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 :(
I don’t mind spoilers—but use spoiler tags if necessary—what do you mean?
Discovery S2-5 Spoiler (Zora)
Discovery encounters an ancient, sentient sphere which uploads its 10,000 years or so of knowledge to the ship’s computer. The data eventually merges with the ship’s AI and becomes sentient. She names herself Zora and wants to join Starfleet.
Which would easily have led into an updated version of “Measure of a Man”, but the whole subplot was basically resolved in a scene and a half that basically amounted to an interview.
The only handwave is that they’re almost 1,000 years in the future at that point, so sapient AI rights may have advanced considerably in the interim and an interview may have been all that was necessary?
That’s too bad. Anything involving sentience and how we evaluate it is so fascinating and it absolutely could have been more interesting than that.
That was one of Discovery’s main problems. It was always on the cusp of doing/becoming something awesome, but could never, ever manage to stick the landing. Often cools ideas, terribly executed and/or realized. Very frustrating.
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.
Soap operas were doing serialized storytelling for decades before your examples. Maybe not good serialized storytelling, but still.
There’s still an important distinction: JMS likened Babylon 5 to a novel for television. It had a defined beginning, a middle, and an end, conceptualized that way from the start of development.
Yes, soap operas are serialized television, but totally open-ended. The producers of Dallas didn’t plan for J.R. Ewing to get shot as part of the series arc; they didn’t even plan him as a main character. A lot of soap operas have a very throw-it-against-the-wall feel. My grandmother was a Days of Our Lives watcher, and stuck it out even through the alien abduction storyline. Other people I know would stop watching for even years at a time, then come back and pick up whatever new storylines were then current.
I mean no disrespect to soap operas, as they give lots of people years of enjoyment. TNG itself was largely episodic, but had some soap opera elements, following evolving relationships among the crew which were carried through. But that’s still not the novel-for-television concept.
Batman ended every episode with a cliff hanger. Sometimes literally hanging batman off a cliff. Then they’d resolve it within the first 10 seconds of the next episode.
Soap operas were incredibly addictive. Some of them have thousands of episodes.
Yes there were soap operas. But was anyone doing it in prime time? Another commentor mentions how syndication was big at the time. Also you did have the concept of a “mini series” which was a popular term at the time, which implied the distinction.
There were prime-time soap operas. Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, just to name a few.
I’d also say none of that is legal precedent.
Just because you got away with breaking the law for decades, doesn’t mean you weren’t breaking the law and the law can’t be applied today.
The court was dealing with the legal question of Data’s personhood, within the framework of Star Fleet jurisprudence. Not whether society at large considered him a person.
It’s similar to some questions that have come before military courts, if I remember right.
i mean it could tho. That’s why every lawyer answers “it depends”
That notion is rather well addressed in Strange New Worlds s2e2 Ad Astra Per Aspera
Amazing episode
Eh, soap operas had been doing serialised TV for decades before the 80s and 90s. And if you look to outside of the US, in the UK serialised TV was extremely normal, and had been for decades - ever since TV started, really. And even before that it was common in radio plays.