I can understand parts of what this episode was trying to do, but I have never found “Suddenly Human” particularly effective—or enjoyable. Its main guest character, Jono/Jeremiah, never really comes to life; the idea of Picard having to try to connect with him doesn’t really work, despite having merit in the abstract; and the central conflict relies too heavily on implausibly rigid attitudes and empty abstractions. It’s all a little too transparent an attempt to say something “political,” rather than to actually tell a sensible or compelling story.
Things start out reasonably enough, in some ways. There’s enough complexity to the setup of discovering a human teenager who was long ago “adopted” by the alien captain who led the attack in which the boy’s parents were killed to hang an episode on, one would think. And, while it’s tiresome that the Talarians turn out to be yet another rigidly patriarchal culture, the idea of putting our captain in the position of having to try to overcome his discomfort with children in order to connect with him has merit as well. Especially coming so soon after we saw him work through long-standing issues with a patriarchal figure in own life (his older brother, and by extension the father for whom Robert clearly functions as a stand-in), I enjoyed both Picard’s initial resistance to the idea of taking point on trying to get through to Jono, and his quickly giving up and trying to worm out of it via the “well-rehearsed” explanation to Troi about why he is not suited to the task. The brief exploration with Troi of the roots of his discomfort with children is also not bad. Unfortunately, however, this is about as far as I can go in saying positive things about the episode.
I’m not sure how much is the writing and how much the acting, but Jono/Jerehmiah is just flat and boring throughout the entire episode, never once managing to make me feel anything for him. Too many of his lines come across like they’re being read out of a textbook seeking to explain how a person might feel in his situation, rather than sounding like something that a real, live person might actually say. This is true throughout, but was most noticeable to me in the scene near the end where he explains to Picard why he attacked him. Just so stiff and wooden and abstract! And of course, if you don’t care about Jono, then the episode really doesn’t work at all. On top of this, Picard’s efforts to connect with him are neither inept enough to be interesting from a character flaw perspective, nor skillful enough to look like growth or forward movement for him; mostly, they’re just sort of boringly by the numbers and devoid of much emotion. The scene in which Jono has his big breakdown during their racquetball game is especially corny and implausible. If Picard had spectacularly bungled the task of trying to get through to Jono, and this had pushed him to some kind of realization about himself, that might have been an episode. Instead, we basically get a bunch of lameness in which his dull efforts kind of work, but ultimately don’t, mainly because they are deemed misguided from the start rather than because of anything about Picard as a character.
The Talarian captain, meanwhile, is portrayed in an irritatingly one-note, not-self-aware manner, and his demanding stubbornness seems particularly foolish given that the episode clearly establishes Talarian weaponry to be no match for the Enterprise. What if, instead of just being indignant and demanding, he had shown some appreciation for the nuance of the situation? He loves Jono as a son; does he really feel zero guilt about his role in the death of Jono’s biological parents? Does no insecure part of him question whether Jono might be happier as Jeremiah, living among his “own kind” and reconnecting with his roots? Was there really no room here for any kind of negotiation or compromise—especially given that Jono is explicitly described as having legally come of age according to Talarian custom, such that he ought, if he so chooses, to be able to cultivate a relationship with his human family without cutting all ties to his Talarian one? I guess the exact state of Federation-Talarian relations is a bit unclear, making it hard to judge the feasibility of such an arrangement—but that, too, is a somewhat irritating aspect of the episode, in that apparently the Talarians fought a war with the Federation at some point in the fairly recent past, yet we’ve scarcely even heard of them (and certainly haven’t heard anything about the war) before now. (This is a lesser instance of an issue that will come up again later this season, when the Cardassians make their debut appearance.)
The main impression that I’m left with from “Suddenly Human” is that all the reasonable, nuanced, ambiguous factors that, taken seriously, might have made for compelling drama, get pushed aside so that the episode can try to make a big Political Statement about “the issue of the foster parent, having raised and nurtured the child, having as much right to custody as the natural parent”—in the words of co-writer Jeri Taylor as quoted in Larry Nemecek’s TNG Companion. It’s not even that I disagree with the point being made, per se, either. I mean, I do think that the foster parent being directly responsible for the natural parents’ deaths through an act of war, and having abducted the child rather than returning him to a family that would presumably have happily taken him in, puts a spin on the “custody issue” that the episode fails to reckon sufficiently with, but even so, the idea that Jono’s wishes should be paramount in deciding his fate hardly seems revolutionary. Overall, then, the episode comes off to me as a case of empty, “politically correct” posturing, in lieu of a willingness to dig into the complexities of an issue—something that, frankly, I would perceive in much of Jeri Taylor’s future Trek work.
As a brief digression: Part of me feels uneasy about harboring such a negative attitude toward the sole major writer/producer that worked on TNG and its successors who was a woman. At the same time, though, another part of me feels like: Really, Jeri Taylor? You just toss into the script that the Talarians are extremely patriarchal? One of this episode’s failings is how saturated it is with boring, stereotypically male attitudes, in fact. (Though at least Worf injects a refreshingly non-sexist attitude in his one scene with Jono.) But could they not have, I don’t know, made either the human child or the Talarian parent female, for example? Okay, the human admiral grandparent is at least a woman, but she’s barely a player in the episode. Hell, even in the pictures of Jono’s parents that someone digs up, dad is a Starfleet officer but mom is in civilian clothes! (Not that I remotely know that these decisions were Taylor’s in particular; she was, after all, only one of the episode’s two co-writers, and it was based on a story by a third person. But still.) Anyway, these complaints about gender on TNG go way beyond this episode, and it may be that I’m only harping on them right now to offset my discomfort—and I do think that my dislike of Taylor’s work is about the work, not about her gender (I wish there had been more female writers and producers on the show!)—and yet, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. Just putting that out there.
But in any event, “Suddenly Human” is not a great episode.
Long before this viewing, I always found the episode’s moral conclusion—that it doesn’t really matter whether Jono is human or not but that he should be allowed to decide his own fate, and that there is much more harm to be done by ripping him away from his family than by letting him stay—so obvious that it seemed ridiculous that anyone was even considering otherwise, though your point that they should have at least discussed that the aliens could have returned Jono to his family at the time is well taken, and that might have made the issue at least a bit more grey. However, I end up feeling annoyed with the Starfleet characters for most of the episode that they’re even considering ripping the kid away from everything he’s ever known. However, I think I found Jono, if not particularly compelling, at least believable and more or less watchable.
TNG is full of these issues of conventionality and patriarchy that you mention, which I agree drags on the episode, but then, that’s often true of this era of Trek. I certainly agree that a lot more could have been done to make this episode much more interesting if they had made the characters more complex, but I probably would have given it three stars. It’s not a great episode. It’s… fine.
Well, the episode also dangles the possibility that the Talarian father may be abusive and Jono may have Stockholm Syndrome. This is ultimately dismissed, albeit seemingly only on the strength of the said father’s assurances that boys will be boys and that it’s perfectly normal to have broken half the bones in your body at one time or another by the time you’re a teenager (this connects to my remark about the episode being irritatingly full of machismo). The impression with which I was left is that the abuse thing is basically just there to muddy the waters and avoid making the “moral conclusion” too obvious too early. This “works” (in my view), but not in a good way, since it doesn’t actually add any complexity or ambiguity in the end. That’s part of what I mean about the episode brushing aside any/all potential ambiguities in order to make its (obvious) moral/political point.