The Enterprise is assisting in the test of a new propulsion device, the soliton wave, when Worf's mother Helena Rozhenko comes for a visit. She's brought Worf's son Alexander, and feels it's time for the boy to come live with his father full time. As Worf and Alexander try to adjust to life together, the soliton wave experiment goes wrong, threatening an entire planet if the crew can't find a way to stop it.
In the early 1990s, the door had not yet swung wide open on serialized television. But Star Trek: The Next Generation was still occasionally pushing on it. Almost every time an effort was made to tell an ongoing story, Worf was involved. Once before, his son had been sent away to live conveniently off screen, but this time the writers planned to keep him as a recurring character.
Because they had future plans for Alexander, the writers knew he'd have to be recast. The boy who'd appeared in "Reunion" was timid and limited, and the producers wanted a child actor with an established track record. They found Brian Bonsall, who'd played Andrew Keaton on the late seasons of the sitcom Family Ties. He comes off much less stiff on camera than the prior Alexander, and reportedly loved the transformation of the Klingon makeup. Alexander would be one of Bonsall's last roles; shortly after The Next Generation ended two-and-a-half years later, he gave up acting.
The bulk of the episode is dedicated to Worf's first days of parenting. To be honest, I found his relationship with Alexander to be less than compelling here, but fortunately the change in Worf's life touches some of the other main characters too. Counselor Troi in particular gets another one of her maybe-twice-a-season moments to do some actual counseling, helping Worf understand the emotional state of his son. We also get see how far Picard has come since his "I don't want children on my ship" attitude of the pilot; he's more than understanding of the sudden new demands on Worf's time. (In fact, a deleted scene on the Blu-ray release provides another example of this.)
There's not too much to the sci-fi B-plot, but if the character drama had been as compelling in fact as it was in theory, this would have been the right writing decision. The jeopardy of the soliton wave doesn't quite have the weight it should, perhaps because the prior episode just put an entire planet in danger, but actually showed us that planet instead of leaving it unseen. Still, it is fun to see Geordi's enthusiasm at being there for an historic engineering breakthrough. (And even more fun to hear him compare it to what it would have been like to see Zefram Cochrane engage the first warp drive; he would wind up literally on that ship in the movie First Contact.)
The budget seems to have been deployed a bit unevenly in this episode. The "Corvan gilvos" puppets in the biolab look pretty ridiculous, particularly when Riker is holding them after their rescue. On the other hand, the live on set fire is fairly impressive. (Though I can thank the movie Galaxy Quest for making an unintentionally comedic moment out of Worf lifting the heavy beam off of his son. All I could think of was: "Do the Mak'Tar strength chant!")
Other observations:
- Besides young Brian Bonsall, another performer in this episode was appearing as one of her last characters. Georgia Brown, who plays Helena Rozhenko, died less than a year after filming this.
- In an ultra-condensed version of Star Trek IV's "save the humpback whales" message, this episode contains a brief mention of the future extinction of the white rhino.
- In this episode, the revered Klingon Kahless is pronounced more like the name looks: KAH-less. Later, they'd decide to change it to KAY-less.
- Some toys will endure for centuries. In the background at the school, you can see the "colorful wooden beads on metal tracks" toy that's in like every doctor's office in the country. (And my own family had more than one at home too.)
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