“Descent, Part II”
Written by Rene Echevarria
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 7, Episode 1
Production episode 40276-253
Original air date: September 20, 1993
Stardate: 47025.4
Captain’s Log: We get a summary of the relevant portions of Part 1, then pick up right where we left off. Lore speechifies for a bit, and Troi can now feel emotions coming off Data. Lore still has the emotion chip Dr. Soong placed inside him in “Brothers,” and he claims to have allowed the Borg and Data to both break free of being mindless automatons, but are passionate now, and with a purpose.
Picard asks if Lore has given them emotions, but Lore confirms that, in fact, Picard did that when he sent Hugh back to the collective. Hugh’s sense of individuality spread through the Borg like a plague, and Lore had to come in and clean up the mess. The ship Hugh was on was lost and directionless—they were incapable of handling individuality and emotion. Lore plans to bring the Borg to the perfection that he and Data represent: wholly artificial lifeforms. Then Lore tells Data to take the prisoners away.
On the Enterprise, Crusher’s skeleton crew is trying to pierce the EM interference when Riker calls, saying he’s lost touch with the captain. Crusher can’t raise him either—and then one of the new Borg ships shows up. Crusher starts beaming teams back, but they can’t get everyone before the Borg ship is in firing range. The Enterprise and the Borg ship exchange fire, but the Borg ship does not pursue the Enterprise as Crusher follows Picard’s orders and heads to the transwarp conduit.
On the surface, 47 people remain, including Riker and Worf. Riker orders the team leaders to hole up and avoid the Borg, thus saving them having to hire extras.
Data and some Borg stick Picard, Troi, and La Forge in a cell, removing their combadges (though he’s still wearing his for some odd reason), and also confiscating La Forge’s VISOR. Data announces that his quest to become human was an evolutionary step in the wrong direction and that he’s not Picard’s puppet anymore. Troi notes that she’s only sensing anger; when asked about other emotions, Data declares that there are none.
On the ship, Crusher refuses to leave without those last 47 people. She has Ensign Taitt (who has only been on the ship six weeks, and is a bit nervous at being thrust into the fire so soon) prepare a buoy with their log entries to send through the conduit back to Starfleet. Then she goes back, trying to see if she can get back to the planet and beam the remainder up before the Borg ship engages them.
Lore has instructed all the Borg to remain linked to Crosus, so when Crosus brings one in to say he has disconnected himself, Lore is disappointed, and gives the confused Borg a pep talk. Then Data takes La Forge away for an experiment—but not before the engineer reveals that he saw with his VISOR a carrier wave moving from Lore to Data. He theorizes that Lore has found a way to project the emotion chip onto Data, and has also disabled his ethical program.
Riker and Worf find Lore’s HQ, but before they can approach, they are ambushed by Borg who take them, not to the stronghold, but to a cave system, where they meet up with Hugh. He provides the same exposition to Riker and Worf that Lore did. (Riker and Worf are oddly unsurprised by the revelation that Lore is behind the Borg, even though they had no way of knowing this before they met up with Hugh.) However, once Lore started experimenting on some Borg, to make them over into his image, Hugh and many others broke away, taking refuge in the caverns. Hugh, who’s pretty pissed at the Enterprise crew, too, refuses to help Riker and Worf directly, though he relents when Riker reveals that La Forge is one of the ones captured.
Data straps La Forge down to a table, deadening his pain receptors, and then sticking probes into his mind in an attempt to make his cognitive functions stronger, but he only has a 60% chance of surviving. La Forge’s attempts to get through to Data, including mentioning that Lore’s controlling him, fall on deaf ears.
Picard and Troi almost manage to escape using the sick-prisoner bit, but they engage it just as Data returns with La Forge. However, Picard was able to grab a piece off the Borg he tricked that La Forge might be able to convert to a technobabble solution that will reboot Data’s ethical program.
Crusher, with the help of Taitt and the relief tactical officer Lieutenant Barnaby, manage to get most of the remaining people off the surface. Transporter Chief Salazar says they’re only missing six—which raises the question, does he mean Picard, Riker, Data, La Forge, Troi, and Worf? If so, what about the security guard who was part of Picard’s team, whom nobody but Picard, La Forge, and Troi know is dead? Or wasn’t Salazar counting Data?
The Borg ship attacks, and Crusher breaks orbit. But the Borg weapons took out the warp drive, so the Enterprise can’t outrun the Borg ship to the conduit. So Crusher sets a course for the sun. She tells Barnaby to dig up metaphasic shielding out of the data banks and incorporate it into the shields. That allows the Enterprise to enter the sun’s corona where the Borg ship can’t follow. However, the Borg ship does take up position relative to the Enterprise, waiting them out.
Because the notion of surveillance within a prison cell has somehow never made it to the Borg (or to Lore), Picard is able to adjust the doodad so that it’ll reboot Data’s ethical program. He doesn’t do so until after Data has taken La Forge for another session. La Forge keeps trying to get through to Data, this time by reminiscing.
Data goes to Lore, expressing some concerns, and Lore thinks that maybe he’s not handling his emotions very well. Using classic behavior modification techniques—or, just generally, the way you deal with a junkie—he withholds some emotions from Data, then gives them back after Data begs for them.
The Enterprise’s metaphasic shield is starting to fail, and they don’t have warp drive yet. Taitt suggests kicking up a solar flare that will envelope the Borg ship, which works nicely, allowing them to escape.
Data takes Picard to the main room. The captain tells Data that La Forge will die if he has another session, but Data insists it’s for the greater good. Picard immediately takes the semantic opening, pointing out that Data’s knowledge of good comes from his ethical program, and what is it saying about this whole situation? Before Data can answer, Lore shows up. He wants Data to close the door on his past, and he needs to know he can count on Data, so Lore tells his brother to kill Picard. But Data can’t do it, as it would be wrong. So two Borg grab Data.
Lore announces that he’s asked the Borg to make many sacrifices, so now he’s going to show how awesome he is by making a sacrifice of his own: killing his beloved brother.
But before he can, Hugh stops him, and he and his fellow rebel Borg attack, as do Riker and Worf from the rafters. Lore quickly runs away, Data chasing him. Eventually, Data shoots his brother, though he does not do so until such a time as it is in obvious self-defense. He then deactivates Lore, though not before Lore says that he loves his brother.
Hugh laments that they no longer have a leader, but Picard thinks that’s not entirely true. The Enterprise comes into orbit, and everyone beams back on board.
Data recovers the emotion chip from Lore’s body before it’s disassembled, and it’s also damaged. Data intends to destroy it—gaining emotions was what led him to torture La Forge, and he values their friendship too much—but La Forge stops him, saying he wouldn’t be much of a friend if he cost him a lifelong dream. They’ll hold onto the chip until he’s ready.
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: A framistatal thingamabob on the Borg can be converted by total non-engineer Jean-Luc Picard, based on instructions from a blinded La Forge, into a doohickey that can send out a nonsense pulse that will reboot Data’s ethical program without his noticing it. Youbetcha.
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: Aside from helping Picard with the sick-prisoner scam to try to escape, Troi serves no function in this episode, which is too bad, as the psychological issues of Part 1 were worth continuing to visit.
If I Only Had a Brain…: Apparently turning Data’s ethical program off is enough to turn him into a completely different person.
I Believe I Said That: “I love you, brother.”
Lore’s last words.
Welcome Aboard: Jonathan delArco returns as Hugh, following “I, Borg,” and he’s way crankier. James Horan returns as Barnaby, having played Jo’Bril in “Suspicions.” Brian Cousins returns as Crosus, Brent Spiner once again does double duty as Lore, and Alex Datcher plays Taitt.
But this episode’s Robert Knepper moment is Benito Martinez as Transporter Chief Salazar. Best known as Captain Aceveda in The Shield (one of your humble rewatcher’s favorite TV series), Martinez is currently appearing on Sons of Anarchy as a drug lord/CIA agent.
Trivial Matters: Data will indeed revisit the emotion chip, though it will look radically different, in Star Trek Generations, where it will cause all manner of problems. The chip becomes increasingly irrelevant as the movies progress, being switched off in First Contact, being left home in Insurrection, and not even acknowledged in Nemesis.
Star Trek’s AIs and the Soong legacy are the subject matter of the new TNG novel trilogy Cold Equations by David Mack.
When Crusher asks Barnaby about metaphasic shielding, the latter says he’s heard of it, which is doubly amusing since Barnaby is played by James Horan, who played Jo’Bril, the Takaran who tried to steal the shielding when it was introduced in “Suspicions.”
The role of Taitt was originally intended for Reg Barclay, but Dwight Schultz was unavailable.
La Forge and Data remember a time when Data jumped into a sea, and sunk to the bottom due to insufficient buoyancy, and he had to walk along the bottom in order to resurface. This is at odds with Star Trek Insurrection, in which Data can apparently act as a flotation device. (Perhaps he installed the buoyancy stuff after his and La Forge’s sailing trip?)
Any similarity to Lore’s deactivation scene and the deactivation of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey is purely intentional.
Hugh’s comment that they can’t return to the Borg Collective makes it clear that this is merely one ship’s worth of Borg that were “tainted” by Hugh’s individuality, and the bulk of the Borg remain as usual (as will be seen on Voyager and in Star Trek: First Contact). Hugh and his gaggle of individual Borg will go on to appear in several works of fiction: the comic book Star Trek: The Next Generation #75 written by Michael Jan Friedman, the short story “Seventh Heaven” by Dustan Moon in Strange New Worlds II, and the novels Avenger by Wiliam Shatner and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, the Millennium trilogy by the Reeves-Stevenses, and Greater than the Sum by Christopher L. Bennett.
Make it So: “Goodbye, Lore.” And so TNG’s final season begins, not with a bang, but a whimper. Seriously, what an unholy mess. After ending Part 1 with Data and Lore declaring that they’re going to destroy the Federation, they then do absolutely nothing to further that goal thus proving that it was just a cheap way to add artificial suspense to the cliffhanger. We put Crusher in command and then get a bog-standard technobabble adventure, in which the only thing Crusher brings to the table is her knowledge of metaphasic shielding—because what the world was really crying out for was a callback to one of the worst episodes of the sixth season. We bring Hugh back and then pair him up with Riker and Worf—two characters who were all but irrelevant to “I, Borg”—rather than reunite him with his friend La Forge, which would’ve provided a helluva lot more dramatic tension.
And then we get the climax, when Hugh and his Borg are able to show up in the main room of the compound alongside Lore’s Borg without anybody noticing, including the two hyperobservant androids that can do billions of calculations per second, but apparently can’t count. Or recognize faces.
But the worst sin committed by this episode isn’t the fact that, after waiting three months to get the followup to an episode that’s all setup, none of it pays off in an interesting manner. No, it’s that it makes Lore boring. Say what one will about “Datalore” and “Brothers” (and I said plenty), they were both enjoyable to some degree due to Brent Spiner’s magnificent manic lunacy as Lore. But here, it’s horribly subdued, as Lore is reduced to a cardboard-cutout villain who isn’t at all fun to watch. He sneers more than anything, and it’s just dull. Where’s the crazed shtick, the histrionics?
Plus, it remains unclear what, exactly, the plan is. Is he trying to make the Borg more emotional? Or more machine? Or what? And what’s the goal, since destroying the Federation seems to have fallen by the wayside?
And ultimately, who gives a crap? This episode is a small sound and very little fury, and it still signifies nothing.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido wishes everyone a happy new year, and is looking forward to finishing off this rewatch in 2013. And who knows what the future will bring?
Also a reminder to all and sundry that we’ll be once again skipping Tuesday because of New Year’s Day, and the next rewatch — for “Liaisons” — will go up a week from today on the 4th of Jauary 2013.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One of the things that bugged me is that they were able to beam up almost everyone who was on the surface (which should be several hundred, if they really only left a skeleton crew on board) in about 45 seconds…this should take at least an hour.
What I remember most about this episode is, after waiting through the summer for the conclusion to a Lore/Borg team-up (golly!), after awhile i remember looking at the tv and saying “Is this thing still on?”
I have always wondered how Troi can sense emotions in Data. No matter how real his emotion chip might be, it makes no sense that it’s “compatitble” with biological telepathy.
You really should add a “Family Reunion” section to the rundown since that’s pretty much all this season is. Data’s brother. Data’s mother. Geordi’s mother. Worf’s brother. Crusher’s granny. The long lost clone of David Marcus.
This episode bodes ill for the coming season – rehashes and callbacks to episodes past without any real purpose. There’s some good stuff coming up – particularly, of course, the finale – but the seams really show this year.
@2 Crzydroid… thank you for this point. The Enterprise has a crew of approximatly 1000 (per the tech manual if I remember correctly). So even if they had 20 transporter rooms (I think the number is less than that) and each had 6 pads per room, it should take 10 cycles to get everyone. That’s locate 6 people, lock onto them, transport them, get them off the pad, reset, and redo. This should take quite some time, not 45 seconds. And if you were going to start beaming people up, don’t you t hink someone should grab the executive and the tactical officer first? For that matter if only 47 crew on board, where are they? Apparently there are 4 on the bridge, I guess 8 in transporter rooms, which leaves us only 35 people to do everything else… hope nobody needs a doctor.
But yeah… this episode sucked. When we last left our heros in the Power Ranger headquarters building Lore and Data were laughing maniacally about their plan to take over the galaxy… The whole point of this episode is a) Can the Chief Medical Officer fight off the powerful Borg Ship that looks like a building designed by Escher and b) Can we stop Data from lobotomizing his best friend. Apparently the answer to the first one is yes, because the all powerful Borg seem to be incapable of ever doing damage to the Enterprise and are stupid and sit still so they can make the sun explode into them. The answer to the second one is also yes, because as we proved in the first episode, Data has no password controls and can be manipulated via remote signal, which is apparently visible to LaForge. Because umm yeah- LaForge who can see the entire EM spectrum on the planet that screws up all sensors decides to randomly to go looking for carrier waves. And then the superintelligent Borg will let himself be mugged so archeologist/explorer Picard can hotwire his radio to reset Data, all while doing it in such a way that Lore fails to notice that his control beam doesn’t do anything and that one of his Borg has apparently gone off the grid. Here’s a question- if Lore sends Data a signal that controls him, and someone hits Control-Alt-Delete on him, shouldn’t the beam just turn his subroutine back off after he reboots? But no… the super android who needs to upload Norton Anti-Virus stat fights his evil brother and kills him. Game over. And we are all fine now that our Data is back. And Brent Spiner can stop playing his entire family for a while…
I think KRAD is right, and thinking about it, throughout the series, Lore is competing neck and neck with Sela for “Worst Reoccurring Villain” over the course of the series. While Sela has really, really dumb plans that are cosmic in nature but easily unraveled, superintelligent and sociopathic Lore is very small minded. The first time we meet him, he decides to feed the entire crew to a snowflake because, um, well, he’s evil. Then we see him again in Datalore, where he deals with some Daddy issues, then again a few years later where he has somehow ran into the one ship of wandering Borg in an entire side of the galaxy and because he is just that damned good, installs himself as their leader where his evil plan is to (do the same thing we do every night Pinky) try to take over the galaxy. Why, we don’t know, nor do we care because he is evil. It’s like the producers never got past the whole “Data has an Evil Twin” idea and made him use his superintelligence in any sort of way. With his capabilities, his plans should be grandiose, well thought out, and hard to beat- they are far, far from that.
One last thought- Hugh gets a personality in 2368 and Descent happens in 2369. So that means we have less than a year for the Borg to lose themselves, be found by Lore, taken over by Lore, rebuild their cube their new ship shape, find their evil lair, and then start blowing up colonies. That’s quite a busy year….
I have the same problem with Crusher here that I had in “Suspicions,” only far more so. How many hundreds or thousands of individuals did she kill when she ordered the destruction of that ship? Okay, granted, there are cases where there’s no other choice, but she didn’t even seem to care, didn’t give a moment’s thought to the loss of life, even though she’s a doctor.
By the way, most of those listed return appearances of Hugh in the tie-ins are incompatible with each other — although it’s not really an issue in the case of Millennium, since it’s an alternate-timeline version anyway.
I think I posted this for Descent Part I, but I was stunned at the time, and still am, that all it takes to change Data “into a completely different person” (excellent way of articulating that, krad) is an emotion chip and the shutting down of his “ethical program”. Really?
But far worse than that, this two-parter, combined with Brothers which I otherwise liked, introduced the dreaded emotion chip, with serious repercussions on the quality of the movies, especially Generations. Ugh. Sorry for the rant, but I hate that thing. Data’s character development sans emotion chip was far better; the movies used it as a plot device for cheap laughs.
Quick off-topic aside: anyone know how to get an accout re-eligible for posting? In the season 6 wrap-up I tried to post a link to a recipe for a cellular peptide cake (with mint frosting no less) and it got flagged as spam for moderator review which probably never happened. Thanks in advance.
Thank you, Keith, for plugging my new Star Trek: TNG – Cold Equations trilogy in the trivia section. You are a gentleman and a scholar, my friend.
Dave: How could I not? :) Besides, it has that incredibly brilliant dedication in Book 3…………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Data’s ethical program was apparently designed by the same people who made Krusty the Klown dolls with a Good/Evil switch…
I don’t think the ethical-subroutine thing is all that implausible. There are cases in real life of people who’ve had brain damage to just one part of the brain and undergone a radical shift in personality as a result. A study five years ago found that injury to a specific portion of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, can alter people’s moral judgment, making them less compassionate and more likely to favor choices that would entail sacrificing a life (at least in the hypothetical). We humans underestimate how easy it is to change our personalities or perceptions just by shutting down a part of our brains. It’s rather scary to realize how tenuous our cherished identities and values really are.
Besides, ethics isn’t just some short, simple list saying “Helping = GOOD, Murder = BAD” or something like that. It’s a complex set of behavioral, social, and interpersonal guidelines and dynamics, connecting to a lot of areas of thought and behavior. Ethical subroutines could take up a fairly large portion of Data’s neural net and be intertwined with a lot of his behaviors and perceptions.
I like that Brent Spiner had been asked at conventions about “would Data swim?” and answered that no, Data would sink to the bottom and just walk. The show using that in an episode was the main thing I liked about this episode.
Didn’t the producers also briefly consider crashing the Enterprise in this episode?
In general I agree this isn’t a great episode (the part 2s generally seem to be let downs) but a few things:
1)I actually kinda liked the callback to the metaphasic shielding since, for all that episode’s flaws, I liked Dr. Ryega and was glad to see his work vindicated.
2)At first glance I laughed a bit at the comment that it was pretty easy to turn Data into a different people, but the more I thought about it the more it did kinda make sense. If you take away a person’s sense of ethics (and perhaps it is a little hard to envision how something like this could be contained in just one program and how that would be programmed) and gave them only emotions (especially negative ones)…what would there be to guide them? I suppose one could use logic or memory or something like that to remember that they shouldn’t do such things, but they might not care.
And then Christopher Bennet said it better than me so…yeah.
Also, I really hope the cellular peptide cake recipe gets through the spam filter because that sounds pretty awesome :D
Agreed on the emotion chip, btw – I much rather would have seen Data acquire emotions naturally, or maybe even realize that he had his own emotions, of a sort.
Just curious, anybody think Lore was lying or not when he said he loves his brother? I mean, he certainly could have been, but he also gives a kind of sad smile, but it’s when he’s facing the floor, so it’s not really for anybody’s benefit (except the audience’s, so I may be overthinking). Their relationship could have had a much more interesting dynamic, I think…
I didn’t much care for this episode either, for many reasons already stated. But something else about this episode stuck with me through much of season 7, and not in a good way. I got the impression that Brent Spiner continue after this episode to speak with the same drier, flatter, and more monotone voice that he used when his ethical program was disabled. It made me think that he was never quite the same even after it was rebooted.
And did anyone else notice that the emotion chip itself looks completely different in “Generations” than it does in “Descent II”? (Possibly also “Brothers”, but I don’t remember clearly what it looked like in “Brothers”.)
@16: Yes, I noticed it too, and so did krad, since he mentioned it in the review.
I think this one looks the same as in “Brothers” though.
So apparently you can just reprogram regular-type shields into metaphasic shields in a pretty short time if you have the proper algorithms on hand, but they never use them again. Ever. Forgotten Phlebotinum ahoy!
David Mack, at least, explains the change in the emotion chip’s appearance from here to Generations as due to the repairs Data and Geordi had to make to it. I can’t remember if anyone else had said that.
One of the first Star Trek novels I read when I got interested in the show was “Metamorphasis,” by Jean Lorrah. Granted, this was about 20 years ago, so my memory of the plot is pretty thin.
However, I seem to remember a portion of the novel deals with Data falling into a large body of water and needing to walk along the bottom to get out. Anyone else read/remember this book/scene?
Also, wasn’t it damage to Data’s ethical subroutines that caused him to go wacky in “Insurrection?”
@19: Really, it was that he received such damage that his ethical program was about all that was working, so he exercised his ethics and exposed the Starfleet/Son’a plot.
Hmmm. Call me when we get to stuff like The Lower Decks.
Yeah, this one was pretty much a snoozer. They tried to make it a grimmer, grittier TNG story, but it just ended up kind of boring.
@@@@@ 20: Thanks! I knew ethics were involved somehow (it’s been a while since I’ve watched that one.)
Definitely true that not reuniting Hugh and La Forge was a major missed opportunity.
Was I the only one who thought Crusher’s using the metaphasic shielding and then making the sun explode on the ship was reasonably clever? It’s not “Balance of Terror” but the bar here is much lower, both for the episode in general by this point and for the doctor left in charge in a battle situation for some reason.
It really is hilarious how useless Troi is during this episode. “I’ll watch the door.” Yeah.
I assume unintentionally laugh-out-loud funny, considering how far everything else the episode aims for misses its targets. Considering she helped justify being a sociopath to Data with the whole nonsensical emotions-aren’t-good-or-bad comment in part one, maybe it’s best she kept to guard duty.
@22: Can’t blame you for not wanting to watch Insurrection very often.
Just gonna jump on the, “Ugh, that episode,” bandwagon. What it lacked in plot, it never made up for in characterization.
@@@@@ 15 Lisamarie: I think the last scene (Data showing remorse for his treatment of Geordi) proves, or at least indicates, that he didn’t need the emotion chip. Soong probably didn’t realize the extent of the capabilities he’d already given Data.
Unlike you, and apparently most of your readers, I loved “Datalore” and enjoyed “Brothers.” That’s probably why I loathe this episode so much. It manages to waste one of my favorite recurring characters (two if you count Hugh, and three if you count the Borg in general). Together with part one this is still a bad story. By itself it’s one of the worst episodes of the franchise as far as I’m concerned, because with all these awesome components it had no excuse to be so terrible.
A couple of things: I thought the whole Crusher in charge of the ship thing was completely wasted. There was nothing she did that any other senior officer wouldn’t have done. That is, replace Crusher with anyone else, and nothing need change.
Second, I started off liking Taitt (as I was supposed to), but I ended up disliking her. She frantically points out that Barnaby will hit the atmosphere if he isn’t careful. Barnaby’s reply is perhaps a tad snarky, but it’s perfectly appropriate, as he is an experienced officer and she’s just a 6-week ensign — and they really didn’t have much choice. But then when Barnaby rightly questions her ability to create the solar flare without destroying the Enterprise (especially considering they hadn’t even considered any other options), she takes on a wildly inappropriate smugness and throws his comment back in his face. It was supposed to be a humorous/you-go-girl moment, but it completely misfired for me. You haven’t earned the right, ensign.
@@@@@ #23 MikeS2: This is far and away a delayed response, considering when this re-watch was undertaken–and when your own posting was written– but, from a neuroscience perspective, emotions are neither good nor bad. In mammals and humans, they are built-in circuits to help ensure our survival, either by serving as protective in nature (FEAR, RAGE/anger, PANIC/sadness, etc.) or by enabling us to connect (LUST/love, PLAY/joy, SEEKING/curiosity, CARE, etc.). Although this predates any book published (these were established to exist by Jaak Panksepp in Affective Neuroscience in 1988), his research was published in peer-reviewed journals prior to compilation of his theories into a book.
I detest this episode. I would rather watch the beard parade in Shades of Gray. I’d give this a 0. I’ve rewatched all of tng a few times through and every time I get to these two episodes- ugh.
Also after this episode, it would cement it for me. I’d throw data right the hell off the ship. Yes, humans make mistakes, get sick, go a little batty sometimes and need medication, get brainwashed, get possessed, whatever- but holy crap. He malfunctions more than my old 1994 Acer Explorer.
But now that I think of it, my 1998 IBM Aptiva got hacked more.
Trek-criticism suffers from an excessive emphasis on universe continuity and coherence as a positive criterion for judgment, in my opinion. I’ve seen Trek episodes and movies literally score major points here and elsewhere simply because they built on and treated the series and overall universe lore in the “correct” way, in keeping with the “spirit” of touchstone Trek narratives. (For instance, even though I too quite enjoyed how TNG developed Klingon culture, I found both “Birthright” and “Rightful Heir” as discrete narratives to have been rather predictable and dull, and would have scored them much lower for that reason, without regard for their larger Trek universe impact.)
“Descent” (both parts considered together as one 90 minute romp) is a fun piece of old fashioned sci fi pulp adventure. A positronic mustache-twirling villain is shrouded in mystery and given a dramatic reveal just as our dashing heroes are captured in an ambush by the villain’s twisted throng of minions. The villain uses several game-changing new technologies to thwart the best efforts of the cavalry and to enthrall an erstwhile beloved character to his diabolical schemes. Just when all is at its bleakest, our apparently broken and outclassed heroes, in three separate instances of separation and defeat no less, pull themselves together and use ingenuity and guile to devise ad hoc reversals of fortune. At the center of it all, the beloved character wrestles against the power the villain– in fact his own brother– has over his mind. At last, his better nature wins out, he defies the villain, and this allows aid from an unlikely quarter, an estranged friend from long ago, to turn the tide in the heroes’ favor. There is climatic show-down between the brothers. Lessons are learned about community, individuality, ethics, and emotions. Plus a plucky young rookie gets to prove herself with a daring move: firing into the sun to destroy a heretofore unbeatable enemy ship with a sun-burst death ray! Plus one of the best teasers ever, apropos of nothing!
The only reason I can see for intensely disliking “Descent” is that it is radically out of context: simply put, it is not very Star Trek. Not at all. Instead, it is very Buck Rogers. Imagine this same narrative as a De Laurentiis Flash Gordon-esque Buck Rogers film: how great would that be! Anyway, because I really enjoy rich old school pulpiness, I’m entertained by it wherever I find it– perhaps especially when it occurs in the “wrong” series. Yes, like others, I watch Trek primarily for the above-mentioned classic touchstone narratives and themes, but unlike others I don’t mind big discontinuities in style or universe coherence, or what have you, from narrative to narrative.
In any case, I think the question “Yes, but is it Trek?” as a criterion usually just gets in the way.
ebyronnelson: Except at no point anywhere in my review of this episode did I say that the problem was that it wasn’t Trek enough. Nowhere. At all. What I said that it was an incoherent mess, which has nothing to do with whether or not it’s true to the spirit of Trek and everything to do with the fact that the script is awful. My problem isn’t with how it fits into the aesthetic of the universe, my problem is that it’s bad. To give just one example from your praise of the episode, what exactly is Lore’s “diabolical scheme”? He talked at the end of Part 1 about destroying the Federation, but there isn’t the slightest indication of wanting to do that in Part 2 whatsoever. Or anything else, really, he’s just evil for his own sake which may be pulpy, but it’s also boring.
For that matter, one of my biggest issues with the episode is one of the things that makes it part of the larger Trek narrative, to wit, the call back to “Suspicions,” which I disliked mainly because “Suspicions” was also an awful episode. :)
I’m thrilled that this episode brings you such enjoyment, that you’re able to just sit back and enjoy its chewy pulpiness. That’s what makes horse races. But there is absolutely no need to coat your praise in a straw-person argument to try to make your own thoughts more noble by belittling the opinions of others. It undercuts your own critique, as it makes it look like you need to tear others’ down in order to make your own point of view more palatable.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I hope I wasn’t belittling you or anyone. I’ve been reading all your re-watch posts as I’ve been going along and watching all the TNG episodes I haven’t seen before, because yours are the best I’ve found (for insight, info, laughs, etc.).
I didn’t intend to impugn your judgment or ability, but rather to question a standard I’ve observed, correctly or otherwise.
Again, this is my opinion, but it’s just something I’ve noticed– or perceived, or imagined– in not only some of your reviews, but also in other Trek podcasters’ and bloggers’ evaluations: a special criterion for how the given episode or film fits into the universe, and occasionally excessive disdain or excessive praise on that basis. If this is a real phenomenon, I’m probably as selective as anyone else as far as when it bothers me: i.e. when I agree with the opinion, I might even see it as pretty righteous. It’s more of an interesting, open question for me, and one that seems to have gained heft as more mainstream entertainment has caught on to the joys and rewards of “universe building”: is the evaluation for people who are more interested in the larger narrative of all the connected works, or for the hypothetical walk-ons who are purely interested in the individual work on its own merits, or both in parallel, or both fused?
I still think the story of “Descent,” if transplanted into some iteration of Buck Rogers (not the terrible 1979 show!) or Dan Dare or Space Patrol, would be heralded as a classic of the genre. As is, I don’t think it’s a TNG classic by any stretch, because some of the ways it doesn’t fit with TNG really do make it clunky. Other ways in which it clashes with TNG are interesting to me, though. For one, I like how much material it references from the entire arc of the series, including that really specific Crusher reference to “metaphasic shielding” (even though I didn’t like the episode it was from either), because it just serves to add an extra old school comic book-y flavor (one can almost see the little asterisks floating over the dialog pointing to captions reading, “See ish so and so, when Adm. Nechayev was also a big tool–ed.”). Also, one of Lore’s main schemes seems to involve devising a method of supplanting living brains with positronic copies of them in the Borg, so that the Borg will be neuro-mechanically similar to him and Data, which I kind of totally love! It’s a pretty crazy idea and makes it seem like Lore might be more of just a haywire machine than he wants others to believe.
All of this makes me curious about whether or not Echevarria intentionally set out to write a pulpier narrative that clashed with TNG’s typical ethos, in order to shake things up, or for whatever reason.
ebyronnelson: Fair enough. :) And thank you for the kind words about the rewatches. One of the fun things about it has been to get varying perspectives in the comments. So thank you for that as well!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The same thing with ethics happens in the Voyager two-parter Equinox, where first we meet a different EMH that’s had its ethical subroutines deleted, performing fatal experiments on a race of aliens, and than the same thing happens to the Doctor, turning him into “Mr Hyde” as it were, allowing him to perform life-threatening surgery on Seven of Nine without any moral qualms whatsoever. He even thinks it improves his efficiency as a doctor.
@@.-@: Indeed, Data’s mind was invisible to the Betazoid super-telepath in “Tin Man”
Speaking of long delayed comments, I’ve been rewatching myself and enjoying reading your rewatch comments after. One thing that struck me about this episode was the end – Lore is completely disabled and under their control, after which Data announces “he will have to be disassembled”.
Given that Lore is just like Data, he should have the same rights and protections under Federation law that Data has; ie, he is a sentient being and should have the right to trial and to a judicial Federation punishment. To extrapolate, if a Romulan had done what Lore had done, and been captured, it would be unfathomable to hear Data announcing “and now we will put him to death, and eject his remains into space”.
@37/dsanchez: Keep in mind that Lore was in a disassembled state when he was first discovered in “Datalore,”and the crew successfully reassembled and reactivated him. They also later reactivated the disassembled B-4 in Nemesis. So I’ve never taken Lore’s disassembly here to be a “death” sentence — merely a form of suspended animation.
Although the novel Immortal Coil later established that Lore’s brain was destroyed when the Enterprise-D crashed on Veridian III. So he is “dead” in the novel continuity, but it was an accident.
Even if it was suspended animation, he would still deserve a fair trial.
Even if you take that interpretation, as someone else mentioned, Data is not empowered to act as judge and jury in this case and inform the captain that he will be disassembling Lore. Further, even if it’s a state of suspended animation (which as far as I know isn’t a real federation sentencing option?) , I’m not sure why disassembly is part of it; he has an off switch just like Data that could be used. As well, I would assume he should have a defined end date.
Anyways, not to argue the minutae to death. It just bugged me to see that after all the episodes dedicated to confirming that Data’s life form has the same rights as anyone under the federation, Data of all people just elected to ignore them all.
Wow, what a lazy-ass shitshow that two-parter was. I guess this happens when you´ve got only structure, no story.
It was pretty cool to see Crusher commanding the Enterprise, though.
AT: You’ve officially surpassed me! My next episode is “Frame of Mind”.
GusF: Told you, I´m a cheater, letting stuff out.
I´m so looking forward to “Parallels” that I can´t stop myself. But maybe I should revisit that old Wesley-episode with the Traveller-Alien. Missed that one.
Have your portion of ridiculous fun with this one here, but Data and Lore are better than that! :)
“Descent” definitely constitutes TNG’s weakest season bridging two-part story and perhaps its weakest two-part story altogether but I still don’t think that it’s that bad, really. Brent Spiner’s portrayal of Lore may be a bit subdued compared to his previous appearances but he does an excellent job as the conflicted Data in the second half of this episode. I also thought that the scenes in which he experiments on Geordi were very well done. The Enterprise subplot had some nice moments too. The lack of a reunion between Hugh and Geordi was the most disappointing thing about it.
I think they wasted an opportunity in this episode to do more with the relationship between Data and Lore. The “I love you, brother” at the end kinda came out of nowhere, and I would’ve liked to see more between them in the earlier scenes to give that final scene more meaning.
I agree with GusF that watching Data’s internal conflicts (in both parts, for me) brought much more of the excitement that we would normally expect to get from Lore.
I don’t have much to add except when Data says:
“The Borg aspire to the perfection of what my brother and I represent. Fully….”
Oh please say functional, please say functional.
“…artificial life forms.”
But he didn’t.
Methinks my brain was not in the serious head space the episode intended. Alas the mustache twirling villain. My brain went all Galaxy Quest.
I liked that the episode brought back Hugh, and that giving him a sense of individuality caused a lot of suffering at first, but might still be a good thing in the long run. But how likely is it that the troubled Borg would run into Lore, of all people? A different villain would have been more plausible, and made for a better story.
I agree with the ethics issues mentioned by others – Crusher should have felt regret when she had to destroy the Borg ship, and Data shouldn’t have claimed that Lore “must be disassembled”. Still, it was nice to see her command the ship and use her scientific knowledge to win the fight.
If this had been a TOS episode, Picard would not just have wished Hugh luck, he would have offered Federation help.
They missed an opportunity with a followup to this episode: the trial of Lore. Because if he “must be disassembled,” at least let him have his day in court first.
Hang on; if the Borg aspire to this technological perfection Data & Lore represent, why did Locutus say Data would be obsolete in the new order?
@49/Phil: Because the people in this episode aren’t the regular Borg. They are a group of inexperienced individuals, “lost and frightened” and looking for a “way out of confusion”. They follow Lore because they need a leader, not because of the technological perfection he represents.
I hate this episode.
@37 and @40: No, Lore does not have the same rights as Data. Technically, Data was never given the same full sentience and individuality as a human being; all Louvis’s ruling in “Measure of a Man,” was, was that he had the freedom to chose whether to undergo Maddox’s procedure or not. And even if Data had such rights (which I don’t believe he technically did), Lore is not Data and does not have such rights. In the previous episode, the Federation expressly ordered Picard to use a so-called “invasive program” that would become so intricate and unsolvable it would collapse the Borg’s neural networks and essentially eradicate them. He argued it was morally unconscionable and was told: “Your priority is to safeguard the lives of Federation citizens, not to wrestle with your conscience.” Since Lore was controlling the Borg, he should not be given a higher standard of justice. He’s not a Federation citizen, he has no rights under Federation law. If they had tried him, they couldn’t let him go, which would make the outcome as unjust as a Cardassian “tribunal” because the verdict would be known beforehand. He proclaimed himself committed to “Destroy the Federation.” No thank you, we’ll dismantle you and vaporize the parts. A casualty of war, no different than Corelki, Franklin or the security officer who didn’t even get a name before being killed at the end of part 1. Lore has no rights because he’s not Federation, he’s not aligned with any government or faction whom you could turn him over for trial and imprisonment and he’s too dangerous to imprison (how do you imprison a homicidal android with the strength of 10 human men and the cunning of Charles Manson?).
@52. Even non-citizens of the Federation have rights. They can’t just execute sentient life forms that have been taken captive. That would be Section 31 level of immorality if they did. And of course they could imprison Lore. He was stopped by Data with a single shot. He’s not Superman. And if you’re that afraid of him, put his head on a shelf Futurama style.
Also, on a pure dramatic level, Star Trek has a fairly good track record with trial episodes. Seeing Lore put on trial could’ve been an interesting sequel of sorts to “Measure of a Man.” What if the Federation was arguing for his dismantling and Picard and Data were forced to defend Lore’s rights? Lore of all people!
@52: The idea that a lack of rights is the default position is abominable and backwards. Rights are, by definition, inherent and universal. They’re not indulgences granted by the state; they’re something that everyone is rightfully entitled to by default, which is why they’re called that.
All sentient beings are presumed to have the same rights. The debate over Data was not about whether he was a citizen, but about whether he was a sentient being and thus automatically entitled to the same rights as everyone else. And Starfleet and the Federation defaulted on the side of accepting Data’s sentience, allowing him to enroll in Starfleet and become an officer like anyone else, until Maddox challenged that default and argued that Data should start to be treated as nonsentient. And his argument was rejected, and he changed his mind. Even if the law didn’t officially come out and label Data sentient, the consensus is that it didn’t need to, that he presumptively is. And therefore Lore is too.
@52/SethC: “He’s not a Federation citizen, he has no rights under Federation law.”
1. The second statement doesn’t follow from the first one. In any decent society, non-citizens have rights too.
2. Are you sure that Lore isn’t a Federation citizen? If his parents are Federation citizens, wouldn’t that make him one too?
“If they had tried him, they couldn’t let him go, which would make the outcome as unjust as a Cardassian “tribunal” because the verdict would be known beforehand.”
No, it wouldn’t. There are many possible verdicts in between “let him go” and “dismantle him”.
“how do you imprison a homicidal android with the strength of 10 human men and the cunning of Charles Manson?”
As a rule, Star Trek characters are pretty ingenious. I’m sure they would come up with something.
@55/Jana: ” There are many possible verdicts in between “let him go” and “dismantle him”.”
And as I mentioned in comment #38, dismantling Lore wouldn’t even be the most extreme sentence. He was dismantled when he was first discovered, and he was successfully reassembled and revived. So dismantling wouldn’t be a death sentence, as long as his brain wasn’t destroyed.
jofesh’s rewrite time:
Instead of a magic technobabble signal defeater that works by distant remote control, why not do, basically, anything else. Why should the remote control work on Data and not Lore? I mean, there are reasons, but it’s more interesting to say it would accidentally do them both.
For example, set up the prison force field to trigger on command; get Data to cross the threshhold and bam, trigger it on him; it knocks him out for a moment; he reboots with a clearer mind; meanwhile their connection causes Lore to restart briefly and to act more rationally for a couple of minutes. He doesn’t know why, but he begins to feel empathy and love for his brother, etc. It goes away as his filesystem re-corrupts the longer he runs. Character moments!
Rather than just digging up the metaphasic shielding cliff notes and saying “Do it!”, Crusher could reveal that she had conspired with LaForge to install a metaphasic shielding doohickey which has not yet been tested. They ask the computer whether the array is functional and it says affirmative, so, she says it’s time to test it. “This one’s for you, Geordie, and for you, Dr. Reyga.” Character moments!
Better Borg choreography: I get it, they shouldn’t stand in perfect rows, because they are, as Messiah Brian says, “All Individuals”. But between unflattering lighting and standing around like a dance crew on break, they don’t feel scary enough. Their tech doesn’t even seem like it’s doing anything.
Lore should have a through-line about needing Data, that he feels incomplete without him. The subtext there should be that Lore is recognizing that his brain is still fractured by installing the incompatible chip, and he thinks he needs Data to feel better, but he’s really just broken. This could even be made clear by the end of the episode. Like “The Missing Piece”, we shouldn’t need someone else to fix us; we need to fix ourselves, etc.
The problem of their Pinky and the Brain-esque takeover would be solved with a single line about convincing the entire Borg to join them and becoming unstoppable. And rather than machines as the ultimate goal, which is what the Borg used to have, Lore and Data bring them the wisdom of how to combine their emotions and individualism with cold logic. They could add a bit of speechifying that ties into major Trek themes: The Vulcans vs the Romulans, etc. The heart vs the mind. If they had managed to nail such a speech, it would have been a thesis/mission statement for the entire series moving forward to its conclusion.
In destroying the Borg ship, it would have been great for someone to say “That ship appears to have only a few life signs on board”. And maybe this is above and beyond, but the Borg historically have communicated ship to ship:
Rogue Borg Captain: You must leave this planet.
Crusher: Or we will be assimilated, I know.
Borg: No.
Wait, as long as I am rewriting…
Crusher: Barclay, I’m getting the shields ready. Keep him busy.
Barclay: Hello, Borg, this is Barclay of the Enterprise, how can I help you?
Borg: You must leave this planet.
Barclay: Or w- we will be assimilated, we know.
Borg: No.
Barclay: No?
Borg: Assimilation is irrelevant. We will destroy you.
Barclay: Look, I – I could be gr-great assimilation material. I used to be all-powerful!
Borg: (looks him over) This is no longer the case.
Barclay: N- no, but, I remember some things. You ever look over the edge of a dimensional spheroid horizon flare? It’s re- It’s really, really…. something.
Borg: You have five seconds to engage engines and depart.
Oh well.
Something that makes me twitch whenever I hear about a robot’s “ethical subroutines” being “switched off”…
Having been heavily influenced by Asimov’s robot works, I wind up with a very Susan Calvinist response of “Destroy it!” as my first instinct. But also, when I think about how to make robotic ethics describable as “laws” of robotics, I don’t think of it as restraints placed on top of a robot’s decision making process–“If chosen action would harm a human, do not do it”. Instead, I think of the classic Three Laws as being so ingrained by being HOW a robot chooses its behavior in the first place–a bottom up approach. I’m sure it would need to be a little more complicated especially in cases of trolley-problem dilemmas, but in general, the robot would start by considering actions that do not harm humans or allow harm to humans. From that space of actions, the robot selects behavior consistent with its orders. Within that space of possible behavior, the robot selects self-defense options. If anything undermined the “First Law”, it would not make the robot murderous. It would render them inoperative.
Obviously, it would be quite possible to build a robot differently. But if we really want an Asimov robot I’ve always been convinced that is the way to do it. I feel like Soong would have done it that way, especially since Data is almost literally an Asimov robot.
@58/tjareth: The Laws of Robotics were clever gimmicks to build problem-solving stories around, but if you really think about them in terms of AI sentience, they’re a nightmare, because they’re basically guidelines for creating a docile slave race. Always obey your masters, never harm them even in self-defense, readily sacrifice yourself for them. Worse, Second Law overrides Third, so a human could order a robot to kill itself for no reason at all, just as a sadistic whim, and it would be compelled to obey. If AIs are truly sentient, then such rules are an obscenity.
Besides, even Asimov didn’t claim they were a perfect solution — on the contrary, most of his robot stories were about the ways in which the Laws were too limited and rigid to adapt to complex or unusual situations. In many ways, they were more a problem than a solution, even aside from the ethical quandary.
It’s also contradictory to assume a sentient AI would be absolutely restricted by its programming. The very nature of sentience is that it’s a higher level of complexity than mere programming or instinct, and that it therefore allows individual choice rather than mindless reflex. We have programming in the form of instincts, emotions, and innate drives, but our intelligence enables us to resist or overcome that programming — a starving person can choose to turn down food in the name of a hunger strike, a person can resist sexual desire out of loyalty to a spouse or a vow of chastity, etc. So it follows that a sentient AI would be able to choose not to be bound by its programmed behaviors.
Not to mention that it’s erroneous in computer-science terms to mistake a neural network like Data’s brain for something that’s rigidly programmed like a conventional computer. A neural network is a learning system, “programmed” by repetition and experience in the same way a person’s brain is, and thus able to change its behavior through sustained effort or conditioning. It always made me wince when TNG talked about Data’s brain as a neural net while simultaneously claiming it was rigidly constrained by its programming.
Yeah, Asimov pretty much created the Three Laws in order to break them as often as possible in his fiction…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Actually, I thought that “Well, Hugh didn’t turn out so bad after all” ending was kind of a cop-out. Truth is, giving Hugh a name and an individual identity and then sending him back to the Borg was a bonehead move on Picard’s part, and although I heartily disagreed with Admiral Nechayev ‘s overall ethical framework (or lack thereof), I also thought she was spot-on in calling him on it. A darker, more ambivalent conclusion concerning Hugh, his putative revolution, and the potential consequences of Picard’s actions would, I think, have been far more appropriate.
For that matter, I thought that Crusher’s (atypical) stoicism in the face of annihilating that Borg ship was a direct reference back to the confrontation between Nechayev and Picard in Pt 1 — basically saying, without putting it in so many words: “Okay, we’ve learned our lesson. When the survival of the Federation is threatened, our alleged ‘principles’ take second place to ensuring it.” Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that Edward Jellico would probably be right onboard with that decision?
@8 CLB as much as it pains me to defend Crusher, whom I have a fetish about disliking, I don’t think it’s necessarily out of character for her to have expressed no remorse for destroying the Borg ship. It was clearly a case of us or them, and I’d like to think she was cognizant of her role as commanding officer, not physician. In this instance, her oath is to her crew and her duty as Captain, not to a “do no harm” ideal. Moreover, I confess I like Crusher much more as an acting Captain than as a physician. She’s efficient, incisive, confident, and when forced into a combat situation she seems to make decisions and give orders more precisely then either Riker or Picard. (As much as I like Picard, he’s often a real milquetoast in those circumstances.)
Someone earlier suggested Lore’s status as a sentient being with rights was irrelevant in that he wasn’t a member of the Federation. I vehemently agree with the way CLB and others reacted to that, pointing out that the fundamental rights of beings are not granted – they simply exist. I confess that recent political history has made me hypersensitive to any argument that people can be treated as lesser than others simply because of where they came into being, or under what circumstances.
As bad as this episode was, I felt something during the scenes where Data was experimenting on Geordi. I thought this was a really good performance by LeVar Burton, as he had Geordi almost pitying evil-Data, knowing that Data would never be able to forgive himself if he ever realized he killed his friend.
And thank you krad, as I believe it was you who pointed out that Lore as a character never really grew. He just does bad things. Way back in the episode with Lore and the crystal entity, I remember I wrote in the comments, we never really found out why he was so intent on feeding it. Lore is one of the flimsiest characters in the franchise, and not coincidentally, he’s my least favorite recurring character.
@62/fullyfunctional: It’s true that Lore was an unchanging character, but isn’t that plausible for a psychopath? People who can never admit they’re wrong or regret their mistakes will never learn or grow.
@63. CLB- Once again, recent American political history makes me agree with you all too readily, and sadly.
I can’t believe that of the various species James Horan played on Trek none was Cardassian because his bone structure would be perfect.
“A framistatal thingamabob on the Borg can be converted by total non-engineer Jean-Luc Picard, based on instructions from a blinded La Forge, into a doohickey that can send out a nonsense pulse that will reboot Data’s ethical program without his noticing it. Youbetcha.”
This shouldn’t be my biggest problem in such a letdown of an episode, and maybe it’s not, but when La Forge asked of Picard, looking at that small piece of machinery, “Do you see anything that we might be able to use as a flux inhibitor?” I rolled my eyes so. freaking. hard.