ST: TNG - Silicon Worship

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: 5.11

Hero Worship

 

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a band of brave adventurers find a derelict ship, its crew mysteriously murdered, with a single shell-shocked survivor mumbling gibberish whose deciphering holds the only key to survival. Dun-dun-duuuuuuUUUNNN !

 

Data shows off his android strength by lifting a beam to save a young boy from a burning house exploding spaceship. (You have to wonder how the artificial gravity still worked.) The kid veers into idolatry and emulation, especially once he hears androids aren't afflicted with emotions. Suspicious yet?

Overall, though they obviously skimped on special effects by filling the episode with banter between Data and his Mini-Me, this worked out well. The child actor (who grew up to work as a producer) played surprisingly well by TV standards. The plot sucessfully fakes viewers out twice before the climax with sensor blips and Timothy's declaration he caused the disaster. On a show like Star Trek, he was as likely as not to turn into a reality-reshaping space god, so it honestly comes as a great relief when the plot is instead resolved via technobabble about gravity waves and resonance. In TNG fashion it lacks a villain, with the environmental hazard being ultimately resolved thanks to the boy acting as hero of the week.

I'm of two minds on Troi's decision to encourage tiny Tim's pretense of being an android. From what I remember of my psych courses, modern psychotherapy in general frowns on a therapist actively engaging with a client's delusions, and the potential emergence of a "folie a deux" always threatens to confound the direction of treatment. Not sure about the case of a child though, being malleable enough to shrug off a period of heavy character acting instead of canalizing it into permanent insanity. Also, patient interaction being removed to Data would lessen the emotional pollution of Troi's observations.

 

I'm of exactly one mind when it comes to Data reiterating his desire to degrade his superhumanity to the level of overemotional plains-apes. I hate it. I won't reiterate my previous statements on his perverse Pinocchio quest, but I do have to note one justification used in this episode:

Data: "I cannot take pride in my abilities. I cannot take pleasure in my accomplishments."

 

Oh, what a pile of electric bull shit!

We know Data can set goals for himself, is driven to achieve them and derives satisfaction from meeting said goals. In fact, his Pinocchio schtick is itself one such goal! He writes terrible poetry, he plays poker, he gets "intrigued" by interstellar phenomena on at least a bi-episodic basis. Are we supposed to buy the invalidation of all Data's personal experiences simply because they're not muddled in the limbic morass of quasi-rationalized ape instincts?

 

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Seriesdate: 5.04

Silicon Avatar

(I'm impressed by the title for once; when this show was filmed, the word avatar was a decade from entering popular parlance and still mostly a semi-obscure Hindu term; within the plot it also pulls a dual reference to both the alien and Data)

 

Anyhoochie, Riker's about to make it with a daring, saucy pioneer woman!

 

Oops, never mind, she's vaporized from orbit, Jim.

 

In contrast to the previous episode, this one ladles on more than the average special effects (by early '90s standards) including that jagged Christmas ornament known as The Crystalline Entity, an interstellar locust swarm of one which seems to have a taste for small defenseless human colonies for no adequately explained reason.

The Crystalline Entity... really should've been given a better name if you intended to bring it back... but ok, TCE zaps the colony Riker's currently helping to pitch their tents, setting the Enterprise off on a wild glass chase aided by a new old biddy sniping at Data in replacement of Dr. Pulaski. Turns out "xenobiologist Ahab" had her son killed by TCE when Data's br(other dr)oid Lore lured it to lower property values on the androids' homeworld. Cue interpersonal drama.

They certainly put more work into the technobabble than usual, but otherwise the script's a bit weak. Picard's decision-making seems obtuse at best, insisting Marr the xenobiologist work directly with Data with no-one to buffer her antagonism, flatly declaring he wants to talk to the space-snowflake with no apparent contingency plan, putting Marr directly at the controls on his ship's bridge (something any military in history would bristle at) at a system with no failsafes and pretty much ignoring evidence all episode long to allow the drama to unfold. The sentimental scenes with Data reciting from Marr's son's diary drag too long to retain their punch. At least the one-shot character was played by an actress capable of some nuance, or the whole thing would've flopped badly.

The denouement deserves special mention. After shattering the space-snowflake to death, Marr asks Data (having gone loopy enough to talk to him as her dead son) for validation in her decision. Data bursts her bubble, but crucially not by some long-winded speech about the sanctity of life. (That's Picard's job.) Instead he mentally reviews her son's journals and concludes he would be sad at his mother throwing away her career and legacy by her act of vengeance. And he says so. Openly. Honestly. Flatly. Beautifully.

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The sight of the old scientist's hands falling away from Data's face, her righteousness crumbling before his indefatigably logical, objective summation of her relationship with her own son serves as an excellent counterpoint to schmaltzy scenes of Data bemoaning his superiority. It's a rare acknolwedgement that a superhuman intellect would be capable of analyzing human behavior externally, as animal behavior, as a set of... data... settling into predictable patterns and not some mystical vital force beyond the grasp of mind or reason. It shows us exactly why Data's sick quest for humanity would yield a fate worse than death, a vastly superior mind crippled by primate primitivism.

Not that the show's writers would ever acknowledge this. They operated by the lowest common denominator of glorifying emotion (that pervasive tool of social manipulation) in all popular entertainment.

More to the point, TNG expanded Star Trek beyond a handful of stock characters vanquishing villains of the week to a universe. To this purpose it needed to flesh out rival empires, some baseline technological level with limitations, but also give the audience a taste of life beyond the bridge, whether in Starfleet (was tempted to include the episode Lower Decks here but I'll save it for a discussion of shipboard discipline) and in the Federation at large. It didn't really pull this off until peaking in seasons 4-5 but in doing so raised the bar for TeeVee ScieFie after it.

Both cases here deal with life on the fringes of space, on either a budding colony or a minor exploration vessel. Instead of the migthy Jimbo Church sweeping all opposition before him, we're given evidence of the fragility and fallibility of human expansion embodied in a bereaved mother and son, both paired in turn with Data (as conveniently blank sounding board) and both with their own position within society at large, beyond a shipboard rank and serial number. They both had family connections and a place of habitation, personal motivations, guilt and regrets. Neither get superpowers by which to ex a divine conclusion to their plots but machinate within the constraints of physical reality via technological tools. Both ultimately create a sense of the Federation as a dynamic, risk-taking, expanding society of free individuals and not a stagnant military autocracy, an impression one could easily get if all talk was merely about captains and ensigns.