ST:TNG - Brothers, Data's Schizoid

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 2.06
The Schizoid Man

Some guy named Graves is dying.
Oh, I get it! Hahaha.

Also, the Enterprise acquires a female Vulcan doctor assisting Pulaski, never to be mentioned again. Pity, too, since that Vulcan businesslike demeanor would've been in keeping with the welcome shift away from Crusher's motherly incongruity aboard an exploration vessel and toward Pulaski's professional dedication. But anyway, Graves is dying, but he's a cyberneticist who's learned how to upload himself to a computer and he conveniently asks how to shut off Data. Then Data starts acting unusual. Hmmm. I wonder what happened. The rest of the episode trudges through the obvious conclusion at snail's pace, relying on Brent Spiner's moderate success in aping the older character's mannerisms for plot progression.

Despite a couple of arguments as to Data's inherent right to his own life as a sentient being he receives little or no development, the episode being instead a case study of the mad scientist's moral moral dilemma. Interestingly, it concludes in true Star Trek fashion not with a defeat of the ambiguous villain but with a voluntary capitulation. Seeing his experiment in immortality is causing unwarranted harm, Graves willingly takes the ethical choice of suicide, erasing himself from Data's brain. Bonus points for displaying Graves' disdain for Data's life but his growing concern over his harm to humans, portraying ethics as the arbitrary balancing act it is and not an absolute.

Surprisingly good toward the end for a season 2 episode.

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Seriesdate: 4.11
Data's Day

See, this is why I'm not a fan of Dr. Beverly Crusher and by extension Gates McFadden's influence on TNG.

Data wants to dance at his friend Miles "Oy'm Oirish" O'Brien's wedding to Keiko O'Nipponame so he asks Crusher to teach him. Hilarity ensues but not before cluttering five minutes of a 45-minute show with tappa-tappa-tappa and slow dancing. It's pure filler and an unwarranted concession to McFadden's SF-unfriendly artistic skills. In her defense, she seemed rather good at it. Guessing the many cuts to the feet of doubles performing the tap routines were entirely for Spiner's benefit and not hers. But the whole ordeal still had nothing whatsoever to do with either stars or trekking or strange worlds or new civilizations or Data's quest for humanity. Of all the science fiction plots I've always wanted to see written, interstellar tapdancing ain't one.

Worse yet, this wasted screen time would have been much better dedicated to the A-plot involving a Vulcan ambassador who turns out to be a Romulan spy in one of the few truly intriguing plot twists in Star Trek history. Plot aside, the entire episode is framed as Data's correspondence with a certain Mr. Maddox, detailing his progress interacting with humans in the social sphere. He boasts of his new algorithm capable of predicting human emotional responses. Of course the smart guy's plan fails hilariously, and repeatedly, as per comedic trope requirements. By the end, Data re-affirms his fervent wish to degrade his superhuman self by attempting to degenerate into a human.

What really clinches the atmosphere here is looking up the name of the character with whom Data's been e-mailing back and forth. Bruce Maddox is the same Starfleet cyberneticist who had demanded the android be torn apart in the name of science back in season 2. In another show of classic Star Trek utopianism Data, instead of holding a grudge, encouraged his antagonist to continue his research at the end of that episode. The writing team stuck to their guns and now two seasons later we find Data casually supporting his former would-be executioner in the pursuit of knowledge. It was this sort of positive thinking which made Star trek stand out. Not mere feel-good sap (though it offered plenty of that too, unfortunately) but cold-blooded cooperation for an objective greater good, juxtaposing Federation social progress with Romulan conceit and deceit.

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Seriesdate: 4.03
Brothers


(alternate title: Three Spiners in a Week)
That episode with Data's badass powerwalk through the corridors, activating forcefields at every step to block his pursuers.

Turns out our heroic androic was built with a hardware backdoor, and daddy's calling him home! So he turns into a total robot and mechanically executes a brilliant plan to hijack the Enterprise and meet his maker. Yes, literally.

This episode could easily have bombed. The shipboard standoff eats up a solid fifteen minutes, yet it never gets boring as we empathize with the crew's dawning realization that Data's suddenly betrayed them. It includes a B-plot about kids fighting which could easily have come across as cloying homeyness yet is instead played lightly and straightforwardly enough to merely provide its intended contrast without seeming intrusive.

Once Data (played by Brent Spiner) teleports down to his destination he finds his creator, Noonien Soong, played by Brent Spiner and a couple kilograms' worth of chin putty.

They're soon joined by Data's evil twin brother-droid (broid?) Lore... also played by Brent Spiner. The writers had some fun with this little trinity too, constantly interjecting lines like:

"I always loved that face."
or
"Tell me. Do I look somewhat... uhhh... familiar to you?"
or
"Do you believe that we are in some way alike, sir?"

- all of which went right over my head when I was ten years old. Yet it's still one of the most memorable episodes in TNG's seven-year run. One-man plays are risky business, and watching Spiner shadow-box for half an hour could easily have dragged the audience yawning to the complaints department. The producers gambled on the actor's nuanced grasp of his character by season 4... and won. He beautifully set apart both Data and Lore's dichotomy from Soong's crotchety, paternal, half-senile rambling.

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Data was, along with Worf, a scarce element from TNG's first-season fumbling to truly exceed expectations. While Brent Spiner seems to have fallen short of world-class acting ability in general, tending toward clowning, he absolutely nailed the Data role from the start, including any and all deviations from its baseline such as Lore. The series, with its very, very shaky start, was lucky to have him. It took several years for most of the core cast to grow into their roles, to learn the restraint necessary to portray good SF (and longer for the directors to allow them to exercise said restraint) so for the first couple of years they were leaning quite hard on Patrick Stewart's Royal Shakespearean talents, to the point of repeatedly cloning him. Spiner rapidly received much the same treatment.

He was inspirational, and Data-heavy scripts tended toward forward-thinking. But for all they leaned on him, there's something odd about Data's early character growth: the lack of it. His Pinocchio quest for humanity gets stated and re-stated ad nauseam, yet only around season 4 with Data's Day do we begin to see his steps toward the human condition: his pet cat, his participation in human rituals, his incipient emotions like nervousness, the trust his reliability has earned among the crew, etc. It seems the show's writers were either unsure as to how to portray inhumanly unemotional thought patterns or afraid such a portrayal would alienate viewers. His plots as often as not have him possessed by ascended alien intelligences or accidentally sapient nanotech or a downloaded cyberneticist or a backdoor over-ride from his creator or the ghost of christmas-past, or really pretty much whoever or whatever wandered along had even odds of taking up temporary habitation in Data's brain. While this did allow them to stretch Data's inhuman behavior patterns more theatrically, it left the character himself slow to develop. Even when not being possessed by space ghosts, he was being squared off against other AIs instead of being juxtaposed with the overemotional meatsacks around him.

Episodes like The Most Toys or Data's Day, where we see Data taking purposeful, independent action, are few and far between. Ironically enough, TNG's token mechano-man ended up treated more as a prop or plot device than as a character.