphans, but their plans are frustrated by the apparent reappearance of the mother, which turns out to be an alien manifestation of the planet below. According to Moore, he wrote this episode because “it never seems that the series has dealt in front with some of the questions that an inevitably mentioned family boat would mention.”

Part of what Moore did an asset to The next generation It was a superfan of the original series and could provide some canonical consistency between the two shows. For example, he was the expert resident in the Tos Klingon and was accused of expanding in much of the mythology of that career for TNG.

Therefore, he knew better than most than a basic element of the franchise was having poor red shirts to die strangely in missions outside, but those deaths generally did nothing more than keep Kirk live and help Spock to analyze the situation. But since the new program had families aboard the ship, “The Binking” is the first episode of Star Trek that thoroughly explored how Affing team deaths affect the members of the surviving family.

“What caused the idea was that we have this ship of a thousand people, and this time, they have brought their families,” said Moore. In this case, the deceased security officer (Marla Aster) had a young son (Jeremy), and we see him deal with the heartbreaking trauma of losing his only surviving father (the father previously died of an infection). The wounds of that trauma open again when a foreigner based on the planet’s energy below aims to be the child’s mother as an act of goodness, without realizing that he prevents the child from moving forward and accepts what happened.

The “The Binking” plot may sound crazy, but what makes it a great episode of Star Trek is that Ronald Moore did something that would do his posterior. Battlestar Galactica Show so effective: examine science fiction concepts through the icy lens of reality. He correctly illustrates that having families aboard the Enterprise-D can make funny stories, but it would be a logistics nightmare For the families of the officers who die in Misiones outside (and such officers apparently die like this all the time).

And the addition of the powerful alien who tries to improve things for the orphan child shows how the “new life” that the crew always seeks to aggravate the traumas that come from raising a family in a ship that is in fatal danger almost every week. Moore leads home to the bleak point that the officers who took their families to the Enterprise-D effectively chose their lives constantly instead of leaving them safely on earth or anywhere else. It is a terrible bet, and in this episode, we see what happens after it is not worth a poor child.

Incredibly, after “The Binking”, we never obtained another episode of Star Trek that would explore so thoroughly the emotional consequences of a team mission out of place. It was a painful lesson in reality, one that hit our favorite characters as hard as we hit those of us who were looking from home. And unlike young Jeremy Aster, he will take shape more than a ritual of union with a moody klingon to help us move from an episode that still It hits us in the bowels all these decades later.