TNG Deathmatch Episode 16: When The Bough Breaks vs Thine Own Self

When The Bough Breaks should, by all logic, be completely insufferable. It's a first season episode about the ozone layer, it's full of kids, and there's a lot of Wesley being smarter than the adults around him, but somehow, it's pretty watchable.

The Enterprise encounters a mysterious planet called Aldea, a kind of interstellar version of Atlantis, a mythical world capable of hiding itself and its wondrous technology from passers-by. (In another instance where it seems Riker was intended to be the lead, it's him rather than Picard who gets to relate the story of Aldea, because Season One Riker knew everything.)

For once, the crew seem relatively on the ball: when two Aldeans (Brenda Strong and Jerry Hardin!) appear on the bridge with a fruit basket to invite them down for elevenses, everyone knows something's up. A planet of awesome power doesn't stay hidden for millennia and then decide to be neighbourly just for giggles: they want something. That "something" is children, and they abduct half a dozen from the Enterprise, including Wesley.

(Aldea is also, incidentally, the name of a restaurant in Holmfirth, a village not far from here that is better known as the filming location for Last Of The Summer Wine. I have never been to Aldea, the restaurant, and I have no idea if the name is a tribute to this episode. If it is, that would be at once amazingly cool and completely bizarre, because if you're going to name your bistro in Yorkshire after a planet in Star Trek, you surely wouldn't choose a planet populated entirely by idiots.) 

See, the Aldeans are sterile and concerned about the imminent withering of their civilisation. They need children, so they steal some from the Enterprise and offer goods in exchange. It is, of course, idiotic to think that half a dozen children would be of any use whatsoever in repopulating a planet, but the Aldeans are idiots. Not quite Pakled-level idiots - they appear to be functioning adults - but they have long since handed over the running of their lives to a massive computer called the Custodian, which does everything for them. If they want to make a sculpture, they use a little laser tool that translates their thoughts and carves the marble for them. If they want to make music, they just hold a magic harp that translates their emotions into sound. They don't have to learn, don't have to practice, don't have to try, don't have to think. Rather than try to solve the mystery of why they can't procreate, they just nick some offspring from the nearest passing spaceship, and they're too dumb to realise that this is (a) not going to work long-term and (b) rude.

(There was also a clothes shop in Sowerby Bridge called Bollox Boutique, apparently because the Canadian owner wanted a name that stood out. I once spent an hour in a traffic jam outside that shop, slack-jawed with disbelief. It wasn't a weird shop, didn't sell punk gear or anything, just regular women's clothes. I don't know if the owner really understood what bollocks are, and I don't know how she was allowed to call it that; suffice to say that the testicular spectres the name conjured up did not entice me to return to buy anything frilly.)

The Aldeans are so stupid they make our first-season crew seem smart. Beverley points out that there's no guarantee that the human children won't be rendered sterile too, since they don't know what's causing the problem, but the Aldeans don't listen. Wesley doesn't exactly save the day, but he does manage to disrupt the Aldeans' plans by getting the kids to passively resist their captors - not talking, not eating, not cooperating. (Jerry Hardin even calls Picard for help because, he confesses, "I'm not very good with children". I like the idea that the combined technological might of the Enterprise and the Aldeans is utterly useless when faced with the stubbornness of children.) It's refreshing. He's just a regular smart kid. All the kids are surprisingly bearable. The episode isn't a classic, but the show, at this point, was improving.

(There was also, once, a shop in Hebden Bridge called Home...Oh! (exclamation point theirs, not mine).  I miss that shop. Yorkshire is a very special place.)

Meanwhile, Thine Own Self is one of my favourites of the seventh season, but it seems most fans don't think very highly of it. Data has been sent in a shuttle to recover some dangerously radioactive metal fragments that have crashed on a planet with a pre-industrial society (judging from the clothes, I guess they're going for a Renaissancey sort of level of development). Some catastrophe occurs, and his memory is affected; he wanders into a village with no idea who he is, what he is, or what the word radioactive means.

I mean, admittedly, this detail is a stretch. In one scene, he sits in on the local kids' science class and contradicts everything the teacher says about combustion; he knows enough to build a primitive microscope and detect radioactive particles but he doesn't know the word radioactive? I mean, I guess it's possible - Data is an android, and it's feasible that the part of his brain that stores the word radioactive might be the same part that stores his identity, and might have been very selectively affected by the accident. It just rings slightly false.

It's a pretty solid episode otherwise, though. The story is basically Data-As-Misunderstood-Monster - his radioactive metal starts making people sick, and as he races to discover an antidote, the villagers turn up with pitchforks and torches to blame him for bringing the disease. (I mean, he did, but they're still belligerent dickheads; the characterisation here is pretty thin.) The look of the village is appealing - yes, the season seven bar is low enough that simply dressing the villagers in Ren-Faire costumes instead of the usual ecru hippy layers or standard Trek jumpsuits adds enough visual interest to elevate this episode. There's some fun with pseudoscience and the proto-steampunky primitive laboratory equipment Data constructs, and it's just a fun, inoffensive little story. 

There's also a side-story about Troi taking the bridge officer test to become a full commander, basically a Kobayashi Maru scenario where she has to order Geordi to his death in order to pass, and it's fluff, really, but nevertheless nice that they wanted to give Troi a little shading, a little bit of ambition. It's as if the writers realised that she could be ambitious or driven or combative only once she got a regular uniform. The callback to Disaster where she's in command by default is a nice touch, as it lampshades the ways in which she's grown: in Disaster she was shockingly out of her depth and didn't even know what a warp core breach was. It feels as if at that point, the writers were embarrassed to be writing her so dumb, and the character was embarrassed to be so ill-informed, and by season six, she was an expert on Romulan engine technology after only a few days aboard a Romulan ship. Somewhere behind the scenes, Troi applied herself to something other than psychology and chocolate, and it's good to see, just not hugely interesting as a plot on its own.

I might ordinarily say that the time would have been better spent with Data in the village, but for once, I think they milked the A-story of everything it had to give. 

WINNER: Thine Own Self