“Brothers”
Written by Rick Berman
Directed by Rob Bowman
Season 4, Episode 3
Production episode 40274-177
Original air date: October 8, 1990
Stardate: 44085.7
Captain’s Log: While the Enterprise is on liberty at Ogus II, two brothers, Jake and Willie Potts—who have remained on the ship while their parents are on sabbatical—play at an arcade that sounds suspiciously like Laser Tag. Jake plays a practical joke on his brother by using a balloon filled with red dye that explodes when Willie fires on his brother. Devastated at the belief that he’s killed Jake, Willie runs into the forest and eats a native fruit that is filled with parasites that could kill him.
The Enterprise cuts leave short so they can get Willie—now in quarantine—to Starbase 416. However, en route, Data suddenly stops talking in mid-sentence and goes to the bridge. While never once responding to anyone speaking to him, he takes over helm control, then cuts life support off from the bridge. Any attempt by Picard or Riker to talk to Data or to figure out what’s going on is set aside to evacuate the bridge. Data fools Picard into thinking he’s going to evacuate also, then remains on the bridge—the lack of life support having no effect on him.
While everyone else reconvenes in engineering, Data impersonates Picard and locks out all command functions and sets up force fields around the bridge. Picard attempts a saucer separation, while Worf and Riker try to break through, all to no avail. O’Brien manually disables site-to-site transporter functions, so Data can’t just beam off the bridge, but when they arrive at the planet where Data wants them to go, he sets up a cascading force field setup so that he’s surrounded by force fields wherever he goes, keeping Worf’s security people from stopping him. When he arrives at the transporter room, he reactivates the site-to-site functions and beams down to the planet.
Data materializes in a jungle near a structure. He walks into the structure to meet an elderly gentleman who deactivates his combadge before restoring him. Data remembers nothing since being in the turbolift and cutting himself off in mid-sentence.
The old man identifies himself as Dr. Noonian Soong, believed to have been killed on Omicron Theta with the rest of the colonists. Turns out he had a route of escape set up. Father and son catch up with each other. Soong asks why Data went into a career in Starfleet—he says it was because the people who rescued him were in Starfleet. Data in turn asks Soong why the doctor created him—Soong says he made Data for the same reason why painters paint, why boxers box, why Michelangelo sculpted.
Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Lore. Data implores Soong not to reactivate his brother, but Soong ignores Data’s sage advice (not to mention the fact that he conspired with the crystalline entity to destroy Omicron Theta, and almost did the same to the Enterprise) and wakes Lore up. Angered at being brought back against his will—and unintentionally, as Soong only thought Data was active, but the homing beacon works the same on both of them—Lore is about to leave when Soong reveals that he’s dying (though he avoids specifics regarding what he’s dying of or of how long he has to live).
The family reunion is a bit tense. Soong tells Lore that he did what he had to do, which Lore does not think is a good enough reason to have disassembled him. In turn, Soong reveals to Data that Lore was not entirely honest in “Datalore,” and that it wasn’t so much that the colonists envied Lore as they were afraid of him. Lore hadn’t been able to properly handle the emotions Soong gave him. Soong has spent the intervening years making emotions work right for Data. Had he known that Lore was reassembled, he would have spent time working on fixing Lore, as well.
But before Soong can install the chip, he needs a nap, as he’s quite old, as evidenced by the sheer volume of latex Brent Spiner has been dipped in to play the part.
After his nap, Soong installs the chip into Data—or so he thinks—who starts singing “Abdul Abulbul Amir” by William Percy French. However, it turns out that Lore subdued Data and traded outfits with him, and so Data’s emotion chip is now in Lore. Soong tries to explain to Lore that the chip wasn’t meant for him, but Lore is too busy being pissed at his creator. He throws Soong into a wall and then beams out.
With La Forge and O’Brien having fooled the transporters into thinking anyone who uses it is Data, Riker, Worf, and La Forge beam down. They find Soong on the floor and Data deactivated. The injured Soong tells Data how to clear his memory, at which point he realizes that his actions endangered Willie Potts’s life. Soong refuses to beam back to the Enterprise, as he’s dying anyway (or so he claims, as his exact words are that he has no intention of dying anywhere other than this planet, not that said death is in any way imminent). The away team beams back, Data restores command functions, and the ship hightails it to Starbase 416 to save Willie.
Data gives Willie a set of toy dinosaurs as a gift, and we see Willie and Jake playing with them, the brothers having reconciled. (One can’t help but imagine Willie saying, “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” with Jake responding, “Mine is an evil laugh!”) When Data expresses surprise at the rapprochement, Crusher says, “Brothers forgive.” For obvious reasons, Data seems dubious at the universality of that statement.
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: La Forge somehow recognizes Soong because of the “stuff” in his lab. This is a neat trick, since the lab is filled with bubbling cauldrons, books, anatomy diagrams, and all kinds of other things that give absolutely no indication whatsoever that the world’s greatest cyberneticist uses the lab. In fact, the “stuff” indicates that he’s pretty much anything but a cyberneticist, as there are maybe three pieces of electronic equipment in the whole room. This is more a failure of set design than writing, but still…
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: Pretty much Worf’s entire security force tries to stop Data from making it from the bridge to the transporter room, and they all fail miserably. One member of that force gets a name, Casey, making him the first security guard besides Yar and Worf to be named in dialogue.
The Boy!?: Wes mostly stands around and is ineffectual, but to be fair, that’s true of everyone not named Data….
If I Only Had a Brain : Between his access as second officer of the ship, his ability to impersonate the captain, and his amazing android awesomeness, Data can take over the entire ship without batting an eyelash, which is actually pretty damned scary, yet apparently comes with no consequences. He also comes up with a 54-word code (mostly numbers with a few actual words thrown in) to lock out command functions. (Amusingly, the computer display of the code doesn’t quite match what Data says.)
Oh yeah, and he also is reunited with his brother, meets his Dad, blah blah blah….
I Believe I Said That: “You know what Michelangelo used to say? That the sculptures he made were already there before he started, hidden in the marble. All he needed to do was remove the unneeded bits. Wasn’t quite that easy with you, Data. But the need to do it, my need to do it, was no different than Michelangelo’s need.”
Soong answering Data’s query about why Soong created him.
Welcome Aboard: Cory Danziger and Adam Ryen actually do quite well as the Potts brothers. Danziger in particular handles Jake’s regret and frustration and confusion at the way his practical joke went so horribly wrong quite well. James Lashly appears as an engineer named Kopf—Lashly will return on two episodes of Deep Space Nine as a Starfleet security officer named George Primmin.
But of course the biggest “guest star” is Brent Spiner. After not appearing at all in last week’s “Family,” this time around he plays three parts: Data, reprising his role as Lore from “Datalore,” and getting dipped in a crapton of latex in order to play the elderly Dr. Noonian Soong. That Soong created his androids in his own image retroactively makes Ira Graves’s comment in “The Schizoid Man” that Data has “no aesthetic value whatsoever” even more amusing (not to mention explaining how Graves recognized Data as Soong’s work right away). Spiner will reprise the role of Soong in dream and holographic form in “Birthright Part 1” and “Inheritance.” Lore will reappear in the season-bridging two-parter “Descent.” Spiner will also play an ancestor of Noonian’s named Arik in three episodes of Enterprise.
Trivial Matters: Data’s ability to impersonate someone, established during the trial sequence in “Encounter at Farpoint,” is apparently good enough to fool the computer’s voice-recognition software (which indicates that the voice-recognition isn’t actually all that good, since it should be able to distinguish between something that comes from a biological rather than mechanical source).
When Soong asks Data to whistle, he attempts “Pop Goes the Weasel,” the same tune he was whistling when Riker met him on the holodeck in “Encounter at Farpoint.”
Riker is the one who reactivates Data, as he’s the only one on the away team who’s aware of his off-switch, having discovered and used it during Data’s hearing in “The Measure of a Man.”
Lore was apparently rescued after two years floating in space following “Datalore” by a Pakled trading ship, and Lore is wearing an outfit similar to those worn by the Pakleds in “Samaritan Snare.”
Data will get his emotion chip back from Lore in “Descent Part 2,” finally installing it in Star Trek Generations.
Soong does not reveal that he was not the only one to escape Omicron Theta—he also rescued his wife, Juliana, who was badly injured. As will be revealed in “Inheritance,” Soong transferred Juliana’s consciousness into an android body, but she eventually left him.
David Mack recently revealed on his blog that his upcoming TNG novel trilogy Cold Equations will deal with Soong-type androids and artificial intelligence.
Although he has been involved with the production of the show since the beginning, having been a co-executive producer since the late first season, this is nonetheless Rick Berman’s first writer credit on Star Trek. It’s also the last directorial endeavor on Trek by Rob Bowman, TNG‘s most prolific director to date.
Make it So: “Great. Just great.” There are a lot of nice touches in this episode, from the use of other crewmembers (Kopf, Casey, the engineer who accompanies La Forge to sickbay) to Riker’s mounting frustration throughout the episode (I particularly like the tone Jonathan Frakes uses when declaring that they only knew they came out of warp drive by looking out a window, with his hope that they don’t wind up looking like Data after using the transporter a close second) to the philosophical conversations about creation and legacies and such between Soong and Data to Crusher’s excellent bedside manner with Willie Potts.
Of course, the real reason anyone gives a damn about this episode is the trifecta of awesome that Brent Spiner pulls off (with tremendous help from director Bowman, who picked a doozy for his Trek swansong). Having three Spiners in a room playing three radically different characters—Data’s quiet deadpan, Lore’s overemotionality and snottiness, and Soong’s borscht-belt shtick—is a joy to watch, and the intensity of those scenes is excellent.
But ultimately, there’s a depressingly inconsequential feel to the entire episode. In particular the lack of consequences at the end are just appalling. It shouldn’t be Soong’s choice whether or not he beams back to the Enterprise, as he is guilty of kidnapping a Starfleet officer and endangering a nine-year-old boy.
Data has also proven to be a massive security risk. As much fun as it is watching him run rings around his ever-more-frustrated crewmates, there’s the simple fact that there is no way he would be allowed to continue to serve as third-in-command of the flagship after this.
Plus the risk to Willie never feels real because you know they’re not gonna let a little kid die.
As an acting exercise for Brent Spiner, this is a masterpiece, at least an 8. As an episode of TNG, it’s below average, a 4 at best. Luckily, that averages out to….
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido has always enjoyed writing Data in his Star Trek fiction. The android appeared in his very first Trek work, the comic book Perchance to Dream (which is about to be reissued by IDW in the trade paperback Enemy Unseen), and also played an important role in A Time for War, a Time for Peace. Go to his web site and get all his latest fiction (like SCPD: The Case of the Claw, a police procedural set in a city full of superheroes), read his blog, follow him on Facebook and/or Twitter, and listen to his podcast, Dead Kitchen Radio.
I had mostly the same reaction. I found Data’s reunion with Soong touching, and I enjoyed the scenes between Spiner…and, er, Spiner and Spiner. However that was all eclipsed by the massive “WTF? Data steals the ship, endangers the life of a young boy, and everyone is OKAY with this? AM I MISSING SOMETHING HERE?” I just could not accept that everyone would say, “Oh, no harm no foul” to both Soong and Data. There’s a good argument that Soong should have been arrested, and certainly Data should have been thrown off the Enterprise. The fact that Data couldn’t help himself only makes the situation worse: who knows what other surprises might be lurking in his programming?
Oh, and Starfleet Security is amazingly incomptent here. Everyone involved in security for this episode, from Worf and his team to the guys who wrote the protocols for computer security needs to be fired.
This is one of my 3 favorites from Season 4 (the other two being “Reunion” and “The Drumhead”). I guess someone’s opinion of this one goes by how much they can see past the flaws, and enjoy the Spiner performances. I guess I was able to do that moreso then our reviewer. Personally, I hold this as exhibit A for evidence that no Star Trek performer was going to get an Emmy award, ever. Betch the Emmy committee didn’t even consider Spiner for this. Shame. I believed him in all 3 roles (the first time I watched this, I thought it was another actor as Soong, that’s how unrecognizable he was – that’s a good thing). I rate his acting tour-de-force a 10, to be honest, and knock the rest of the show down maybe 1-2 points for your reasoning (which never occured to me, but I stink at notcing that stuff).
“Borscht-belt shtick”? I used to work at a famous “borscht-belt” resort (even though I’m not Jewish), and I certianly saw that in Soong’s “never thought I’d be running from a giant snowflake line.”
Anyway, I liked this much more then Keith did. It’s not in my top 5 of TNG, but it’s up there.
I do agree that it’s a crime that Spiner didn’t get an Emmy nomination for this. It was three fantastic performances — four if you count the “possessed” Data of Acts 1 and 2.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As you point out, Spiner is brilliant in this episode. In a way, I almost consider it a continuation of “Family,” given the themes.
— Michael A. Burstein
I never understood why Data didn’t bring up his experiments with Lal when Soong comments how he wishes Data had become a cyperneticist. I always felt that was a missed opportunity on the writer’s part, especially for Data to express that he can understood some of his father’s feelings regarding the need to create. Overall I do enjoy this episode in spite of its sad ending, it leaves a feeling of longing for human family like relationships that Data seems to desire.
Bit of an unsatisfying episode like you say, saved by spiner’s acting and i always loved how data completely owned the entire ship. That was very cool you have to admit, particularly the cascading force fields.
A brief word of praise for Data’s use of about the only decent password I’ve ever seen on TV. If he followed standard TV convention, his password would likely have been “Spot” or “Lal.” As for his spoofing of Picard’s voice, I’d wager he’d entirely fool a modern speaker-recognition system. Not being a security guy, I wouldn’t really care to speculate what defenses a 24th-century computer would have against that kind of thing.
The events in this episode do raise major security concerns about Data, but the notion of having him transferred off or even cashiered out of Starfleet for it is uncomfortable-making after he went through the whole rights-as-a-sentient-being thing in season 2. Starfleet already knows of means by which any officer or crewmember could be subverted or replaced, from the C-in-C on down. An organic officer who was replaced by a shapeshifter or (say) assimilated by the Borg but then rescued wouldn’t receive such punishment.
Great to hear about David Mack’s upcoming project.
Fun episode with the cascading force shields.
Funny, I could’ve sworn that Soong died of his injuries after Lore flung him aside, and that’s why he wasn’t arrested. And since he was the only one who understood positronic brains enough to hack Data (until Lore figured it out in “Descent”), that would explain the security-risk question.
And seriously, it’s not as if organic Starfleet personnel haven’t come across mind-controlling aliens or machines on a fairly regular basis — Landru, Sylvia & Korob, the Platonians (okay, that was body control, but same security issue), etc. But that isn’t considered to disqualify humans from Starfleet as unacceptable security risks.
Spiner did do a very good job with this, as did Bowman and the effects artists who orchestrated the complex split-screen shots. But I still wish Keye Luke, who was originally meant to play Soong, hadn’t died shortly before the episode went into production. As I said in my comment on the “Datalore” rewatch, that episode’s assertion that Data’s creator was unknown was rendered nonsensical when we discovered that Data’s face and voice were exactly the same as those of famous cyberneticist Noonien Soong. Also, the ethnicity of the name doesn’t really fit Spiner, although that’s probably less of an issue in the 24th century given cultural intermixing, and we’ve seen it before with Leila Kalomi.
Although figuring out what ethnicity “Noonien Soong” is meant to be in the first place is a poser. “Soong” can be a variant transliteration of a Korean or Chinese name, but “Noonien” is a name I haven’t been able to find in any non-Trek context and it doesn’t fit Chinese or Korean naming patterns. Supposedly Roddenberry named this character and Khan Noonien Singh after a Kim Noonien Singh he knew in WWII, an old friend that he hoped would hear his name in the shows and be inspired to get back in touch with Roddenberry, but I’m wondering if Roddenberry misremembered the guy’s middle name, which could explain why he never heard from him. There is such a surname in India as “Nunia,” but “Kim” is an odd name for an Indian unless his parents were Kipling fans.
I think you’re being too harsh. Soong did not intend to kidnap a Starfleet officer and endanger a child, he simply reeled in a construct of his. Did he know Data was in Starfleet? -yes, Lore could’ve told him, but how long was he there? He had no way of knowing Data would commandeer a starship.
Picard might want to lower Data’s access privileges after this, but Data’s nature has and will save the entire ship more than once.
And I really don’t get how voice recognition is supposed to know whether a voice is generated by a throat or a recorded playback or a really good synthesizer. The computer has to read data inputted via a microphone somewhere, and unless there are scales under the deckplates and IR sensors on the user, sound waves are just soundwaves.
I’d give this a 7, mostly because I hate the kid subplot.
@7,
Actually, “Measure of a Man” is part of the reason I would treat this incident with Data pretty harshly. We established Data was a sentient being with all the rights of a sentient being, but that also means all the responsibilities of a sentient being. Meaning he needs to be held responsible for his actions. And no, I don’t think a biological crew memeber who stole the ship so that he could go deal with his daddy issues would get a shrug of the shoulders and a “okay then, carry on.” At the very least, that crew member would be removed from his post and given a through psychological evaluation, probably followed by a few months of desk duty before there was even a chance he’d get to serve on a starship again.
Really, the problem here isn’t whether Data is an android or a human or an alien, it’s the fact that he’s part of the main cast. If Lieutenant Commander Redsh Irt from the planet Expendable pulled the same thing Data did, he’d be in the 24th century equivalent of a hospital for the criminally insane. If Wesley did it, it would be treated as a childish prank, almost cute, pretty much the same way it was treated with Data.
But it still bugs me. There ought to have been consequences from this.
sps49: You’re proceeding from a false premise. Soong specifically said he had been following Data’s career, so he knew damn well that he was an active-duty Starfleet officer, and since he wrote the program, he knew how it would work. No matter how you slice it, he caused a lieutenant commander in Starfleet to be somewhere against his will. What Soong did was no different than what Kivas Fajo did in “The Most Toys,” and Riker’s response to his refusal to beam back to the ship should’ve been, “That wasn’t a request.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think the issue with the voice recognition is not so much “Is it reasonable to suppose that a 24th-century voice-recognizer would be able to tell a human voice from a mechanical imitation?” as “If it can’t, should they really be relying on it as a security measure?”
krad- d’oh! I didn’t remember that, sorry.
Lsana @11, how can he be held responsible when his programming was hacked and he was made to act without his knowledge or consent? If a human did this, and as 9 has pointed out, this has happened in past Star Treks, there would be no consequences for the human because it was beyond his control. If anything, Data and such humans are victims of mind rape.
@15 Certainly, a good case could be made that Data shouldn’t be subject to any criminal or disciplinary action for what he did during the influence of the signal. However, he is a security risk still – especially given his proven ability to hijack the ship on his own – something that LaForge or Wesley have never been demonstrated to be do – and removing a security risk from a situation like that isn’t unjust punishment or vindictiveness, it’s just a sensible precaution.
@15,
As I recall, it was less a case of Data’s programming being “hacked” than it was of “some subroutine that was aready there was activated.” I don’t think I’d consider this the equivalent of mind rape by unknown outside forces. What I would consider this equivalent to would be a human crewmember who went temporarily insane and did the same thing. If it had been a human who did this, I wouldn’t have wanted him prosecuted, but I would have wanted him removed from the bridge and subject to a through psyschological evaluation. Likewise, Data should be removed from the bridge and we should examine his programming thoroughly enough to be sure that there aren’t any more of these little surprises. And if we can’t evaluate the programming that thoroughly without damaging it, then the question at least should be asked whether Data should continue to serve on the Enterprise (the answer doesn’t need to be “no,” but the question needs to be asked, which it wasn’t here).
And as @16 pointed out, a crazed Data can do far more damage than a crazed human or Vulcan, so it’s worth taking additional precautions.
It’s been a long time since I watched the original series, but didn’t Spock take over control of the Enterprise at least once, and try to several times? So there’s precedent for not punishing mutineers and hijackers.
I always liked this. Regarding the lack of consequences for Data’s hijacking of the Enterprise, I always considered that some sort of evaluation of Data’s reliability and/or hearing was held afterward (off-screen).
Then again, maybe I’m just too eager to retcon ST:TNG…
Bruce: Well, he did take over the ship in “The Menagerie,” but he was immediately court-martialed for it. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My problem with this episode is not the lack of consequences to Data personally but the lack of security controls but into place after this episode. Okay, the flagship is still voice recognition after this? Not even fingerprint or optical scanning extra layers for the auto-destruct? I seem to recall at least one other episode where the moving force field worked after this (maybe in DS9 or Voyager though). This should have forced a Federation wide security review after the FLAGSHIP was compromised (yet again lol).
Once again Starfleet Security in the 24th Century appears to be as equally inept as Starfleet Security in the 23rd Century- they’ve just changed uniform colors. They can’t figure out how to get around Data’s blocks on their equipment on their own ship? I get the idea that Data can reproduce Picard’s voice better than a simple recording and put in a rediculously unbreakable code. But there’s no way to manually stop a warp drive? Even on a modern nuclear reactor there is a manual way to SCRAM the pile and stop the reaction. There’s no manual block that would say, stop the antimatter flow to the engine and keep an AM reaction from occurring? I’m supposed to believe that Geordi and his crack team of engineers just sat around in engineering doing nothing for X hours until they reached the planet? And there was no attempt to retake the bridge? Nobody said- hey lets beam 10 guys onto the bridge and start firing phasers? How were they supposed to know that Data was just visiting dear old dad? What if he was going to turn the ship over to Romulan command or go strafe Vulcan or someting? Then Data takes a stroll through the corridor as his preprogrammed cascading force field walks along with him… it’s your own damn ship! You can’t go cut a power line somewhere or blow up a forcefield emitter?
The problem is that if the ship is being hijacked by someone or something, the crew (all thousand of them) should be pro-actively trying to take it back. We see Riker try to sneak onto the bridge and a forcefield pops up… so Riker gives up. They tried separating the saucer section and get blocked… so they give up. I get it that Data is really, really smart and can hack the computer really well, but in true Trek fashion there should be some sort of way to get around it. The only one on the ship who seems to have any success is O’Brien, who manages to do his magic on the transporter system to block Data and then allow the away team (who apparently has forgotten they have 50 shuttles on board) to beam down.
Brent Spiner’s acting is tremendous in this, and it’s what keeps this episode afloat- but it can’t overcome the weak claim on reality that occurs here… I’d give it about a 5- 4 of which are for Spiners ability and the other point for Riker’s sarcasm.
If everyone on the crew except Data gets a pass for being compromised due to a video game addiction in “The Game,” I think Data himself should get a pass on this one…and that’s without getting into all of the many other times members of the TNG crew have acted against Starfleet orders under an outside influence.
Consider this: Maybe we just don’t see the inquiry into Data’s actions. If a season is 26 episodes, and is supposed to span a year, then there are approximately two weeks per episode. Some episodic missions may span a longer time than this, but most episodes seem to take place in a considerably shorter amount of time. We don’t see everything that goes on on the ship. Most of that “filler time” is probably travelling at warp from one destination to another (during which time things are presumably happening on the Enterprise as well). I’d also like to think that the ship goes on routine missions every now and then. I’m getting a bit carried away, but I think I’ve made my point that during a typical season a lot more goes on than we actually see.
Now, perhaps you can criticize the writing and say they should have SHOWN us the inquiry, or at least made mention that there would be some consequences. Nevertheless, I don’t think we can necessarily say beyond the shadow of a doubt that there were NO consequences.
I love this episode, I would say easy 8 or 9, but the lack of consequences does bother me also. That being said, this isn’t like Boomer in BSG actively shooting her captain. Data, as safely as he could, took over the ship for a trip to a planet.
Yes, there should have been consequences, but I would be OK with a throw-away line from Georgdi like “I re-routed all his emergency fiber pathways to newly created known pathways, and than ran a level one diagnostic…” or something like that.
and let’s not forget how many times data has single handidly saved the ship!
It’s never bothered me that we didn’t see a court martial or any fallout from Data’s actions though all the points that are being raised here seem perfectly reasonable. This remains one of my favorite episodes of the series and my reaction to Data’s takeover of the Enterprise is the same today as it was 22 years ago – it’s just plain cool and exhilarating to watch.
One of my favorite little callbacks is in the episode when Lore reveals that he was rescued from deep space by a Pakled ship. Given Lore’s impatience with people he considers his intellectual inferiors (everyone he meets) I’ve always imagined the unfortunate Pakleds couldn’t have survived very long once the evil android came on board!
@krad: You mentioned that the security code had numbers and words. Those weren’t words, those were letters using the NATO Phonetic Alphabet (i.e. tango = “T”, charlie = “C”, etc.). Though they probably wouldn’t call it the “NATO Phonetic Alphabet” in the 24th century since I’d assume NATO no longer exists, they obviously still use it probably under some other name.
I’ve often thought about how dangerous Data can be, and how he is miraculously still given so much access. This is an issue that was probably never meant to resolved (or brought to attention in the first place) by the writers, simply because that would make Data a bit uncool if you will.
As an episode, it was thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining (more so for the Data fans), enough that the little issues can be waved completely (trying to count the flaws and mistakes in the series would never end, almost all of the episodes have them). I was however disappointed that Lal was never brought up. It was as if this episode was written before the Lal episode (yet they could remember to insert mention of Lal in future episodes). They missed the perfect opportunity for Data to consult Soong about Lal and for Soong to see that he and Data share a similar desire and be proud of Data’s attempt at “continuing the family business”. One of the most glaring writing mistakes in TNG imo.
No.
Once a software has mastered speech synthesis perfectly, as the one Data uses quite obviously has, imitating ANY voice perfectly is trivial.
Also: why should there be consequences? The Enterprise has been demonstrated to be ridiculously easy to overtake, manipulate and incapacitate time and time again.
Ridiculous was “tap-your-head-and-rub-your-belly”. Seriously? An assembly line robot from the 60s can do that.
Other than being mentioned by Remmick, Picard being mind-controlled by the Ferengi went without any repurcussions. If some sooper dooper telepath came in and compromised Troi in some way, no one would suggest that she be removed from the ship. How is Data being similarly compromised any different?
The problem with the security isn’t so much that the computer will accept Data’s imitation of Picard’s voice, but that if there is a function available only to the captain, Data shouldn’t have known the pass-phrase at all. The voice recognition should be fine on any other ship, but on the Enterprise Picard should have been practicing safer computer in the presence of an android who he knew could perfectly imitate his voice.
Well, of course: in it’s own way, this episode is as ridiculous as anything from Season One. This isn’t the first time Data’s gone off the reservation, and with this one, the idea that he’d be allowed on a Federation starship again, except in a containment field worthy of Magneto, is absurd. It also falls directly after we’ve seen Picard assimilated by the Borg and leading an devastating attack against Star Fleet. Just like the plethora of zombie movies points to an underlying societal trend (brainless people disengaged from reality and going through the motions of survival), so is ST:TNG’s fascination with crew members being controlled by outside forces and becoming threats. I get it, but it’s too easy and too lazy. The wonderful momentum that the show established towards the end of Season Three is being threatened by the repitition of this theme, and the internal consistency of the show is being ruined by recurring characters themselves becoming the threats that the Enterprise has to overcome, and then having those same characters resume their good guy roles in succeeding episodes as if nothing happened.
This was a great hour of television! Data taking over and getting off the ship was epic, and the scene where Data and Soong discuss the meaning of life is one of my greatest top 2-3 scenes of all time. The lack of consequences is something that is hard to set aside, granted. Otherwise its a very good and memorable TNG episode. 9 out of 10
You can’t hold Data responsible for something that was completely out of his control. We’ve learned in the 24th century that any officer can be possessed by an alien force. They don’t immediately lose their rank and secuirty clearance after that occurs. However, holding Soong responsible is a much more valid argument.
I’m certain Geordi also knows about Data’s on/off switch. Wesley Crusher states in “The Game” that Geordi and his mother know more about Data than anyone else on board. This is supported by their handy work in “Deja Q” and “Inheritance”.
Aside from “The Mind’s Eye,” this is easily the best episode of the fourth season. Bravo, Mr. Spiner!
I don’t think it’s completely unrealistic that the events of this episode wouldn’t hold more consequences for Data. Other Starfleet officers are capable of being taken over, controlled, or altered in some way as well. It’s a big, scary, alien world. It’s not as if Data just snapped or malfunctioned for no reason. Picard wasn’t held accountable for the things he did while under Borg control. Data shouldn’t have been either. Him being an android makes no difference.
I think it’s silly to assume there were not consequences. There wouldn’t be for Data, since he was not under his own control. But a security upgrade could be made fairly easily.
And it could be invisible, too. Instead of just voice activation, the computer could scan to make sure that the person who said it has the same biological pattern as the person. In fact, I’m surprised that wasn’t already in place.
Or, I would be if tech security in Star Trek didn’t suck.
With a rather small amount of time this episode took Lore way beyond the “Data’s evil twin” schtick from “Datalore”. His confusion and denial when Soong says that he’s dying and his resentment at perceived abandonment (“You took me apart!” “Why didn’t you just fix me?”). Some of Lore’s behavior is insincere and scheming but I think that only begins when Soong reveals the new component for Data. There’s even an element of tragedy as Lore’s jealously and dishonesty leads him toward disaster; that twinge he gets after getting Data’s chip makes it seems like he’s quickly going insane.
I recently rewatched “The Wrath of Khan” for the first time in 20 years, and it made me think of this episode… In that movie, Kirk has to go through a retinal scan when he simply wishes to open a classified file, but this episode confirms that Starfleet spaceships in the 24th century don’t use any sort of biometric scans to confirm the identity of a person giving orders, mere voice recognition is enough. It seems absurd that Starfleet security would have somehow become less sophisticated in the decades between TWoK and TNG. If that retinal scan had still been standard protocol, Data’s hijacking attempt would’ve failed.
Watching Data hijack the Enterprise is worth the price of admission for me.
The lack of consequences at the end is pretty much par for the course in Star Trek, and it is possible that it would be justified as long as the powers that be felt that they had barred this particular stable door. Two examples:
– LaForge gets brainwashed and attempts to assassinate a foreign dignitary – nothing.
– The entire crew minus two gets brainwashed by The Game and delivers the Enterprise to a hostile power – nothing.
Heck, Picard gets possessed by an alien probe in The Inner Light and gets command back without even an evaluation period, much less required therapy. (And of course, he gets shanghai’d into an alien collective and turned into a cyborg, and retains command, although he at least took some shore leave while the Enterprise was repaired afterwards in Family.)
So yeah, Starfleet doesn’t really care about security vulnerabilities or psych profiles.
I loved this episode, though I too thought it would have been nice to see a few moments of rethinking ship’s security in the aftermath. Another point of interest–the evacuation of the bridge. I don’t think Picard expected Data to evacuate. At that point it still wasn’t clear what was happening, and for all he knew Data was reacting to an external threat and was unable to pause to explain. When gas filled the bridge, I saw Picard nod to Data at the end–I figure he is wordlessly giving Data command of the bridge, presuming Data plans to stick around to solve whatever the hell is going on.
What really throws me about the episode is the “emotion chip”. It would otherwise have been a fantastic step on Data’s path to realizing he does have emotions. Instead, both Data and Lore are astonished by the idea of a chip that bestows emotions, after they’ve just revealed more emotions than any prior episode. Lore’s jealous desire for the chip is especially contradictory. If it bugs him that much, doesn’t that prove he doesn’t need it?
By that chip they cut off one of the most promising of the few long-running story arcs of the show. And for what payoff? Cheap gags. I’m quite frustrated at the whole thing.
Speaking of consequences, the episode opens with two minors being left unsupervised on a military grade spaceship…for days or weeks on end…with unfettered access to a dangerous plant…all of this with approval from all of the other adults…and the person who gets the dressing down is the older of the two children?
Maybe I’m the only one who ever thought this since it was just one line that was inconsequential to the rest of the episode, but when Lore explained how he was rescued by a Pakled ship, I immediately thought, “those poor murdered Pakleds.” Lore wasn’t exactly the type of being to show gratitude to his saviors.
While it aired after “Family,” “Brothers” was actually filmed before it, so giving Brent Spiner a week off makes even more sense.
Having just watched Episode 9 of Picard, Season 1, and then this episode in quick succession, I realized that in all of Star Trek, the Soong family tree (both biological and android/synth) has a lot of long lost family members who are retconned into existence whenever the story of the week demands it.
Thoughts from the binging quaranfuture:
1. More STTNG episodes seem to deal with some kind of pathogen/quarantine/species destroying force than not, and it’s creepy rn :)
2. Dr Soong’s lab is not a failure of set design – it’s a total homage to Dr Frankenstein! Admittedly, that doesn’t make as much sense as it could, but it especially resembles the version of the Frankenstein laboratory rebuilt for Young Frankenstein (out of pieces of the original 1931 set, fun fact), Jacob’s Ladder and all. With a touch of Grandpa from the Munsters, complete with the Borscht belt thing. I think it was a choice, and for all we know there are ten more rooms with computer equipment in them.
3. I think the points about retinal scans and Data not knowing the Captain’s passwords are excellent, and it would have been badass for Data to (a) disguise his retina to pass the scan, and then (b) hack the password with some kind of android thing, like R2D2 getting control of the garbage mashers.
And if disguising his retina would be too much of a stretch, I feel like he could have figured out a way to fail the retina scan enough times that the computer would diagnose itself as faulty. Like when you try using your credit card chip 3 times and eventually it says you have to swipe it.
4. It is ironic that I am about to click “I am not a robot”
jofesh: Sorry, it’s a failure of set design because La Forge specifically says, “Look at this stuff!” as if just the act of looking at the equipment in his lab, you’d know he was a famous cyberneticist. And that stuff was not anything remotely resembling that.
I’m just tired of the tendency in fiction to lump all science together as a monolithic thing.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It can be overly convenient. However, remember that fictional characters rarely start out with their family trees enumerated at the beginning. Even in real life when you meet someone is the first thing you do is exchange family histories? These sort of things come out over time, so it doesn’t bother me too much. I will agree it seemed to happen to Data a lot.
The subplot with the brothers makes no sense to me. What parents are going to go on sabbatical and leave their pre-teen kids behind on a starship, especially one that goes into battle or otherwise faces a threat to its existence about every other day? Wesley staying on for Season 2 was weird enough but this is beyond me.
Also, where was this arcade / forest on the Enterprise and why do they have such toxic plants there? If it was on the Holodeck, it seems the safeties would have prevented that.
The entire thing seems to have been hurriedly thought up just so Crusher could deliver that line about brothers to Data at the end. Then he has to kill Lore in a later episode anyway.
@37/Tuomas: “If that retinal scan had still been standard protocol, Data’s hijacking attempt would’ve failed.”
Pardon my years-later nitpick, but hardly anyone in real life uses retinal scans anymore. Modern biometrics use iris scans, which are much simpler, quicker, and more reliable. Unfortunately, fiction clings to the obsolete phrase “retinal scan” with near-fanatical devotion. Syfy’s Dark Matter even had characters talk about retinal scans when the depicted technology was unambiguously an iris scanner, which drove me crazy. It was like referring to handcuffs as shouldercuffs.
On the question of electronic mimicry of speech, I gather that modern computers can already tell the difference between a human voice and a recording of same, no matter how high-fidelity. So that’s another reason the computer shouldn’t have been fooled by Data’s mimicry.
@39/Timothy Ryder: “Lore’s jealous desire for the chip is especially contradictory. If it bugs him that much, doesn’t that prove he doesn’t need it?”
Not if he’s a psychopath, and is only capable of selfish emotions, which seems to be the case. He might want a more complete set. Or maybe he just wants it because he wants to be Soong’s chosen son instead of Data, and thus wants to take anything that was made for Data.
@47: I think the forest with the hazardous fruit was on Ogus II. Not that that excuses letting minors wander unaccompanied there.
Maybe Geordi’s visor allowed him to recognise Soong? Was this the only episode of TNG written by Rick Berman? Shouldn’t that homing beacon have worked on Julianna Tainer (and B-4) as well? They let a little kid stay dead in Hide and Q, Krad.
34: Admiral Satie thought Picard should have been held accountable. 36: That chip unbalances Data too in ST Generations. 39: Gas never filled the Bridge because once Data had control of it, there was no need. 40: As the older of the two, Jake should have known better.
41: No, he certainly didn’t appreciate the Enterprise crew in Datalore. 42: I did wonder where Spiner had got to during that episode (the only time he wasn’t in TNG). 44: “I am not a robot”. What’s up with that? 47: Data doesn’t kill Lore, he deactivates and has him dismantled again.
@50/David Sim: Berman also wrote “A Matter of Time.” Other than that, he only co-wrote the story outlines of “Ensign Ro” and “Unification” with Michael Piller. “Brothers” and “A Matter of Time” were Berman’s only script credits until Enterprise, where he became Brannon Braga’s regular writing partner and had script credit on 17 episodes and story credit on 20 more.
Juliana was programmed not to know she was an android, so putting in the recall program would’ve spoiled the illusion. And B-4 was an early prototype who’d been long since disassembled.
The chip didn’t “unbalance” Data in GEN, it just flooded him with emotions that he needed time to get a handle on.
50. David Sim
34: Admiral Satie thought Picard should have been held accountable.
I think Admiral Satie’s opinions would be highly suspect. The only reason she was bringing it up was to destroy Picard and she was only doing than because he was opposing her witch hunt approach to what was proven to be an accident.
Quoth David Sim: “Maybe Geordi’s visor allowed him to recognise Soong?”
What does that have to do with anything? His exact words were, “Look at this stuff!” As if the “stuff” would prove it was Noonien Soong, which only makes sense if the stuff was stuff you’d see in a cyberneticist’s lab, and it so totally wasn’t. (FWIW, Picard was much better about this in the Soong lab in the final few episodes.)
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
Has it ever been established that Data’s vocal hardware was like a high-fidelity speaker (with the movement of lips, etc. done for human verisimilitude and also because Brent Spiner is a human being) rather than via the channeling of air through synthetic vocal cords and tongue/lips/teeth like human beings do? (As a supporting point, we do often see/hear Data take in a breath of air before speaking, which would suggest again that either the mechanics of his speech are like those of other humanoids, or that Soong was very attentive to detail.)
In other words, could it be that Data’s “Picard” voice wasn’t a recording and playback of Picard’s voice, but rather that he re-shaped his vocal cords and other vocal mechanics to match Picard’s so he was actually speaking in Picard’s “voice”? That would seem to me to be more likely to fool a sophisticated voice-based security system.
That being said, it seems to me there’s no excuse for the absence of any other security factors in his being able to take over an entire Galaxy-class starship. Heck, if I were putting together the security profile for the ship, one of the first things I’d do would be to make sure the computer could figure out when internal sensor data didn’t match up with the commands it was receiving — like when the voice commands to take over the ship in Picard’s voice were coming from the bridge where there were no human life-signs and Picard couldn’t have survived without an EV suit, while Picard’s combadge attached to a human life-sign was down in Main Engineering.
@53/krad: Looking at the scene, Geordi looks at Soong’s face first, then back and forth between Soong and the lab. With his VISOR, he’d recognize people by their bone structure and body heat patterns and such rather than just facial features, so he probably recognized Soong despite his age. Referring to the “stuff” was just additional corroboration. Maybe it wasn’t cybernetics tech, but Soong was famously eccentric, so maybe Geordi was referring more to what his belongings revealed about his personality than his profession.
51: I still think that Julianna was someone Soong would want to keep tabs on. He must have deactivated her at some point before she left him so he could implant that holochip into her, but you’re totally right about B-4. I really must summon up the willpower to see Star Trek: Nemesis again. The emotion chip seemed to unbalance Lore, perhaps because of the new flurry of emotions on top of his own. Although Data didn’t become violent, he did seem on the verge of having an episode, just not a psychotic one like Lore’s. 52: I realise she was just using Picard’s assimilation as a way to justify her own twisted beliefs. Picard was just as much a victim of the Borg as anyone else at Wolf 359. 53: I can’t comment on ST Picard because I have yet to see any, but Geordi’s enhanced vision is just one possible straw I’m grasping at.
I vividly recall seeing this with the usual group in college when it aired. We couldn’t stop “Holy $#!%”-ing during the commercials about Data’s badass fugue-state efficiency, along with Spiner’s amazing lip-sync performance — only to be astounded again as it dawned on us that Soong was being played by Spiner too. Yeah, Soong getting a pass for abducting a Starfleet officer and disabling his ship is hard to swallow, I do wish Data had mentioned Lal, and we should’ve at minimum gotten some dialogue about how it may be possible to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the future, but Spiner’s tour de force is really special.