For the past quarter of a century, Star Trek: The Next Generation has been regarded as a bastion of intellectual entertainment that approached how humanity would operate in its finest hour. It’s hardly surprising since the show was meant to encourage us, the viewers, to greatness—to a future where creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned we would never want for food, shelter, or material possessions. Where we would explore and philosophize and pursue creative endeavors to our hearts content. It sounds like a glorious future; it should be a glorious future.
But… there’s a problem with Data.
When I was very small, my favorite character on The Next Generation was Data. Which makes sense, as Data was the Spock stand-in of the series, and Spock was my real favorite. Before everyone starts roasting me alive for not appreciating how unique Data is in his own right, let me assure you that I find Data to be perfectly singular. But in his original inception, he fulfilled a function—the straight man who doesn’t understand all these wacky emotional humans. He was a variation on Spock, one that all Treks (and many others shows besides) have in some capacity. Spocks are often essential to the science fictional experience because they allow us to view humanity from the outside.
It is here that the similarity ends, however. Spock was working to suppress his humanity, at least initially, and then to find a way to balance it with his Vulcan half. Data was doing just the opposite—working to become more human with every experience, piece of knowledge, and new hobby he picked up along the way. And that… depresses me.
Which is probably confusing at first blush, so allow me to elaborate:
Spock’s portrayer, Leonard Nimoy, is fond of pointing out that his character’s struggles are in their essence, entirely human. That we are all, in our everyday lives, looking to balance exactly what Spock is: emotion and logic. The place where these dueling natures meet and the importance of their co-existence are the building blocks of his entire character arc. The fact that Spock finally comes to terms with his need to embrace both the human and Vulcan halves of himself is a solid progression; at the end of the day, Spock has two legacies. Allowing them to live side by side in him without anger or confusion is a healthy place for him to end up.
But Data is not half human. Rather, he is created by a single man (and his wife, we later find out) with a massive ego and the brain to match. A guy who was so full of himself, he decided to make all his kids look exactly like him. In reality, Noonian Soong was doing via scientific means the same thing that many humans decide to do—to extend his legacy with progeny. He and his wife Juliana considered the androids they built as their own children. But rather than respect the newness of what he had created, Soong worked hard to make his kids fit in. He created a brand new species and decided that it was only as good as it was human.
Does anyone else see my problem with this?
Data is childlike in many ways due to operating with a limited experience set. And one of the ways that he remains childlike is in his reluctance to question what Noonian Soong wanted for him. The android takes his father’s desires as gospel—if he was intending to create an android that could pass as a human, surely that is what Data must become. Nevermind the fact that emotions are capable of being realized by countless species that the android himself has encountered. It is an equivalency problem; in Data’s positronic mind Human = Good. Of course he should emulate them.
And the majority of Data’s friends and crewmates never bother to disabuse him of that notion. More distressing, they constantly project their own human viewpoints onto his development and behavior. The episode “In Theory” is a perfect example of one of these situations amped up to its most cringe-worthy. Jenna D’Sora assumes that because Data is kind to her, because he shows concern for her emotional well-being, that he must have romantic feelings for her. After striking up a relationship with him, she shows dismay at learning that Data is running a program to accommodate their status, that he can multitask when kissing her. This despite the fact that she had been told by Data that he has no emotions. Move a few words around in the scenario: let’s say that D’Sora had been a man and Data had been a Vulcan woman. That D’Sora had pressed entering into the relationship because any Vulcan female who asked after his well-being had to be romantically inclined toward him.
That scenario just got super uncomfortable, didn’t it?
Of course, we’ve met an android who presumed that he could be more than simply human—Data’s psychopathic predecessor, Lore. What’s noteworthy is that Lore was “more human” than Data was before his deactivation; he possessed an emotion chip that allowed him to feel as humans did. Unfortunately, he lacked the empathy to use that ability to evolve. It’s telling (and common to science fiction in general) that most examples we get of advanced mechanical beings on Star Trek use their impressive abilities to try and wipe us out, either by accident or design: from the M-5 computer to V-Ger to Lore, becoming more often means that humans are on the Quick and Easy Offing Menu. Data, one of the very few examples who is not in the habit of snuffing out Terrans, is apparently only inclined in that direction by virtue of wanting to be one of us.
And this perspective is incredibly limiting, especially when Next Gen is constantly expounding on Data’s status as the very sort of “New Life” Starfleet means to seek out. Why not let Data be unique, then? Why not let him know that he’s supported if he choses to own the parts of himself that are not human at all? Examples are always useful in forming behavior, I grant that, and he is on a ship where we are the primary species he comes into contact with. But the only person who ever seems to intimate that Data could be something far beyond human is Captain Picard. He is the only person who comes close to asking Data harder questions, to examining exactly what Data’s emotions or lack thereof incorporate into his being, to telling Data that he doesn’t have to always make the same choices a human would make if they aren’t the choices he’d prefer.
Every other person on the ship is either tickled or irate when Data makes a human faux pas, and that’s often treated as comic relief within the confines of the show. But why is that comical? Why isn’t it instead looked upon as narrow-mindedness for refusing to consider the ways in which their fellow crewmember and friend is vastly different from them? When Spock was harangued aboard the Enterprise, at least we knew that he was being teased toward the humanity within him that he refused to admit. It wasn’t “Vulcans are bad, humans are good,” (at least, not amongst the bridge crew), rather “Vulcans are good, but you are also human and that’s good too.” Doctor McCoy was the first person to razz Spock into an emotional reaction over tedium, but was incredibly protective and furious if anyone ever tried to force emotional displays out of his friend. Data, on the other hand, is simply being laughed at for not knowing that his reactions are odd.
Which is sort of bullying. But it’s fine because he doesn’t have the emotions to know it’s hurtful, right?
Lal, Data’s created “offspring,” provokes even more interesting questions on this front. Data offers her much more freedom than he was allowed—he lets her chose her own skin (and gender, which he and Counselor Troi are very adamant about for some reason) from thousands of composites that he has created. So here’s a question: if Lal had chosen the Andorian skin she considered, would he have expected her to emulate Andorians? Is Data incapable of understanding why anyone would wish to behave in a way that he considers contrary to their appearance? And if so, who is responsible for instilling that belief in him?
Even more unsettling is Troi’s reaction to the whole process. She is mainly concerned with making sure that Lal is attractive and easy to socialize. Being Andorian in appearance might make it difficult for all the people (that’s humans, by the way) on the ship to relate to her. When she sees a human male possibility, she remarks that he’s attractive, so there shouldn’t be any problems. In other words, humans—in this enlightened age—are still so vapid and appearance-obsessed that they will only be comfortable with Lal if she appears as the same species and is good-looking by their modern standards. Moreover, they insist that Lal come to this gender-appearance decision immediately, and that she choose carefully because this will be who she is forever.
Um, why? She’s an android, she should be able to change her appearance if and when she pleases. Humans themselves are capable of changing their genders if they find that the one they were born with doesn’t suit them. Why isn’t Lal afforded the same options? Perhaps Data lacks experience with a suitably diverse population to know this about humanity, but what is Counselor Troi’s excuse? What is wrong with the 24th century?
These problems are compounded in the episode where Data meets his mother Juliana, “Inheritance.” In a scene that roughly parallels Spock’s mother talking to Doctor McCoy in “The Journey to Babel,” Juliana tells Geordi about the things that young Data used to do that other humans might find amusing. (You know, before they wiped his early memory and replaced it with the memories of the colonists on Omicron Theta. Because that’s totally a legitimate thing to do to anything that you’re planning on treating like a human being.) She has a chuckle over how Data originally never wanted to wear clothes, which made the settlers very uncomfortable around him. Because Data didn’t see the need for them, Juliana and Dr. Soong gave Data a Modesty Protocol to ensure he would want to wear clothes and make everyone less nervous.
Because in the 24th century, the nudity taboo is still so strong that Data—who I feel the need to remind us all, is still not human—must be altered fundamentally to ensure adherence to human cultural norms. (By the way, Dr. Soong, would you care to explain why you felt the need to make Data anatomically correct in the first place? I’d be real interested on that account.) Because he’s supposed to be easy on the eyes for us, to blend in. And it’s hilarious when he doesn’t, isn’t it? I understand that parents love to tell stories like this about their kids, but those stories do not usually end with “And then I opened little Harry’s brain and reorganized some synapses so that he would never take his pants off in front of grandma again.”
This is not evolved, highbrow humanity at its finest. This is shoving anything different in a box because considering how the universe looks from Data’s perspective would just be plain silly! I mean, he wants to walk around naked because he physically has no need for clothes! That’s not logic, that’s lunacy—what a character! Look, I am all for celebrating humanity in fiction, but it is a poor way of doing it by suggesting that everything in the universe would be better if it were more like us. That’s not a celebration, it’s ego. Ugly, poorly-informed ego.
It doesn’t make me hopeful for our future when I watch how people treat Data. It makes me wonder how we will ever become evolved enough, open-minded enough to be what Jean-Luc Picard insists we are. Flaws are part of human nature, yes, but superiority and even the most mild of prejudices are learned. We can do better. Even Star Trek can do better.
For Data’s sake.
Emmet Asher-Perrin just wants Data to enjoy being an android for once. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Well argued. I always found Data’s irrational attachment to becoming more human one of the great mistakes ST:TNG made. What would have been far more interesting is exactly what you posit: letting Data be an android rather than Frankenstein’s monster. I grok what the writers were trying to do; create a Modern Prometheus to play as a foil against our own human failings, and Data’s search to become human is essential to that goal. However, it was completely unecessary. A classic case of the writers trying to be clever and “deep”. It was, all around, a failure of the imagination.
So much potential squandered so early in the series.
How interesting.
I think, in-universe, we can lay a lot of this at the feet of Dr. Soong. He did have a big ego and obviously wanted to create copies of himself, and so he instilled things like the modesty protocol and the desire to be fully human, because it’s what he (Soong) wanted for his son/copy. And he never lived long enough for the “Dad, I love you but I’m not like you” confrontation.
And I don’t really care that none of the other crew* got beyond their fascination with his Pinocchio complex. It’s what he wanted, so they wanted to help him with it. Picard did try to tell Data that he could be more. It would be interesting to see a conversation between Data and Picard where Picard draws on his mind-meld experiences with Spock and Sarek to tell Data, “Look, Spock finally realized that his life wasn’t about being fully human or fully Vulcan, it was about being fully Spock.. You need to be fully Data, whatever that is.”
*Except for Troi. It really is pretty bad in retrospect that she was insisting that Lal choose an attractive form and gender-for-life, for all the reasons you said.
I have never thought about Data in these terms before! Thank you, Emily, for this wonderful, thought-provoking article!
Data’s desire to become more human is not irrational at all. It’s explicitly programmed into him. It’s a fundamental part of who he is and what he was made to be. And if he is considered to be a separate species of one, it’s a fundamental trait of that species, for better or worse. Yes, he could have been created differently, but he wasn’t.
Also, I think in many ways it’s giving data too much credit In the first couple seasons he is portrayed as highly intelligent, but arguably not particularly sentient. He’s barely this side of the Turing test. We often use intelligence as a synonym for sentience, hence ‘intelligent life’, but they are not really the same thing.
I’ve been saying something similar for ages. In the TNG spec script I submitted back in 1992, I gave Troi a scene where she points out to Data that he’s always had his own form of emotional reactions — he has preferences, aspirations, dislikes, things that motivate his actions in the same way emotions do. She said that just because he didn’t express human-style emotions like laughter and tears didn’t mean he had no emotions of any kind, and encouraged him to accept his own, distinctly android emotions. (I eventually worked a version of that scene into my story “Friends With the Sparrows” in the TNG anthology The Sky’s the Limit.)
It should be noted that the idea of Data being completely incapable of (human) emotion wasn’t explicitly codified until “The Ensigns of Command” at the start of the third season. The original idea behind Data was that he did have emotional capacity but it was subdued and underdeveloped. You can see this in his “drunk” scene in “The Naked Now” and especially in his reaction to Armus after Tasha dies in “Skin of Evil” and his reminiscence about Tasha in “The Measure of a Man.” It always frustrated me that the later producers imposed the silly cliche of “machines can’t feel” on the character. Not only did it oversimplify and limit him, but it’s an idea I’ve always found stupid. The conceit is that machines can only have programming whereas living beings can have feelings — but emotions are programming. We don’t choose them or learn how to have them, they’re hardwired responses built into our brains and bodies. Animals have emotional responses even when their brains are too simple for higher thought. So it would be enormously easier to program an AI to have emotions than it would be to program it to have sapient thought.
As for the metatextual motivations for Data’s quest to be more human, it helps to look at his origins. It’s well-known that he was partly based on the title android from Roddenberry’s pilot movie The Questor Tapes, but he owes just as much to Xon, who was to be Spock’s replacement in the abortive Star Trek Phase II TV revival that turned into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Much of TNG’s core cast is basically a rehash of Phase II‘s core cast. Picard is based on the more the more mature, seasoned Kirk, the already-accomplished veteran explorer who’s grown out of his man-of-action phase and become more a mentor figure. Will Riker is Will Decker, the captain’s younger protege and replacement action lead. Troi is Ilia, the sensual alien empath who has a romantic history with the first officer. And Data, to an extent, is Xon, the unemotional full Vulcan who strives to get in touch with his emotions in order to relate better to his human shipmates. (Which was meant as a contrast to Spock, who was already half-human and trying to retreat from it.)
I think the original idea behind Data’s quest to be more human, then, wasn’t that he believed humans were superior to androids, but more that he wanted to understand how humans thought and felt so that he could relate to them better as his colleagues and friends. As with Xon, I think it was meant to be more about exploring humanity for the sake of understanding than about having an inferiority complex because he didn’t belong to humanity. Unfortunately, that did get lost somewhere along the way.
Pardon me, but what do you think raising a child means (on a neurological level)?
As a parent, and now grandparent of an extremely active 3 year old who needs synaptic rearragement, I say Torvald FTW!
Data’s whole journey was one of discovery and development about who he wanted to be. At the start of it, who he wanted to be was “human”. But I think he outgrew it.
He developed an identity of his own, through living and interacting among humans. (A “natural” identity, if you will.) And while we saw him getting human features “bolted on” to him (sleep/dreaming, parenthood, flesh, and emotions), we never saw him stick with ones that didn’t work for him – that weren’t compatible with his natural identity.
His holy grail – his proxy for the whole of human experience – was always emotions. Yet when he (1) gained emotions, and (2) gained the ability to turn them on and off, he was shown to routinely turn them on and off.
Because of that – because of his willingness to tailor these human-like features to fit his own desires – it seems to me that he outgrew his simple quest to “be human”. Humanity became less an ideal, and more a source of inspiration. In RPG terms, he stopped trying to *run* the pre-packaged module, and started cannibalizing it for elements that worked for him.
I really don’t think she would have been. Data never presented humanity as the ideal for all androids. (Granted, we never saw him deny it as being the ideal for all androids. We have insufficient data about his attitude to other androids.) It always seemed a very personal quest – it was what he wanted for himself.
He was insistent about her making her own decisions about her own identity. (While to a 2014 audience, his insistence that she choose at all is cringeworthy, I think it’s telling that he contrasted her choice with his own lack of choice) And, in general, whenever he saw people making decisions about their lives that didn’t fit with his own decision-making, his reaction wasn’t generally disapproval – merely puzzlement. He would consult with others on the ship – asking questions that generally boiled down to “I have observed X behaviour. I do not understand the reasoning behind this behaviour. Can you enlighten me about it?” (… Granted, the crew often gave him *terrible* answers to these questions.)
I’ve always found the Trek crews inability to see past their own privilige– whether they are criticizing Spock for being different or teasing Data for being different or making fun of Worf for being different– both very realistic & very sad.
You’re right, and there’s always been a huge difference between the way the Federation is described (an egalitarian multicultural utopia) and the way it ends up being presented on screen (the USA in Space).
This is just one of the reasons I think Trek works better in prose than on screen; for whatever reason, Trek novellists don’t seem to have those same cultural blindspots (either they aren’t American, or they have the self-awareness [and production timetable] to deliberately grow beyond them).
(FWIW, David Mack’s Cold Equations trilogy deals with just this issue; with Soong realizing [in hindsight] that Data never needed the emotion chip in the first place because he already has emotions, just not human ones.)
@8: The treatment of the emotion chip was really shoddily handled in the movies. First they make this big change in Data’s character that should’ve let him evolve in new directions, and then they spent the next three movies systematically reversing it. In Generations, he was told the chip was permanently integrated into his neural net and he’d have to learn to live with having emotions just like anyone else. In First Contact, this was ignored and he was given the ability to switch it off at his convenience. In Insurrection, there was a casual reference to him not taking the emotion chip with him (remember, the chip that was inseparably fused into his brain two movies ago) and his behavior was no different than it had been in the series. And in Nemesis, the emotion chip was never even mentioned, and Data said “I feel nothing” at one point.
That’s why I didn’t mind so much when they killed him off: because they’d already systematically destroyed him as a character, abandoned all his potential for growth and forced him into reverse evolution through lazy plotting and character decisions.
But what I did in “Friends With the Sparrows” was to try to salvage those horrible, inept storytelling choices in much the same way you propose, cythraul: to show that, once Data had humanlike emotions, he realized they didn’t perfect or complete him the way he thought they would, that his true value lay in the attributes he’d had as an android all along and that he could grow as a person with or without an emotion chip. That was the first step in his journey away from the chip. I believe it’s the duology A Time to Be Born/A Time to Die by John Vornholt that explains why the chip was gone by the time of Nemesis.
And this is one of the reasons I love this site…thoughtful perspectives that I never considered on my own. Thanks for this.
There is a lot to unpack here – and I LOVE Data and he is probably my favorite character. I’ll sidestep the queston on if being ‘human’ is really a valid aim for him (I personally enjoy a lot of that, because of the enjoyment of watching the outsider distill what is best about us and trying to emulate that and get to the deeper ‘truths’ about what it means to be human or sentient) – but I just want to say that I definitely agree with you on In Theory being a horrible episode. It always bothered me that she couldn’t love him as he was/accept his methods of showing love. Even though I loved watching Data’s studies of humanity, I never wanted him to be identical – he was his own being. The emotion chip also bothered me because I think in his way, he WAS learning how to experience and express emotions.
I always thought Data wanted to be human for more pragmatic reasons. Since he worked around a lot of humans (and one moody Klingon), understanding emotions made him a more effective officer. And since Soong made him look human and perhaps programmed him with this yearning, he may not have had much of a choice. Can you program fate?
Interesting article. More like this please.
Data seemingly has all the time and capacity to become human, and anything else he wants to be. Lets assume for arguments sake that Data achieved his goal of ‘attaining’ humanity in Star Trek: Nemesis when he sacrificed himself for Picard, not out of some mission requirement or orders, but to save his friend, and furthermore that the hinted at rebirth via B4 (whole other kettle of ethical fish) is a thing.
What does Data do now? He has all the time in the world to ‘learn what it is to be n’ Klingon, Ferengi, Romulan etc etc. Or he could spend a few years learning what it is to be an android. He could learn what it is to be a starship if he wanted. Or champion synthetic rights.
But since none of these involve lens flares, we probably won’t see any of them.
Also, I’m not sure programming emotions can be so simple. Or let me put it this way: would you as a designer want to program emotions into your “offspring”? Nearly every situation in life requires some degree of emotional response, so this would require a judgment call by the designer. What are his likes and dislikes? Does Data want to join Starfleet? Does he want to be a cyberneticist? Does he like strawberry ice cream? Is he a morning person or not?
If so many things in your mind are programmed, does free will really exist?
Oh, yes, the “programming” thing — another AI cliche I’m not fond of. Programming is the equivalent of instincts, reflexes, urges, etc. A conscious, self-aware being, by definition, should be capable of choice, not simply blind obedience to programming. Programming is just the basic level of processing, while consciousness is an emergent property that arises from it. So a sapient AI should not be limited solely to programming any more than a human is limited to reflexes and urges. They’re both defined by the capacity to choose, to base their actions on conscious decision.
Besides, they kept saying Data’s brain was a neural network, and neural nets aren’t programmed, they’re trained. They learn from experience, adapt and grow in response to stimuli. So to say on the one hand that Data has a neural net and on the other hand that he can only do what his programs tell him is contradictory.
I’m coming from a 21st century point of view. I have no idea how a “neural net” would be engineered, so forgive me. But a designer still has to begin somewhere if you wish to give your android emotions from the get-go. How do you teach a machine to love? Where do you start? Babies are capable of this, so how can a machine do it, neural net or not? Would you want to teach it hate and anger? Or as Geordi once pointed out, how would an android recognize anger from an odd power surge?
If emotions are “hardwired” into us, what kind of wire do you use?
@18: Umm, neural nets are a real thing that are very much a part of 21st- and indeed 20th-century computer science, which is how the makers of a 1987-94 television series were aware of them. The human brain is a neural network. That’s the whole point: That Data’s neural architecture parallels that of the human brain. So he shouldn’t be “programmed” any more than we are.
But I’m not talking about emotions in this particular case. As I said, emotions are essentially programming, in that they’re automatic responses. What I’m saying is that conscious behaviors and life choices, things like ethics or goals or talents, are things we develop through learning and experience and choice, rather than encoded programming. If one of the pervasive myths of intelligent AIs is that they can’t feel, the other is that they’re slaves to their programs. What I’m saying is that intelligence, by definition, enables a being to make choices beyond built-in programs, drives, and instincts. Your instinct may be to eat a piece of food in front of you, but if you’re on a diet or fasting or have certain kinds of food you choose not to eat for religious or ethical reasons, then you can make a choice to resist that instinct. Your instinct may be to run from danger, but if you’ve chosen to become a firefighter or a soldier, say, then you can teach yourself to act in opposition to that instinct. By the same token, an artilect that’s “programmed” with, say, a prohibition against killing humans should be able to make a conscious choice to resist or break that prohibition. Because intelligence is the ability to act on the basis of choice and judgment rather than rigid, inbuilt responses.
So yeah, maybe Data could’ve been “programmed” in some sense with an urge to become human, in the way we have inbuilt urges to eat or socialize or mate or what-have-you. But that would just be the starting point of his behavior, not a limitation upon it. He could choose to direct his goals in a different way. He could recognize the desire as something that was imposed on him rather than something he genuinely wanted, and train his neural network to evolve in a different direction.
Ah, I had no idea neural nets were a real thing! Always assumed it was Treknobabble. Well, computer science definitely ain’t my field.
I still don’t understand how consciousness can be engineered, or even how to make a machine curious to learn more and more information. And if the latter is attained, can consciousness and emotions come from raw data (no pun intended)? Or will it require a joining with humanity, as seen in ST: TMP?
The human brain is a machine. It’s complex enough to be aware of itself, because it’s had a lot of time to evolve that level of complexity. But at the most fundamental level, our consciousness boils down to a bunch of neurons functioning as binary on-off switches, more or less. It’s a little more complicated than that, but consciousness doesn’t come from the raw material, it comes from how the network of connections is organized, a sufficiently complex structure with multiple levels of emergent processing and feedback loops. Essentially the human brain is a computer constantly calculating a model of the world based on its sensory inputs and its analysis thereof. There’s a theory that the conscious mind is the brain’s simulation of itself, serving as an “attention schema” — a model of what the brain is paying attention to in order to let the brain focus its attention usefully and respond appropriately to changing stimuli. Thus the model lets the brain be aware of itself being aware of things.
Present-day computers haven’t been around long enough to develop equivalent complexity, although they’re getting closer by leaps and bounds. We tend to see machines as something fundamentally different from living minds because we don’t have experience of machines as complex as living brains. But that doesn’t mean there’s some kind of absolute divide. Biology is just organic nanotech that emerged the hard way, through billions of years of trial and error. But eventually it evolved a way to be aware of itself and to accelerate innovation beyond what ordinary evolution could accomplish. We’ve brought computers from the processing level of plants to the processing level of a small mammal several million times faster than natural evolution produced the same degree of advancement. It may not be long, then, until we end up creating computers on an approximate par with the human mind — although they would probably think in a very alien way, and might very quickly advance beyond us.
“There’s a theory that the conscious mind is the brain’s simulation of itself”
Well, that idea just blew my simulation—er, mind! Interesting. Thanks for the info. Good chatting with you, CLB, as always.
I never had much of an issue with Data’s being ‘programmed’ but still developing on his own, because in a way, we as humans are ‘programmed’ by our genes and the various neural, hormonal, etc systems they encode – but that doesn’t mean everything is irrefutable. (I love Ridley’s books on this subject!)
It was almost inevitable that the issue of Data’s emotions would be badly handled on TNG, considering how badly they handled everyone‘s emotions on TNG.
From the very beginning, with Picard’s admission to Riker that he was “bad with children,” and Riker and Troi re-enacting Decker and Ilia’s “I couldn’t have said goodbye either” scene… to the crew’s later discovering they had been sampled for cloning and acting as if they had been raped… to their downright painful visits to planets where women ruled… it seems almost all their stories related to human emotions were being written by 12-year-olds.
And Data was no different. Picture the scene above, where Data tries a beard. And instead of snickering at him like a grade-schooler, Geordi could have simply said: “I know what you’re going for, but… that style doesn’t look like you. Different beard styles fit different people… try a few more styles before you settle on one.”
And I particularly hated it every time Data said something like: “I know I wasn’t particularly helpful back there.” And someone (usually Picard or Geordi) would reply: “No. You were being human.” So, human=unhelpful… good to know. And why am I trying to be human again?
I agree that we would’ve been better served with a Data who wanted to understand humans better, but who was satisfied with being himself… that was what Star Trek was supposed to be about, being proud of yourself as you are. Instead, we got Data as a caricature of himself; like the episode Hero Worship, where the boy Timothy reacted to a loss by emulating Data… and by so doing, helped to show us how ridiculous and hollow much of Data’s character was. And it’s worth noting that no one thought it was a good idea for Timothy to keep doing it… so why would it be okay for Data to act like a caricature of a human?
But hasn’t that always been Star Trek’s problem? The Federation — and Earth in particular — was always conceived of as having created “paradise,” where humanity was the pinnacle of social enlightenment and progressive values. Racism, sexism, poverty, disease, greed, even money itself — we are constantly told that all these things have been eradicated and that humanity has created an egalitarian utopia where everyone is happy and works for a “common purpose.”
When you build a universe on such self-congratulatory foundations — as the universe Gene Roddenberry built was — the question is not why would Data want to emulate humans; the question becomes why would he not? It’s just taken as an assumption: Of course Data will want to emulate humanity because, as we’ve been saying since Star Trek first aired, humanity is now Enlightened. It is the progressive Paradise we’ve all been waiting for!
One of the reasons why DS9 is my favorite Star Trek series is because it smashed to pieces this pervasive, self-congratulatory myth that the Federation was the “paradise” as it was constantly portrayed. I think Eddington’s speech in the episode “For the Cause” was one of the most important moments in Star Trek history, since it completely went against what had, until that time, been the accepted gospel of Roddenberry’s universe:
And not only should everyone want to be in the Federation, but everyone should want to be like Enlightened Humanity. Data’s journey in TNG reflects this underyling assumption, for better or worse.
@25: Actually that “humanity has been perfected” thing only goes back to the beginning of TNG, not the beginning of Star Trek itself. The humanity of TOS had overcome 20th-century problems like racism and nuclear war, but they still had con artists (Harry Mudd), bigots (Lt. Stiles), murderers (Kodos, Lenore, Janice Lester, Dr. Coleman), attempted murderers (Ben Finney, Larry Marvick), lynch mobs (the Janus VI miners), corrupt starship captains (R.M. Merik, Ron Tracey), semi-mad scientists (Tristan Adams, Richard Daystrom), criminally misguided social engineers (John Gill), and so forth. TOS offered an improved humanity, but not a perfected one.
Because the Roddenberry who created TOS was a television producer first and foremost, whereas the Roddenberry who created TNG had come to think of himself as a visionary futurist instead. For decades, fans had been telling him how much ST’s positive vision of the future inspired them, and it went to his head.
“are still so vapid and appearance-obsessed”
To be fair, your appearance says a lot about you whether you like it or not. When you meet a heavy guy with a neckbeard wearing clogs and a grease stained howling wolf shirt, what are you thinking? Instantly there are assumptions you make about this dude. You can change people’s assumptions by looking different than you are.
I have to interject that as much as I love Star Trek on film, it often does not resonate the future that Mr. Roddenberry originated in written form: not just in its poor treatment of the character “Data” but in general. I respect the writers who have put his world on screen, but as with any translation from book form to film… it loses something.
The books basically said that humans do evolve and that not only does the world become a better place, where better forms of humans live, the entire universe is open for exploration due in large part to that evolution.
The film makers however, are faced with the task of taking an idyllic world and making it appeal to people who have not evolved anywhere close to that level yet. In fact, many movie goers are not big readers of the original series and for that reason have no clue what they’re missing out on when enjoying this world in film-form.
An example: as I was leaving The Desolation of Smaug, I heard two guys complaining to each other that they hated movies that ended in cliff hangers and that it sucked. I asked if they knew there was going to be another movie or not and of course they didn’t. Neither of them had read the books. I think it is the same with many of the new generation of Trek fans. Writer’s are playing to a less intelligent, less likely to read anything audience and so, characters like Troi and Data are “Hollywood-ized” in an effort to appease the masses… which is unfortunate for the rest of us who are sadly, a minority in this world and would be the most likely ones to appreciate the world that Gene Roddenberry envisioned.
I hope that newer fans will spend a little more time inside the mind of the genius that is Star Trek in the written form because there is much within it to be learned, and aspire to. As to the “desolation of Data” as an android who is really superior to humans but treated in many ways as a second-class citizen, I agree with Emily. I fear that we, as humans, will eternally create beings that mirror our strengths and our imperfections without the foresight to attempt using them in an effort to forward us into a more intelligent species.
@28: “I have to interject that as much as I love Star Trek on film, it often does not resonate the future that Mr. Roddenberry originated in written form: not just in its poor treatment of the character “Data” but in general. I respect the writers who have put his world on screen, but as with any translation from book form to film… it loses something.”
Umm, what are you talking about? Gene Roddenberry was a television writer-producer, not a novelist. He created Star Trek as a TV series. The books are based on the shows, not the other way around. Roddenberry himself only wrote one piece of Star Trek prose fiction in his life, the 1979 novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Data’s quest for humanity is phase in his evolution. During the whole show and movies he is in a teenaged phase. While not rebellious he is clearly trying to act like something he is not. Therefore in Nemesis when he dies I had hoped that this was a set up for a “Search for Data” sequence of movies in which Data is reborn and reconnected with his memories that he gave to his brother B4 before his death. Data is fasinating he could live for centuries and continue to grow and evolve. Data’s character is written about in fan fiction surviving beyond Nemesis such as in Star Trek Strange New Worlds II’s “I Am Become Death” by Franklin Thatcher or more recently when Data appears as captain of the Enterprise and brought back to life in the IDW prequel comic to the JJ Abrams reboot of Star Trek. The Data characters in both of the above example make me hope we haven’t seen the last of Data even if the character is played by another actor or written about by various authors.
Cheers all wonderful discussion,
@30: You need to read the Cold Equations novel trilogy by David Mack.
On a more personal note Mr. Bennett and Krad if I may have either you asked Dean Wesley Smith who edited all the Star Trek Strange New Worlds fan fiction series if you could take over for him and continue the series in any form. It seemed that the powers that be gave their blessing even though the stories aren’t canon. Has anyone asked to resurrect that series?
Cheers,
P.S. I haven’t read that series but it will be on my list to read this year Mr. Bennett. Thanks.
For some reason I’m reminded of a few words by Philip K. Dick.
If you’ll pardon me, I just noticed my navel. I think I’ll go look at it for a while.
@32: The cancellation of the Strange New Worlds series had nothing to do with Mr. Smith’s willingness to continue or anyone else’s willingness to take over. The contest was expensive and difficult to run, and the anthologies lost money every year. It’s remarkable that Pocket was willing to continue publishing them as long as they did, but eventually they reached a point where they simply couldn’t afford to keep doing them.
Your commentary about “In Theory” reminded me of one of Asimov’s Robot short stories, “Liar.” The plot summary in Wikipedia is
If I remember correctly, Herbie made Susan Calvin think that someone was romatically interested in her, so she’d feel better. Isn’t that basically what Data was doing?
Thanks for the info Mr. Bennett that is sad but still I wish cbs and paramount would throw Tor a bone and let them continue the series in an online arena I would hope it would be much cheaper than print.
cheers
@36: First off, Simon & Schuster, not Tor, has the license to publish Star Trek prose fiction. (And it’s just CBS now; Paramount only has a license from CBS to make the Abrams movies, and has no hand in any non-Abrams tie-ins.)
Second, it’s a common misconception that electronic publishing is significantly cheaper than hardcopy publishing. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the cost of a book goes to the human labor of writing, editing, cover design and art, copyediting, proofreading, design, typesetting, marketing, promotion, etc. Plus, in this case, you also had to pay the lawyers for working out the legal issues involved in the contest, and you had to pay the prize money to the winners. And the economies of scale are such that the cost of printing thousands of copies of a physical book is mere pennies per unit. So e-books aren’t really that much cheaper to make.
I have always thought that the way they treated Data (and most of the show in general) was a demonstration of the fact that although they often congratulated themselves on having achieved this amazing Utopian society, they were in fact still a deeply flawed society.
The question I always had was whether the writers and producers were self-aware enough to see the paradox or if they honestly believed it was a Utopia.
Thank you!~
You’ve said exactly what I’ve been thinking for years and never had the words to say!
“Data, on the other hand, is simply being laughed at for not knowing that his reactions are odd.”
That’s what I hated about portrayal of Cylons in Battlestar Galactica too. In the end, the only “good” Cylons, the ones humanity could deal and ally with were those who willingly gave up everything that made them different from and in some areas superior to humans. Solution to the problem of dealing with the Other was for the Other to emulate us as closely a possible and become subsumed.
Pretty close-minded and uninspiring, when all is said and done, IMHO.
Just about every SF TV series introduce an alien or robot as a way to present a differing point of view. Often a super intelligent and (justifiably) arrogant. Then as time goes by, the alien/robot gets more and more humanised. They start thinking like humans, and often are changed to look more human. They fall in love with a human. Maybe the ultimate expression of this was “The Bicentennial Man”, the Robin Williams film where an immortal robot changes himself so he can feel emotions, and become mortal and die. This is always presented a wonderful progression and “growth”. Similarly in recent “Doctor Who” the Silurians, intelligent lizards, were reintroduced as beautiful green women with scales (and breasts). Or the absurdly humanoid aliens of Avatar. Or the Cylons of BSG. All created to reassure the audience that humans are the ideal, the acme of Creation. That everyone and everything else aspires to be human.
So very many SF shows revolve around aliens and robots that look identical to us, want to become us, join us and/or replace us.
This could be extend this to the way villains and unsympathetic characters on long running series are often develop a “heart of gold”. Frank Burns on M*A*S*H, e,g, started as a complete asshole, ended as just as lovable and cuddly as the rest.
I guess it’s because people want to be liked. Actors generally want to be liked, and so no matter what the character starts off as, there is always pressure to make him/her/it more likeable. To show “growth” into becoming more nice, to be assimilated into American society. The shows that don’t fall into this trope, like “Breaking Bad” notably, have to be really excellent in every regard to succeed. Where more mediocre shows with lovable characters can drift on for years. So I understand why it happens. Yet it’s so depressing that SF shows almost universally lack the balls to actually present characters who aren’t human and don’t want to be. If SF isn’t about different ways to look at the world than ordinary fiction, what’s the point of it at all?
Yet it’s so depressing that SF shows almost universally lack the balls
to actually present characters who aren’t human and don’t want to be.
Why should male human anatomy be the standard in an SF show?
@41: “This could be extend this to the way villains and unsympathetic characters on long running series are often develop a “heart of gold”. Frank Burns on M*A*S*H, e,g, started as a complete asshole, ended as just as lovable and cuddly as the rest.”
You need to refresh your memory there. In fact, Frank remained completely irredeemable, and if anything, became an even worse caricature of himself over time. That’s why they dumped the character and replaced him with Charles Winchester — because they’d made him so rigid and grotesque that it was impossible to soften or reform him the way they had with Major Houlihan.
roddennberry was a humanist.
“the human adventure is just beginning”
what he never lived to see is that the audience he raised, then raised again(TNG) would become the borg,that they would even choose a Spock to Lead them- Obama and JJ.
Trek is a conveint fiction, and its world full of inconsistancies that bolster the media format of 1 hr drama. the narrative.
the fault in logic today, is that its children cant see that. they truly live as Moriaty, trapped in a ship in a bottle that isnt the real world, but a mediated narrative.
it could be worse, you could be attempting to seek the logic of humanity in Star Wars.;)
Because in the 24th century, the nudity taboo is still so strong that Data—who I feel the need to remind us all, is still not human—must be altered fundamentally to ensure adherence to human cultural norms.
This is a television show from the eighties. They couldn’t have had Data be, say, a kangaroo-form or a non-human shape; because obvious reasons of HARD. How do you film scenes around it? Do you have an animal actor (how do you do dialogue, then?) or an animatronic (really, really hard), or other special effects (like, maybe a cartoon a la who Framed Roger Rabbit). Much easier to go with a human actor, painted to look slightly robotic. And once you have a human actor, you really don’t want to go the whole naked route. Because seriously, given the kind of show that The Next Generation was, that wouldn’t have worked.
Also, they would have to have applied the paint all over the actor’s body, instead of just the hands and head. Waaaay more work.
And also, do you have the naked actor be cold or do you have everyone else be uncomfortably heated on the set?
Also, this allows Data’s actor to play the doctor who made Data, and also Lore; and also to play Lore.
Also, this is a show from the eighties; I don’t think a gender-changing Lal would have flown past the executives/network. And that’s terrible, and shows rather a lot about the values of the time. Also, yeesh, a body-changing character? You’d have to hire multiple actors for the same dang character, and how’re you going to make it seem like the same person in a different body and all that, waay easier and simpler to go with one body. (and before you cite The Doctor, he is noticeably different in each incarnation in personality; which is not what we would be going for for Lal).
I mean, there’s a reason most aliens in Star Trek look human-like (tailless, bipedal, tending towards two arms, two legs, and a head, and a face). How are you going to make a giant spider-alien work? How do you do dialogue (do you find an intelligent giant spider and teach it to speak and hen get it to memorize its lines?) (do you make an animatronic-wait, I already went through this.) How do you make a giraffe-alien work?
Also, if the aliens kept speaking all these different languages all the time, it’d be hard for the audience to understand (yes, there are people who speak Klingon; but do you really want your audience to have to learn twelve languages just to understand the dialogue?) without subtitles. How do you convey emotion through tone of voice, when the tongue and throat making the sounds is completely unearthly? How do you do guestures from an alien world with completely foreign bodies? Heck, facial expressions, try conveying that on a jellyfish-looking alien.
Every alien on the show would have to entail quite a bit of special effects work just to be an unspeaking part in the background; and a lot more to be a real character; and a whole dang lot more to be a main character.
It’s not really bigotry that we never see starfish-looking characters in the main crew of the Enterprise in TNG; it’s that it would have been unfeasible for the time; given the effects needed. Data had to have a human form. Now, the whole “wanting to be human and rejecting my android-ness” thing isn’t necessary, that should have probably gone in a different direction, celebrating Data as a unique form of life.
But there’s reasons why Data had to be played by a human actor in clothing, speaking a human language.
Most of these things fall into about three categories:
1. Soong *was seeking progeny via his android children. It *was an ego thing. And he *did want them to be like him. He even asked Data why he joined Starfleet and didn’t become some manner of scientist in a disappointed tone, implying he’d really wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.
2. This is a show written in the late 80’s to early 90’s, so there are a lot of things they should have addressed or been able to address that they couldn’t or didn’t because of current social taboos at the time. The writing would be very different if the show was done now.
3. Several of these points indicate how the show suffered from the limitations of time within the space if a tv series. They could only stretch out so much in an episode. I think if they’d given/had more time they’d have fleshed out the Lal things in particular better. And these same issues are evident in basic problems with the writing on the show which is notoriously full of plot holes, bad dialogue, etc.
That said, you make very good points. And I personally agree that it’s atrocious that they didn’t take a more serious and accepting tone with how Data is different from the humans around him. These are the things that make me love his character. And every time he’s reduced to comic fodder, I want to throw things at my tv.
Ps: I am thrilled to see Mr Christopher L. Bennett participated in this comment thread/conversation. His writing is magnificent and it’s wonderful to read his thoughts!
The writing would be very different if the show was done now.
I think “Voyager” and “Enterprise” are pretty good evidence to the contrary.
Oh, they go in for more serialization, but in terms of addressing issues… we have yet to have a gay character, or a trans character. In Star Trek of all things.
@48: Except that if the show were done now, it would be done by different people. The avoidance of LGBT characters, I gather, came down mainly to Rick Berman’s policies. He no longer has anything to do with Star Trek, and probably wouldn’t have anything to do with it if it came back to television.