My wife and I are rewatching The Next Generation and just finished Measure of a Man, the episode in season 2 in which Data’s personhood is legally debated and his life hangs in the balance.
I genuinely found this episode infuriating in its stupidity. It’s the first episode we skipped even a little bit. It was like nails on a chalkboard.
There is oodles of legal precedent that Data is a person. He was allowed to apply to Starfleet, graduated, became an officer and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander with all the responsibilities and privileges thereof.
Comparing him to a computer and the judge advocate general just shrugging and going to trial over it is completely idiotic. There are literal years and years of precedent that he’s an officer.
The problem is compounded because Picard can’t make the obvious legal argument and is therefore stuck philosophizing in a court room, which is all well and good, but it kind of comes down to whether or not Data has a soul? That’s not a legal argument.
The whole thing is so unbelievably ludicrous it just made me angrier and angrier. It wasn’t the high minded, humanistic future I’ve come to know and love, it was a kangaroo court where reason and precedent took a backseat to feeling and belief.
I genuinely hated it.
To my surprise, in looking it up, I discovered it’s considered one of the high water marks for the entire show. It feels like I’m taking crazy pills.
Hot take. But put it in the context of the year it was aired, not today. Star Trek (and sci fi in general) was suffering from being perceived as “blue babes and laser guns”.
This episode was thoughtful if taken as standalone. And TNG really was about taking the episodes more or less independently. The season long story arcs and such didn’t exist. People weren’t binge watching. So the world building was less important than the specific hypothetical moral quandary of the week. Like, they are almost like Asimov short stories with a shared cast.
It wasn’t until a few years later that serialized TV even really became a thing – Twin Peaks probably was the first here, but Babylon 5 would have a good claim (and DS9, Buffy, and others were coming together then too). So the style of storytelling on TNG S2 is different.
Divorce the story from Star Trek and the setting and evaluate it as a sci fi ethical quandary. And in that framework, it is a remarkable episode.
Also, Brent Spiner played it well :)
I think that’s a terrific argument and it is always wise to contextualize it in history.
We have absolutely been binging which certainly gives it a different feel, but I would argue even as a standalone episode it was poorly written if superbly performed.
There are ideas that could have been played with in a way that respects the setting. Perhaps another computer attempting to join Starfleet, but it looks like a box rather than a person and asks Data to argue its personhood.
I don’t know. I’m not a writer and I’m just spitting an idea off the top of my head, but I think there’s a place for internal consistency within a narrative regardless of when it was written.
There is an episode later where Data defends the rights of a less-human-looking artificial life (the one with exocomps), though no courtroom scenes.
I think most star trek episodes can be torn apart pretty easily - I actually enjoy pointing out errors while I watch. But it’s good drama and themes with fun characters in an optimistic future, which is still a rarity decades later.
(This is vague enough that I don’t feel spoilers are necessary)
They kind of had that exact opportunity in Discovery. But instead of an entire courtroom episode, it was more of a forced arbitration scene :(
This era was also the high water mark for syndicated TV which really drove the episodic format. Viewers couldn’t be guaranteed the show would air on the same channel or even the same timeslot. So long form serial TV were really rare.