When The Bough Breaks
This is frustrating – a story that’s based around children, but which has no interest in them at all.
“What A Wonderful Fairytale”
Tasha is half-right, I guess. What we’re watching here is quite clearly a fairytale. Specifically, it’s an iteration of the magical child-snatcher story. The episode puts some effort into making the port to science fiction work, but it’s half-hearted at best. You can’t save a species by transplanting a similar species into the same environment, hence why the Chinese government hasn’t attempted to save the giant panda by parachuting tar-stained polar bears into the bamboo forests of Gansu. The idea that seven people are enough to generate a genetically stable population going forward is also risible – that’s a gene-pool so shallow you could evaporate it with ten minutes and a glitchy hairdryer.
And yes, mocking Trek for suggesting something scientifically bogus is a mug’s game (though I always wonder how many people who smugly point out “it’s science-fiction” at times like this would react if the crew started wandering outside the ship without spacesuits). My point is that the scientific implausibility of the situation underlines the fantastical nature of what we’re dealing with.
“When The Bough Breaks” is essentially an inversion of stories like “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” or “Rumpelstiltskin” (see, DS9? It can be done!). Rather than starting with services rendered, which then come with a price tag of one or more children (whether it was the agreed fee or as a response to being stiffed), this story sees the magical beings stealing first, and asking fiscal questions later. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, as the saying goes, particularly if you’re prepared to buy that forgiveness with a thick wad of space-cash.
There might be some interesting directions in which you could take this. Given the amount of government-sponsored child abduction the world has seen throughout history, and is still seeing today, though, you’d want to be damn sure the tale you’re telling is worth playing in the shadow of an ongoing tragedy.
“When The Bough Breaks” is not that story. It is amazingly, defiantly, stupifyingly not that story. If some addled, drunken descendant of Beaufort or Richter somehow created a scale with “that story” at one end, and a windmill staffed by tigers on the other, “When The Bough Breaks” would be distinct risk of getting flour in its claw-wounds.
Moreover, being that story isn’t even something it meaningful aims for. It immediately declares that seven children are literally priceless (a position which both feels intuitively inarguable, and which in practice is held by pretty much nobody), and does nothing but repeat the point for thirty-five minutes, until it’s time to wrap things up. “What would be worth giving up your child for?” “LITERALLY NOTHING!”. “Oh, um… OK. Here’s Jerry Hardin, I guess?”
Barren Climates
Not that I’m dissing Hardin. As with the similarly staid (though rather more interesting) “Emanations”, he’s easily one of the best things about this episode. He does the best anyone could to sell the Aldeans’ nakedly indefensible position, hitting the triple point between exhausted bathos, smug superiority, and desperate self-justification. And to the extent there exists any thematic density to the episode, it’s here – in a powerful but time-worn civilisation, big on tech and isolationism and failing completely to understand itself, having to stare extinction in the face and responding by stealing from less powerful people, purely to allow total denial of the obvious facts.
Sound familiar? If not, the fact episode goes so far as to reference depleted ozone layers – the climate crisis of its day, except we actually bothered to do something about it – should rather drive the point home. Let’s just say the fact Greta Thunberg won Time’s Person Of The Year the week I first wrote this seems like a pretty impressive coincidence. So to does Elon Musk winning the week I edited this for the new blog, for equally relevant but entirely less pleasant reasons.
These coincidences are just that, of course. What we could re-purpose as a commentary on Trump or Biden’s America [1] would struggle to do a similar job in the era of Reagan resplendent – back then environmental issues were still generally talked about as problems to be solved (or not), not as oncoming cataclysms which we can only hope to blunt. As written, the reference to ozone depletion comes across as an attempt to shoehorn a contemporary environmental issue into an utterly unrelated story. As a result, the reference comes across as more glib than portentous.
This is a small part of the episode’s biggest problem. Even worse than the lack of ambition, “When The Bough Breaks” is just badly written. It isn’t just the fact ozone depletion comes into the narrative out of nowhere. There are structural issues, like the subplot with Rashella refusing to hand over Alexandra (Geddit? Because she’s rash?) disappearing the instant it arrives [2]. There’s lazy plotting, like letting Dr Crusher’s plan to have Wesley surreptitiously scan Duana succeed, because she’s stupid enough to think a teenage boy hiding behind his kidnapper in-between hugs from his mother is a perfectly reasonable thing to let happen.
More than anything else, though, it’s just not an interesting script. The dialogue is flat, arid, and lifeless, a desert of dialogue. Everyone says the most obvious possible thing at the most obvious possible moment. The cast knows it, too – Comic Relief could only dream of seeing people phoning in this hard. Hardin, as noted, is entirely on his game, and Stewart’s Shakespearian chops means he can always fall back on gravitas when, as here, he has nothing else to work with.
Others fare less well. Gates McFadden delivers the line “They’ve taken my son” like she’s just remembered the bins need bringing in. The most fun Frakes has here is asking “What’s the hurry, Harry?”, which is his best line only in the sense that athlete’s foot is the best fungal infection. Sirtis should have sued over the fact someone decided it was reasonable to make her say “Humans are unusually attached to their offspring” on-camera. And while there’s a lamentable lack of any episodes that really give Denise Crosby a chance to shine, this one really goes the extra mile in making Tasha as formless and abrasive as Blu Tack rolled in sand.
Wesley Crushing It
It wouldn’t be fair to suggest the episode is completely devoid of good points. Hardin we’ve discussed, but I also want to mention the special effects employed to represent the Custodian. Despite it being kit-bashed on the cheap by Michael Okuda, it looks just as good as anything you can find in 80s cinema. I can give no higher praise.
It’s a shame the rest of the episode’s design is unable to match it. It’s particularly odd and unfortunate that the surface of Aldea is so well-lit, given its occupants claim a sensitivity to light. A shadowy twilight world would not only have looked far more interesting, it would have offered a visual link to the darkness of the Pied Piper’s exit route, or the draughty castle Rumpelstiltskin’s victim found herself locked within.
I’m trying to stick to positives, though. Um… how about the fact that for Wesley apologists (if such a creature exists), “When The Bough Breaks” is probably one of their most useful resources. Young Master Crusher sticks out as a terrible idea far less here than in previous episodes. A cynical explanation of this fact would be that the rest of the episode stinks so bad there’s no way for Crusher to gas us out further. I’m not sure that’s an argument wholly without merit, actually, but even so this is genuinely one of Crusher’s best outings. Wesley handles himself with a comparatively subtle competence, being quietly disruptive against his captors and hiding his plotting behind the veneer of naivety the Aldeans are expecting. It’s one of the few times we see Crusher being impressive, rather than constantly being told that his impressiveness is obvious.
This doesn’t mean Wesley’s status as the golden boy is completely ignored. He’s the first scanned, and the first stolen. Alone among the abductees, the Aldeans seem to have plans for him (unspecified and unexplored, naturally) beyond billeting him with a unit. It also seems relevant that given the Aldeans’ association with sixes – we see precisely six Aldeans, their decor and technology makes repeated use of hexagons – their heist is described as involving taking Wesley and “six more children”. This places Wesley outside the repeated references to sextets, and links him with the Custodian itself – a literally towering intellect.
This is far bearable than usual, however, because he’s finally in a situation where having him as the smartest and most insightful person in the room makes some sense. He isn’t the only wunderkind transported to Aldea (no-one Harry’s age should be studying calculus unless they’re incredibly advanced – that’s A-level territory), but his age combined with him having spent months working on getting into Starfleet means having him be the most generally capable is at least reasonable.
It’s unfortunate then that the episode in general is so disappointing that it can’t qualify as the strongest Wesley-centric episode yet; that remains “Where No-One Has Gone Before”. I’d argue though that this is the episode in which Wesley himself is at his best, with its entirely underwhelming nature just further demonstrating how Wil Wheaton never seemed to catch a break.
“You’re A Wizard, Harry”
While it’s frustrating some of the best material Wheaton gets in the whole first season ends up being dragged down by the rest of the episode, though, it’s also rather fitting. The spectres of missed opportunities haunt every frame here. In particular, the episode gets so close not just to using Wesley sensibly, but to deconstructing what the central problem is with him to begin with.
Let’s return to the central truth about Wesley Crusher, which was commonly and correctly accepted long before I got into the business of Trek criticism: he isn’t an actual character so much as wish-fulfilment fantasy for the teenage boys that were assumed to be the show’s primary audience. It’s therefore rather interesting that so much of the episode is based around adolescent fantasies.
You know the ones I mean, I’m sure. You may have shared in them yourselves. Hell, I don’t know the age of every one of my readers – you may have those fantasies right now. The form they take is very simple: a desire to be whisked away from the life you are currently forced to settle for, and taken to a place where people actually get you. Who recognise your actual worth, rather than grading your homework and tests, and counting the days you were marked present, and then insisting the resulting numbers define who you are.
This is clearly what’s happening to Harry in particular. As I mentioned above, he’s obviously stratospheric in terms of his mathematical chops – he’s vastly ahead of where I was at that age, and I lecture mathematics at university. However, whether due to an overly pushy parent (himself a doctor), an unappealing teacher, or just pure and simple disinterest, Harry clearly doesn’t care. He wants to be an artist. And then, one day, in a flash of light, he meets two kindly artisans who are going to teach him to become just that. We don’t see much of what’s happening with the other children, but it’s clear Katie is having a similar experience, being instructed by Melian in the ways of Aldean music-making.
The tools given to Harry and Katie also fit in with the wish-fulfilment idea, in that neither of them takes any actual skill to use – they just magically understand what’s inside your soul and presents the resulting beauty to the world. This again is caught up in the fantasy that the central problem with one’s life is that no-one can recognise the obvious truth about who you really are. It’s a seductive line of thinking, because it allows you to place the blame on everyone else for failing to understand, rather than it being your responsibility to work on who you want people to think of you as, and on what you want to be able to do well. I can speak personally to this, in fact – I nurtured a very specific fantasy as a kid of finding exactly the sort of musical instrument Katie is given here, one that would sing my soul music and make everyone realise how special I was. Needless to say, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t in fact any more special than everyone around me. Still less did it occur to me to just learn to play an actual instrument.
I recognise now how silly and solipsistic the whole scenario was. It’s no surprise that the episode similarly rejects the scenario as a good idea. It also comes very close to admitting the underlying problem with Wesley – he doesn’t get a unit here precisely because he’s already living an adolescent fantasy. The Aldeans have nothing to tempt him with.
But once again, “When The Bough Breaks” proves completely uninterested in exploring where these fantasies come from, what they say about children/teenagers, and whether there are larger issues in play that need addressing. Instead, the sum total of the episode’s conclusions on this front can be summed up as “children need their parents”.
This is both thunderously unoriginal and deeply questionable. It’s immediately obvious that not every child is best off with their parents; there’s no need for me to spell out the case there. Beyond that, though, there are a whole host of contributing factors to childhood experiences of alienation, most of which have little or nothing to do with their relationship with their parents. Trying to reduce the complex and vital topic of how children struggle to cope in our society to the message that “families are good” is just admitting you don’t care about the issue in the first place. I mean, this is TNG we’re talking about – a TV show about how humanity has forged a utopia by rejecting the greed and spite of the Reagan era in which it was made. Pretending there’s no cultural context to the struggle for children to find their place in the world actively betrays the show’s ethos.
Like I said at the beginning, this is an episode that desperately wants to be about children. It just doesn't want to think about them, at all, for even a moment. Apparently, considering kids to be priceless doesn't mean actually checking on how they're doing.
The ending here is both pat and patronising, then. To return to the fairy tale trappings the episode relies so heavily upon, it’s simply taken for granted that the children of Hamelin must have wanted to stay with their lying, cheapskate parents. Ultimately, the episode can’t work as a critique of Wesley Crusher because it’s too closely aligned with the mode of thought that gave us him in the first place – adults know precisely what children want, and if they disagree, they’re simply wrong. The children of the Enterprise aren’t characters here, they’re objects for adults to gain and lose, empty vessels the adults can argue over how best to fill. Watch how quickly and happily Harry abandons the idea of no longer having to take calculus when his dad immediately nixes the idea. What ten-year old could possibly need to take calculus? [3]
But no, father knows best, it turns out. Children need their parents. They need a firm hand. They need to see themselves represented on screen or they won’t watch a TV show from a genre that has always been massively popular among the young. What makes “When The Bough Breaks” so frustrating isn’t just that it’s determined to say as little as possible. It’s that what it does say is superficial and inaccurate.
It’s that it’s less mature than its own children.
Ordering
2. The Jihad
3. When The Bough Breaks
[1] And by Q's Q-tips, it's depressing that it's so easy to lump those two administrations together on this. For all the very good reasons to be happy Trump got the boot, 2021 has done an awfully good job of demonstrating the narrow difference between someone wanting to cause harm, and someone insisting they're no fan of harm, but that preventing it would simply be too difficult right now.
[2] This is particularly annoying given the parallels this episode finds in America. I rather love the idea that the outrageously selfish schemes of the rich and powerful might end up collapsing because some among them want to be outrageously selfish in a different way to how they’d all agreed (this time the coincidence comes in editing this the week Senator Joe Manchin killed a stimulus bill he'd promised to support, apparently just to feel important). It’s a shame the idea goes nowhere here.
[3] OK, fine. Maybe calculus is far more important to an interstellar civilisation than an Earthbound one. This is possible, sure. It’s also not particularly useful, and - absent textual evidence - it seems unwise to go out of your way to sever links between a sci-fi story and the context of the world in which it was written.
Maybe I’m worrying too much about the maths, actually. HOW UNLIKE ME.