Three in a row of a family related thread. This one is a little different. It's a good episode, but it actually seems a bit too complex... a little too much for a one-off episode.
It starts with an automated distress call from a Talarian vessel. The Talarians are a former enemy and there's a history (an unclear history) of war with them which is why they wonder if the distress call is a trap. In some ways this episode isn't detailed enough for the complex story it's trying to tell and consequently feels a little uneven. What was the war about? What was even the outcome since they still appear to be so hostile? Anyway, thanks to Troi they know it's a legit emergency and go over to find a radiation leak and a bunch of unconscious and injured crewmen. Among them is a human boy.
When the survivors are recovered enough they start to rock on their beds and make a howl which is a noise called the B'nar, that the Talarian's make when they're distressed. They don't stop until the captain comes in and orders them to. The scene establishes some key points to the culture - they're a patriarchal warrior culture that respects only the male authority figure and that they don't remove their gloves to make skin contact with other cultures because they think themselves superior. It's all very interesting. This ship appears to have been a training vessel for combat and all of them want to be returned to their captain. They can't figure out why this human boy is with them and he has previous injuries that would seem to indicate that he'd been badly treated by the Talarians even though he seems as adamant to return as the others.
Naturally they can't just return him since he doesn't "belong" to them. He is human and after a little research they find out that he's the grandson of an Admiral and his name is Jeremiah Rossa. Jono is surprised that his grandmother outranks Picard, but he's the man in charge of the ship, so he's the only one he'll talk to. Therefore it becomes the captain's responsibility to assume a parental role and draw out of him information about his life in with the Talarians.
Naturally this is difficult for Picard because he's not a kid person and I can completely identify with that, but it takes the episode into more of a teen drama angle with Picard's discomfort in having to share his living space with a teenage boy and with him doing a lot of complaining about things like Jono's taste in music. And of course, the teenager responds with hostility and an aversion to the "rules" that he has to live under now. Mixed in are awkward conversations of Picard asking him if he's been abused by his captain... I mean, it may as well have been a "show me where he touched you on the doll" type of thing. But they eventually work it back around to introducing Jono to his human family with pictures of him with his parents as a child and a recorded message from his grandmother.
And it's also made very clear from what the boy says and when they meet up with Captain Endar that Jono's injuries are a result of the harsh physical testing that their adolescent boys go through as part of their training to become warriors. You also see the genuine affection between Endar and Jono. Endar claimed Jono as his son since his own son was killed in battle; that's part of their culture as well. Still, the Enterprise wants to retain legal claim on him because he's human and he still has living family that would like to have him returned. This produces tensions between them and the Talarians that escalate from talks to threats.
Meanwhile Picard finds a way for Jono to vent his frustrations and he ends up having flashbacks of his parents' death and his own abduction. This experience is contrasted with his first experience with genuine laughter from the situational humor of living as a human. This is the first part of what frustrates me about the story because there's a lot to cover here, psychologically. It's actually a really good story that should've been developed over a longer period of time and involved a main or reoccurring character. That way all of the "teenage drama" and the meat of the story wouldn't have had to be so compacted into one episode and it could've unfolded in a more deliberate and detailed pace.
Jono is conflicted by his new memories of humanity versus his loyalty to his captain and the only father's he's ever really known. So he stabs Picard in the night fully expecting to be executed for this because that's how the Talarians would deal with an incident like this. And this is the second part of this episode that is frustrating... it's all too familiar... it's a tweaked version of the Klingon culture. All of it - the male dominant perspective; the howling; the hard physical combat training beginning at a young age; the militant mentality; the family bonding of Endar to Jono similar to the episode, The Bonding; the sever judgements when loyalty is transgressed. It's a story that couldn't be done with the Klingons within one, disconnected episode because it wouldn't fit in well with the alliance between the Klingons and the Federation, so they made the Talarians. But then you have Worf who has been raised between cultures and has to reconcile them both throughout most of the series, so this episode becomes, in effect, a redundancy. But that's not to say it couldn't have worked with Klingons or something else in the manner I mentioned before - as an ongoing look into the life of a reoccurring character. The concept is sound.
So, accepting that Jono would rather die than be taken from the Talarians, they return him before real hostilities can commence between the two ships. Taking Jono's choice into account in Picard's speech at the end also partly feels like a commentary on how it's wrong for American's to "force" people to assimilate into our culture as part of the rules of immigration... or that Stockholm syndrome can be healthy in certain cases... but I could just be over thinking it. As I said, there are too many variables for one feral episode. When Jono leaves he removes a glove to touch Picard out of respect and it's a nice way to end it.
Anyway, I'm just as conflicted as Jono about this episode. It's top notch work, no doubt. It's engaging and, like I said, a good idea for a story. But it's also uneven and compresses too much story into a short space of time. I guess I'm going to have to go three and a half stars on this even though it has four star potential.
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