Hey, it’s that guy from ‘The X-Files’!
That had never occurred to me before, since this was the first time I’ve watched this episode in nearly 20 years.
But first, the episode, in summary. The Enterprise finds a long-lost, hidden planet, make contact, after an initial visit have their best and brightest children stolen, and spend the rest of the episode scheming to get them back. A solution presents itself at the end, allowing the Enterprise and its crew not to have to engage in actual violence or difficult moral decisions.
More broadly: The Enterprise is following some ‘bread crumbs’ in space in search of a long-lost, mythical planet and culture that some have compared to Atlantis or similar Earth myths. The planet and its people reveal themselves. Their technology is formidible: they can cloak their planet, a shield protects their planet, they have the technology to beam through anyway, and they have a repulsor beam that in a matter of seconds sends the Enterprise far enough away to take 3 days at maximum warp to return to the planet. The inhabitants, after some pleasantries and a scan of the Enterprise, inform the away team that they can no longer reproduce and that they are going to take some of the Enterprise’s children … this makes Riker’s beginning-of-the-episode literal run-in with a young boy, who is chastised by his father, thematically relevant. Ah.
The inhabitants say they never take without giving in return—they are an advanced, peaceful culture that has devoted itself to the arts—and so to them what is left is to negotiate proper compensation, such as advanced technology. When Picard & Co. stall and plot and shout, X-Files Man demonstrates their power by using a repulsor beam to hurl the Enterprise a great distance. The Enterprise crew uses the next three days to return to the planet and contemplate their temper tantrum.
Meanwhile Wesley (grouped in with the children … above whom he towers), who also was taken, has become ‘unofficial’ leader of the group of kidnapped children. The aliens-of-the-week (AotW) indicate that they (the children) can have anything they want—exept they can’t go ‘home’—, that their special artistic talents will be nurtured, and that they’ll each get new adoptive/foster families. One of the AotW takess a shining—ah, emotional attachment!—to a child (the tiny ginger with the bad hair and often-chewed stuffed animal) that is supposed to go to another, indicating that all is not as ‘reasonable’ and ‘calm’ as one might think. One boy learns to be a sculptor with a laser knife, a girls learns music on a giant ‘Simon Says’ board, the ginger is good with shapes, and Wesley is given nearly-free-reign of the computer system by his elderly and not overly bright caretaker. Said computer is called ‘The Custodian’ and we learn that: a) it takes care of all mundane matters of the AotW; b) the AotW only do ‘art’ and so have forgotten everything about i) agriculture, ii) technology, and iii) science; and c) either the Custodian never breaks down or it repairs itself (if it is repaired at all) … the AotW sure can’t do it. Plot point? Perhaps.
Wesley realizes that pouting won’t work, and that giving in so soon isn’t good for the episode, so he organizes the children into a passive resistence outfit … they won’t eat, talk, be joyous, or do what the AotW want, and, he concludes, if they make themselves unwanted the AotW will send them back!
Wishful thinking, but anyway …
Finally Picard & Co. return to ‘negotiate.’ Crusher gets a chance to talk to Wesley, to whom she palms a medical scanner, and he scans the oblivious old woman. Back on the Enterprise Crusher figures out what’s wrong, Data & Geordi figure out how to beam through the protective shield, and once all the key figures are back on the planet Riker & Data take out the Custodia so that Picard can a) explain matters and b) dictate terms from a position of power.
It appears that the shield—perhaps because it has broken down?—has helped to destroy the planet’s ozone layer and the remainining couple thousand AotW are slowing dying of radiation poisoning. It made them sterile, it removed their appetite and brought on lesions, and obviously were the children to remain, they, too, would have become sterile, thus defeating the AotW’s repopulate-our-planet-and-save-our-culture plan.
Yay, Enterprise!
It’s a rather TOS premise with a Children-on-the-Enterprise twist. It reminds me a bit of 11001001 in that the ‘aliens’ do what they do and fail to take ‘reasonable’ alternatives because they perceive the risk of being turned down as too great. Rather, that’s what happens in 11001001 … here no reason except X-Files guy’s arrogance can explain why more reasonable solutions/options were not pursued.
For example, why not offer their planet as a place where some humans with children could set up a colony of sorts. These AotW look human, but they are not … so the whole idea of adopting human children to be the seeds of a new generation of their culture only applies to their culture, not their ‘species’ … so a colony is just as good kidnapped children and has the advantage of not pissing people off. Of course, the advantage with children is that they can be molded / are malleable … it’s a kind of Changeling / Reverse-Cuckuoo situation. But then we would not have had a ‘plot.’
Speaking of Changelings … what I like about the episode is the way it thematically ties itself to myths / fairy tales / legends. We get the reference to Atlantis, an advanced ancient civilization whose own arrogance or decadence (depending on the version) destroyed it, though I’d think, too, of the ‘Lotus Eaters’ here, too, as the paradise presented is really a radioactive Chernobyl … except we don’t have a drug or other addictive substance to make people want to stay. The ‘bread crumbs’ along with kind-of-orphaned children (see also: the boy who had a falling out with his father …) reminds us of Hansel and Gretel, but the taking away of the children is more a Pied Piper riff. Furthermore, the advanced culture whose technology, or, rather, reliance thereon, leads them to a kind of intellectual decrepitude reminds one, rather, of Wells and The Time Machine … except we have no Morlocks.
These are stories that come immediately to mind when watching ‘When the Bough Breaks,’ but each of them has more depth of characterization than does this episode, which is a little sad. Then we have just plain silly moments. From the point of view of 2011 and all our Amber Alerts and the like, the mass kidnapping in general and the specific way children are parcelled out seems even creepier than it did in 1987 or so. That’s right, let’s give the little girl to a single old man, nothing strange about that. A drinking game could have been formed by just treating various statements by the AotW as sexual innuendo. At points the ‘acting’ is ridiculous, and in particular the passing of the health scanner between Dr. Crusher and Wesley is so obvious as not to border on ridiculous but to leap over that line and dance a jig on the other side.
And the episode was only a year and a half or so after Chernobyl, it was the 80s, and we were talking about the ozone layer, loss of whales and fish & fowl habitats, etc. Our myth-laden episode was in fact quite a contempory allegory in some ways. Were it not for the ‘how stupid the artistic elites really are’ sort of message, I’d rather appreciate now, in 2011, the combination of fluency-with-technology and ignorance-of-technology trope. Consider those who can, sort of, google things and find things online, those who can IM and text and even email, but who have no idea how computers or other technology works. Of how many can drive but not change a tire, let alone oil or check fluids … we’ll leave the big mechanics out of it. I put a terminal emulator on my screen and students and colleagues alike think I am “using DOS” and that I must be ‘programming’ or similar. We treat 80s-era software as difficult and arcane, but forget the thousands upon thousands of secretaries—most with only a high school education—who had no trouble learning those difficult to use early word processors and spread sheets. Even my computer-phobic-father was better at using a work terminal attached to a distant mainframe than he is at doing anything but checking stocks, reading his email, and playing solitaire on a modern computer.
Looking at this episode in conjunction with the rest of the season, we have cultural conflicts (in terms of ethics/morals and children) played out with the aliens’ technological superiority (see also: ‘Justice’), and as with ‘11001001’ we have an ‘advanced’ society too closely linked to their technology that ‘one little thing’—a supernova, a computer kind of breaking down—can lead to death and destruction. And as in ‘The Last Outpost’ we have these hints of an ancient civilization lost to myth that, among other things, can rather easily control and/or destroy the Enterprise.
Links:
- When the Bough Breaks (Wikipedia)
- When the Bough Breaks (Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki)
- When the Bough Breaks, et. al. (A.V. Club)
