7.10 — “Inheritance”

7.10 — “Inheritance”

Plot: The Enterprise’s visit to Atrea IV is the occasion of Data’s meeting with Dr. Juliana Tainer, who approaches him with the news that she was married to Dr. Soong, and is Data’s mother. Data must come to grips with this information and decide what relationship he wants to have with the woman who abandoned him on Omicron Theta.

Thoughts: I had to laugh at the set up of this episode. The idea of reigniting the core of the planet is reminiscent of the star reignition experiment in TNG 4.22, “Half a Life,” which was ultimately unsuccessful. It sounds awfully drastic.

Imagine a travelling salesman showing up and trying to sell you in under 5 minutes on a plan to use molten plasma to reliquify your planet’s core. What could go wrong, right? No evacuation or informed consent provided by the planet’s other inhabitants seems necessary. It’s a handshake deal.

This episode is not awful, but it’s quite sudsy. A lot of sturm und drang and unexpected revelations, leading us… where? Data confronts his mother and his father, who comes off like a mad scientist à la Dr. Roger Korby, Chrisine Chapel’s fiancé who was obsessed with transferring human consciousness into android bodies in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”

I feel like they are shaving the status of Data’s emotional makeup more finely than ever. He plainly has emotions, although he repeatedly denies them. The revelations of this episode unambiguously trouble him, and he is given lines like “I would like to get to know you better” that make no sense without emotion. Or maybe I don’t understand emotions?

Data’s problem, if it is a problem, seems to be one of suppressed affect, not a lack of underlying feeling. It is revealed that he was made to be creative, at Juliana’s insistence, which I think is new (before I had the sense that Data was copying other people’s artistic expression, hoping to spark something creative within himself). I don’t know how you can have creativity without emotion, and I wish TNG focused on that, rather than glossing over all the interesting questions.

We are left with two continuity “errors” that are perhaps not unexplainable, but only just. First, all the hoohah about Juliana wanting to leave Data behind so as avoid facing the prospect of dismantling him later doesn’t square with Soong’s revelation that the real Juliana was injured by the Crystalline Entity before the evacuation the planet, leading to Julian’s death in a coma only a short time afterwards. How can the false Juliana remember it if it didn’t occur? Second, Soong explains to Data how Juliana left him in a recording he must have planted in Juliana’s head after the leaving occurred, which is a good trick. sunny jim suggests he may have updated the file remotely, by wireless.

The episode builds to the question of whether Data should tell Juliana her true nature. This question is interesting, but again too contrived. We have previously observed that coherent principles of medical ethics have been lost by the 24th century, but let’s break this down: Juliana is not an invalid, and Data is not her guardian. Surely Crusher’s medical ethics require her to give Juliana medical information directly, and allow her to make critical decisions for herself. If Juliana were in need of a guardian, it is not obvious why Data is a better candidate than her husband, whose interests nobody considers for a moment.

It is, in a sense, interesting to see Data make the “wrong” choice, and deceive Juliana. My personal interpretation is that Juliana already knows she is an android, because of course she would. It’s far from clear, however, that the producers share the same interpretation.

Why would Data, of all the beings aboard, choose deceit (supported by Troi, who should also be aware of medical ethics)? Is it because he wants to be alive so much that he cannot bear to take the illusion away from Juliana? But we are told that Data has no emotions.

Data is an interesting character. It frustrates me that he is SO CLOSE to being much more interesting, but TNG (almost) never goes there. If they do, they skirt away from the territory immediately. There are a handful of good Data episodes (“The Measure of a Man” and “The Offspring” spring to mind), and so many more that could have been better.

Since this is an average-or-better effort for seventh season so far, I give it 3 of 5 damaged transporter pattern enhancers.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Inheritance_(episode)