“When the Bough Breaks”
Written by Hannah Louise Shearer
Directed by Kim Manners
Season 1, Episode 16
Production episode 40271-118
Original air date: February 15, 1988
Stardate: 41509.1
Captain’s Log: While Riker is en route to the bridge, one of the children literally bumps into him—and falls to the floor. Harry apologizes, then tells his father, Dr. Bernard, that he hates calculus. I was thinking he’s way too young to be studying calculus, but whatever.
When the first officer arrives on the bridge, Picard tells them that they’ve been finding hints of Aldea, a mythical planet of philosophers and scientists that is filled with wondrous technology. The planet has supposedly remained hidden from the outside world for millennia.
Said planet suddenly appears out of nowhere and greets them warmly, asking to meet. Their leaders beam on board—their shield prevents all but Aldean transporters from working—but prove sensitive to the bright lights of the Enterprise. Shortly thereafter, Riker, Troi, and Crusher are beamed suddenly to the planet.
The Aldeans have a modest proposal: they can no longer reproduce, so they would like to take some of the Enterprise children. Riker, Troi, and Crusher make it abundantly clear that this is not acceptable—so the Aldeans send the three back and just go ahead and take the kids they want anyhow.
They insist on providing compensation for the children, but the parents (understandably) just want their kids back. However, returning the children is non-negotiable, but the Aldeans have information and technology far beyond that of the Federation, and they’re offering it.
During negotiations, Crusher insists on seeing Wes. She palms him a medical scanner, and he surreptitiously scans one of the Aldeans. After they’re beamed back, the Aldeans drop the other shoe: they send the Enterprise three days away at warp nine, making it clear that yes, they are bullies and kidnappers, and the whole polite thing was just a front.
Crusher’s scan reveals that they have radiation poisoning due to gaps in their planet’s ozone layer caused by their shield. They not only have chromosomal damage that prevents them from reproducing (and causes their sensitivity to light), but they’re dying. Riker and Data beam through a fluctuation in the Aldean shield (an earlier conversation between Wes and an Aldean revealed that they haven’t even maintained their equipment in ages), and are able to neutralize the Aldeans’ computer. While Picard beams the children back, Crusher explains that the children will suffer the same as the Aldeans if they remain on Aldea.
With the Enterprise‘s help, the ozone layer is re-seeded, the Aldeans undergo therapy to cure the radiation poisoning, and Harry reluctantly agrees to continue studying calculus.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: “And we know they’ll make good parents.” Troi says this at the end, even though most of the evidence presented in the episode shows that they, in fact, make lousy parents….
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: Data tells Wes that the cloak around Aldea bends light waves. Two problems there: One, if light waves are bent around Aldea, how can the Aldeans see? Two, sensors are supposed to be more sophisticated than visuals. If it’s just bending light, radar and sonar would detect Aldea easily, much less super-duper 24th-century sensors, so there has to be more to it than that. This is a rare case where more technobabble would’ve been useful.
If I Only Had a Brain : Apparently Data has never before been exposed to the notion of lying about a Starfleet regulation to someone who wouldn’t know better as an excuse to bring someone else onto an away team (in this case, Crusher, to represent the parents). As with many things Data learns about on the show, you wonder how incredibly boring his pre-Enterprise assignments must have been for him to miss all these bits of human behavior..
The Boy!?: Due to his being the oldest, the tallest, and the only one listed in the opening credits, Wes emerges as the leader of the kidnapped children. He organizes a hunger strike and other bits of passive resistance among them to protest their being taken from their families.
He also apparently sleeps in his clothes (all the way down to the boots), which is just weird….
Welcome Aboard. Jerry Hardin makes his first of two appearances on TNG—he would return as Mark Twain in the season-bridging two-parter “Time’s Arrow.” The children do fairly well, particularly Jessica and Vanessa Bova, who were just adorable as Alexandra.
But this episode’s Robert Knepper moment was when I saw Brenda Strong, whom I had forgotten was in this. Strong is probably best known now as the voice of the deceased narrator of Desperate Housewives, though she’ll always have a warm place in my heart for her recurring role as Sally Sasser on Sports Night.
I Believe I Said That: “What’s your hurry, Harry?”
Riker’s inevitable response to Harry running down a corridor and crashing into the first officer.
Trivial Matters: This is the first of five writing credits on TNG for staffer Hannah Louise Shearer, and the only TNG directorial credit for the late Kim Manners, who would go on to acclaim as a producer on The X-Files (on which Hardin would also have a recurring role as “Deep Throat”) and Supernatural, before dying of cancer in 2009.
Make it So: “The legend will die, but the people will live.” A mostly harmless episode that lifts quite a bit from The Cliché Handbook. You’ve got the Mysterious Legendary Aliens who turn out to have a Horrible Secret, and who are Meaner Than Expected. The children fit all the types, including The Really Really Adorable Little One With The Stuffed Animal (which amusingly appears to be a stuffed tribble) and The Kid Whose Last Conversation With His Father Was An Argument (And The Father Regrets It Later). Oh, and the Kidnapper Who Becomes Overly Attached.
Still, the performances are all fairly solid, the ozone-layer message unsubtle but not too sledgehammery (certainly less so than other first-season attempts at pointing out things humanity is currently doing wrong), and the twins playing Alexandra are cute as all heck. Where the episode shines most is (as usual) in the performance of Sir Patrick Stewart. His anger and outrage and justified self-righteousness at the kidnapping of children modulates nicely into diplomacy when negotiating with the Aldeans and amusingly into total discomfort when he has to actually deal directly with the children. That last gives us the episode’s final cliché, the Ending Where Everybody Gets A Chuckle, as Alexandra hugs Picard, leaving her stuffed tribble attached to the back of his uniform without him noticing.
I’m especially forgiving of this episode because it’s the first time since the pilot episode that the show has even acknowledged that there are children on board the Enterprise (beyond a single, brief scene in “The Last Outpost“). With the weight given to that particular aspect of the ship in “Encounter at Farpoint,” it was disappointing for it to take 15 episodes before it was even dealt with, much less made a plot point.
Warp factor rating: 6.
Administrative notes: Tor.com is taking Independence Day off, so the next Rewatch (“Home Soil”) won’t show up until Thursday the 7th of July. Also, if you’re a Star Trek fan, you might want to consider attending Shore Leave 33 in Hunt Valley, Maryland from the 8th to the 10th of July. I’ll be one of the guests, as will several other Trek authors, as well as actors John deLancie (Q), Gary Lockwood (Gary Mitchell), and Sally Kellerman (Dr. Dehner).
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest novel is a high-fantasy police procedural, Unicorn Precinct, and is currently available for the Kindle, and will be available in other eBook formats, as well as trade paperback, from Dark Quest Books in July. It’s the long-awaited sequel to his 2004 novel Dragon Precinct, which will be re-released by DQB later this year. A subplot involves one protagonist, Torin ban Wyvald, being reunited with his father who wants to take him home to Myverin, a distant paradise where they focus on art and philosophy—much like Aldea, only without the technology and radiation poisoning. (Hey, at least I connected the book to Star Trek this time!)
“Don’t mess with the Deep Throat” haha, if the government knew he was actually an Aldean double agent, he’d be executed…oh wait, he was executed for helping Mulder. Arguably, he was far more useful to Mulder.
…X:Files rocked…
SPORTS NIGHT!
That is all.
To be fair, it’s possible they meant all wavelengths of light, so radar might still be ineffective. And I think there might be a different, fairly major problem with using sonar to detect a planet. :P
Still, if nothing else, 20th-21st century techniques like detecting the effect of gravity on Aldea’s parent star as Aldea orbits, or even just looking for lensing effects or something, would also work just fine, so I do still agree with your overall point. Just nitpicking your specific examples. :D
Also, wow, I never made the connection that Mark Twain was Deep Throat. That’s kind of awesome, I love when I see a character actor from one scifi show pop up in another.
Idran: Hey! Stop clouding the issue with facts, dagnabbit!!!!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Too young to be studying calculus? This is Gene Roddenberry’s 24th century we’re dealing with, sir, in which, just as in Lake Wobegone, all the children are Above Average!
Yep. Patrick Stewart gets the lion’s share of carrying these episodes. And throughout the series, too.
Agree with @5; if you aren’t doing calculus before puberty you will never make it to warp theory.
I do have to kind of mentally squint to believe the Aldeans have all these techno-goodies but can’t shield out damaging radiation (shield out all light, radiation, and evidence of gravity that would show where the planet is, just not gene damaging rays. I soooo wanted to see Crusher hand them a prescription for sun screen to save the day, even if saving the planet is obviously a better solution) and that they can’t scan and fix their own genes.
OK, maybe they have lost all information on how their technology works. It happens. But makes you wonder how they meant to trade tech for kids.
But not nearly as much mental squinting as some episodes, so no big.
Huh. I never once assumed that was a stuffed tribble. I just assumed neutered tribbles were popular pets in the 24th century!
A harmless episode. It’s not unwatchably bad, but it’s not exactly entertainingly good, either.
Still, out of the kidcenric episodes, my favorite is “Disaster”, mostly due Picard’s makeshift crew being so adorably funny.
Well, given how inefficient our educational system is (with so much time wasted on re-teaching stuff forgotten over summer vacation, along with other problems), I can buy a more sophisticated educational protocol reaching higher math much sooner. Although aside from this episode, we never get any further indication that 24th-century teaching techniques are any better than our own. (Like the eradication of headaches, it’s a utopian first-season conceit that was ignored by later showrunners.)
What always frustrated me about this episode is that the crisis only existed because everyone ignored the obvious, ideal solution. Sure, the Aldeans were wrong to abduct kids from the Enterprise crew, but there’s a whole Federation out there, and even in a utopian future, there are bound to be children who lose their parents in one way or another. Why didn’t Picard think to suggest an arrangement whereby the Aldeans could negotiate to adopt orphans from across the Federation? That way, not only would the story not have required Picard, Deanna, and the rest to be morons for not thinking of that solution, but it would’ve been a nice way of promoting adoption to the viewing audience. They could’ve even put in one of those charity PSAs at the end giving people a phone number where they could get more information about adoption or foster parenting — do some real good rather than just show a fictional utopia. Instead, nobody in the entire episode seemed to be aware that there even was such a thing as adoption. It’s a missed opportunity.
“And I think there might be a different, fairly major problem with using sonar to detect a planet. :P”
Thanks Idran, for making me laugh today!! :D
Overall I liked this episode, and must admit I didn’t really remember much about it, but I think it’s tolerably good. I also wonder exactly what tech knowledge the Aldeans were going to share, if they were clueless as to how the Custodian worked or where its power source might be…
And yes!!! Sir Patrick Stewart carries the episode!! What a joy it is to see such a great actor in action!
Oddly enough one of my strongest recollections of a TNG moment is that middle schoolers on the Enterprise were studying calculus. I remember nothing else about this episode. Although Chris@10 has a point, in retrospect I don’t think the idea of an average 10/12 year studying calculus really holds water.
Sonar (originally an acronym for SOund Navigation And Ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in Submarine navigation) to navigate, communicate with or detect other vessels.
Wouldn’t work real well in a vacuum.
The Technobabble line writer may have had the Aldivian Flu or something that week.
I just started re-watching TNG thanks to netflix finally getting it on instant streaming. I’m surprised by which episodes I remember and which ones I’ve totally forgotten. For some reason, this one really stuck with me. I think it was one of the first episodes where I didn’t find Wes unbelievably irritating – the whole passive resistance attempt was interesting and with some other kids on screen, he didn’t seem quite so precocious.
One of the few decent Wesley stories. His idea for passive resistance and his rapport with the other children were good progressions for his character.
I don’t think a 10 year old having to take calculus in a 24th century setting is a stretch at all. Especially considering this future that’s being portrayed. Heck, my own 12-year old daughter could probably handle calculus if the crappy school system she’s in wasn’t quite so crappy – or if I had the money to send her to a real school. She’s been bored with math since 4th grade and she can accurately do 3 and 4 digit multiplication and division in her head. It’s understandable but frustratingall the same to see my child’s abilities being restrained by the average-ness of her peers.
Just saw the episode for the first time and wanted to add my voice to those of the last few commenters — I was struck by how much better Wesley was handled here than in other episodes. Rather than get shoehorned into a “precocious gee-whiz” role, he’s given a chance to behave like a sharp and pragmatic teenager.
Math skills are much more about physiological brain development than about education. While I’m not going to argue about crappy school systems, or that kids could understand math better if schools did a better job, there is a physical limit to what they’re able to understand that’s not just a matter of getting more information into their brains earlier and faster.
However, that being said, I don’t have a problem with 24th century kids doing calculus in middle school. It’s not unreasonable to presume that advances in health and nutrition, as well as ‘natural selection’, have resulted in at least a portion of the elite population (ie, those ending up in starfleet) having brains that are developing for math more quickly. As EnsignJayburd points out, there are some kids today who have these abilities — they are the outliers, rather than the norm, but they do exist. They have different brains – it’s not a product of their education. It’s quite feasible that these math-gifted people are more common in the population 300 years from now.
Calculus is taught in Chinese middle schools, although at 3rd year as China has a 3 year middle school and 3 year high school system. But that’s the average. Accelerated classes and students starts calculus one or two years early. So a bright Chinese kid starts Calculus at age 12-13. I think it’s similar in Taiwan, Japan and Korea as well.
There are also some children present during the evacuation of the Enterprise in 11001001.
Regarding all of the hubbub about younger kids learning calculus, I think we’re making way too much of it. I do imagine that the writers for this episode wanted to get across the idea: “Wow! In the future even little kids will study what we now think of advanced math! How else would they understand the complex tech?”
On the other hand, basic calculus is really not that hard. Many of its principles also can be understood conceptually even by middle school and even elementary students today, if it were taught differently. In most schools, it is taught using a lot of algebra, coming out of the mathematical tradition of analysis, which requires a lot of levels of abstraction.
But really calculus is just about rates of change of things and summing up lots of bits of things… that’s it. Most kids implicitly understand how a speedometer relates to the position of a car: if the speedometer goes higher, the car moves its position faster. A tachyometer roughly correlates to acceleration, too, on a level surface (assuming one gear), so just looking at these things a bit and seeing how they relate to a car in motion can instantly give a kid a feel for how derivatives work — since velocity is the derivative of position, and acceleration is the derivative of velocity.
Yeah, sure, doing all the algebraic stuff is harder, but if you do it using graphs — which is easy with computers today — the slope of curves and things gets pretty intuitive. I guarantee that most middle-school kids could develop a very intuitive sense for how differential calculus works, well before they could master the abstract art of algebra.
But we don’t teach it that way.
Similarly, there have been a number of proposals to teach integral calculus in relation to various geometric methods, instead of algebraic ones. Some math teacher initiatives have even tried some of these things out on elementary school kids, and they can effectively find areas under curves and such using geometrical methods, rather than complex algebraic calculus.
Ironically, all of this is getting back to the way Newton and Leibniz probably understood this stuff conceptually back in the 17th century, when algebraic notation was still being standardized, but geometrical methods were well-known and intuitive (and frequently used by these founders of calculus in proving their methods).
Even the algebra can be simpler if you allow the use of infinitesimals. For decades, mathematicians regarded teachers who used them as stupid, even though they work and only require basic algebra I level comprehension for a lot of things (rather than complex discussions of limits), but a few decades ago, some mathematicians put the use of infinitesimals back on a rigorous foundation. That’s what Leibniz used… it made sense to him.
Anyhow, this is all to say that teaching calculus to middle-school kids, at least on an intuitive level or a basic numerical level is very possible today. It’s only if you approach it through the bizarre algebraic sequence we do today that it seems ridiculously hard, but that has more to do with 19th century mathematical formalism than the actual complexity of the concepts.
I love the idea of them adopting orphans. I was just thinking the same myself. It feels like the obvious answer. Is it too late for a how it should have ended episode?
@15: I can sympathize, not because I have children myself, but because of my own experience in a sub-standard school system. I took Calculus as a senior in high school, and found it not only simple to understand, but enjoyable on a certain problem-solving kind of level. I ended up getting a grade of around one hundred and six percent in the class, and while much of that is down to having a superb teacher who understood how to present the material and make it enjoyable, that’s not the whole story.
You see, I was ready to take Calculus at least two years earlier, having transferred from a school system that taught accelerated math courses (I was one of two students who took geometry in seventh grade), but because the system I transferred into did NOT teach accelerated math, I was instead shunted into several redundant, unnecessary math courses until they considered me old enough to be placed into Calculus, even though I had been intellectually prepared well before that time.
Ironically, although the explanation for not putting me in a more advanced class was that “sophomores aren’t allowed to take that class,” I was still the only sophomore in the class they DID put me in, among both juniors and seniors, and I got the best grade in the class, in a course that was considered unnecessary by the system and that most students never took.
That’s only one area in which I feel that the school system I graduated from failed me, especially once I got into college and realized there were large gaps in my formal education, but I won’t go into those now because it would be a long, probably very boring rant.
Wil Wheaton’s younger siblings Amy and Jeremy played Tara and Mason, two of the Enterprise kids.
Cut Wesley a break. He was sleeping in his clothes because he knew he was going to sneak around to find the big brain computer. I liked this episode a lot until the very end. Even for a season one episode, it was particularly cringe-worthy to have the intractable leader suddenly turn a complete 180 and provide the heartfelt closing speech.
But by far, my favorite thing about this episode was Brenda Strong’s mouth. Lovely woman.
I know, right? That was so weird. It would’ve made much more sense for the lady to make that speech, especially given that the dude’s last appearance on camera before that scene was making a sour face and saying how Picard has destroyed them.
I was struck that you didn’t mention that the Aldeans wanted the children to become artists and musicians. Harry made a rather lovely woodcarving of a dolphin and returned wanting to be a sculptor.. The fact that the children got something positive from the encounter really added to the story for me.
This is one of the episodes I remember seeing as a kid, and my memory of seeing it back when matches my current impression: boring. I think the problem is that the rather cliche plot means the only potentially compelling element to the episode is the plight of the kidnapped children, and that just doesn’t move the needle much. Maybe it’s because half the kids seem just fine with it, at least to start, or because Westley is the only character we’re familiar with that’s involved. It’s not that the (child) guest stars do a bad job, it’s more a case where a little more emotion needed to be written in at the right points. Unfortunately, where they are – in a couple cute “Full House style” elements (mostly led by the Alexandra character) – they come in late and feel a little forced. I like the idea of incorporating kids into some stories, but this episode makes the mistake of throwing together a group of kids, assuming we’ll instantly bond with them because they’re kids, and then leaving them helpless and mostly in the background while the rest of the (dull) plot plays out. Westley is the exception, obviously, but the episode would have been little different if he’d been the only one kidnapped.
Fortunately, future episodes mostly focus on one child, which is generally more effective, but at least one shows the way a group of kids can be a key element to an episode. @9 Hit on what was probably the best “kids” episode: Disaster. Not that it’s an absolute formula, but keeping the kids closer to the action and few enough that they can all have some meaningful interaction creates opportunities that just weren’t there in this episode.
I’m not quite sure if the implication in the episode itself is that every grade school kid has to learn calculus or if it’s only kids who show an aptitude, but you’d hope for a much less cookie-cutter approach in the future. It’s not just 1% prodigies that are capable of things like learning calculus at 10, leaving the rest of us in a narrow and well-defined learning space: I’d speculate that at least half the kids out there are capable of understanding at least one subject at a level several grades beyond average. The number of kids a one-size-fits all approach to education serves well is the minority, and hopefully it’s not just a fictionalized future where kids are challenged and encouraged to jump ahead as far as they can manage.
My favorite episode so far, although now I’m seriously questioning the wisdom in bringing families on a Federation exploratory vessel.
I was floored to see young Brenda Strong here.
@10. Christopher L. Bennett: Why didn’t Picard think to suggest an arrangement whereby the Aldeans could negotiate to adopt orphans from across the Federation?
I had the same reaction and was especially surprised to see Riker immediately answering for everyone in the entire UFP — along with Crusher specifically and exclusively (exclusionarily, if that’s a word) referring to humans’ relationship with children, which discounts a wide range of Federation cultures who may well have different attitudes towards progeny.
It seems a bit strange that Picard put two of his people at risk by beaming them through the shield, without even attempting the obvious diplomatic solution: basically, saying “return the seven of ours you took, and we’ll give you the capacity to produce hundreds of your own”.
Regarding the Aldeans as parents, the only bad thing about their parenting seemed to be the thorny issue of their unwillingness to return the Enterprise kids to their parents. With orphans adopted from elsewhere in the Federation, this would not be an issue, and it would be a total non-issue with brats of their own.
@27/Fujimoto: “My favorite episode so far, although now I’m seriously questioning the wisdom in bringing families on a Federation exploratory vessel.”
People often say that, but how many times has Earth been threatened with destruction? We’ve seen planets and starbases get attacked or destroyed as well as starships. At least starships can move away from the danger. And they have shields and weapons to defend themselves, just as starbases and (presumably) Federation planets do.
The fact is, even if an action-adventure TV series is set at a high school on Earth, it’s going to be an uncommonly dangerous high school on Earth (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Batman Beyond, say). And yet we never see parents demanding that the school be investigated or shut down. They keep sending kids to this dangerous place because that’s the artifice of series fiction. So you can’t say kids would be safer somewhere else, because anywhere the series was set would be equally dangerous.
The original intent was that the Enterprise would be probing deep space for years at a time, totally out of touch with the Federation, and would have a large complement of civilian researchers as well as career officers, who wouldn’t be as likely to sign up for a years-long tour away from home if they had to be separated from their families the whole time. And the intent was to leave the civilians behind in the saucer when the battle section went into danger, though that proved too difficult an idea to keep doing. I’ve often thought it would’ve worked better to have at least two ships, a pure science vessel captained by Picard and a defensive escort (of one or more ships) captained by Riker.
True, Earth faces danger too, but compared to the Enterprise which is out there frequently encountering new stuff and potential threats, the risk factor would be significantly less living on Earth.
As I said, that’s forgetting that this is fiction. Set a Trek series on Earth, and Earth will get regularly attacked or infiltrated or be endangered by planetary-scale disasters. That’s just the way fiction works. The characters will always be in unrealistically frequent peril no matter where the show is set.
Anyway, since when was living on Earth safe? You could get killed crossing the street. You could fall prey to an earthquake or a tornado or a pandemic. You could slip in the bathtub and die of a concussion. At least on a starship, you’re surrounded by top-of-the-line shields and defense systems, and a state-of-the-art medical center is just a few decks away if you need it.
A Westley episode and a kids episode that doesn’t turn out so bad. Heck, it was even a little heartwarming. It succeeds in spite of itself. I really like the shot of away team and the Aldeans standing back-lit in a small portion of the screen, while the energy source oscillates. It’s a nice composition and a trick of scale that Trek didn’t use often enough.
The part I found unintentionally funny is Troi’s line that “humans have unusually strong attachments to their children.” And Betazoids don’t? Deana, your mom tries to get you married every episode she’s on — and she still calls you “little one.” Her comment makes it sound as if every other alien race in the ST universe just kicks their kids out of the nest at the age of 2 and makes them scrounge for worms and tubers.
Also, the old musician dude was creepy AF. Or maybe I’m just cynical.
Still, it’s an unusually solid episode for this season. For some reason the little floating/morphing shape game has stuck in my head since I first saw it as a teenager.