My wife and I are rewatching The Next Generation and just finished Measure of a Man, the episode in season 2 in which Data’s personhood is legally debated and his life hangs in the balance.
I genuinely found this episode infuriating in its stupidity. It’s the first episode we skipped even a little bit. It was like nails on a chalkboard.
There is oodles of legal precedent that Data is a person. He was allowed to apply to Starfleet, graduated, became an officer and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander with all the responsibilities and privileges thereof.
Comparing him to a computer and the judge advocate general just shrugging and going to trial over it is completely idiotic. There are literal years and years of precedent that he’s an officer.
The problem is compounded because Picard can’t make the obvious legal argument and is therefore stuck philosophizing in a court room, which is all well and good, but it kind of comes down to whether or not Data has a soul? That’s not a legal argument.
The whole thing is so unbelievably ludicrous it just made me angrier and angrier. It wasn’t the high minded, humanistic future I’ve come to know and love, it was a kangaroo court where reason and precedent took a backseat to feeling and belief.
I genuinely hated it.
To my surprise, in looking it up, I discovered it’s considered one of the high water marks for the entire show. It feels like I’m taking crazy pills.
You are not taking crazy pills, its premise does suffer when watched with a “critical eye” (i.e. thinking about it even a little).
The reason it’s remembered so fondly (imho) is two fold. It is one of the first “thought provoking” episodes. And the first couple of seasons were… not the best to put it mildly.
edit: admittedly, I do enjoy it, but I really have to turn my brain off to do so.
Honestly, the validation means the world to me. The performances were all top notch and I get the idea they’re going for, but how they went there was so painful and contrived.
Especially back then, people made exceptions for scifi shows bc even remotely good ones were in such short supply. Also the limitations were quite severe - for funding, for each episode having to fully wrap up by its end and therefore be almost entirely self-contained (except season-bridging 2-parters with cliffhangers stitching them together), and even then people might end up rewatching them in a different order later on, before e.g. VCRs existed and started becoming more common.
Though in many more ways than one, not only irt that, it is one of the better shows of all time. Certainly in comparison with the large majority of its successors.
lol, no kidding. Even watching it as a kid my first thought was, “the fate of Data’s rights can be determined in an impromptu court session with bridge crew acting as lawyers!? Shouldn’t they have… real courts for this?”. At the time I didn’t consider the limitations of the show of course, and I do think the willingness to tackle high concepts was what made the show so special. But damn did the limitations show in this one.
I can barely stand TNG
Seriously though it is slow and pretty boring. No to mention the special effects are just bad.
Give me the original series or something a little newer. TNG is just so bad.
Honestly I agree, the legal parts were cringe. I even saw a legal analysis of it on YouTube and they thought it was legally great.
But it’s pretty simple in my mind: if he didn’t have agency, he wouldn’t have been able to join Starfleet. The very basis of Starfleet accepting him means that he is capable of making his own decisions. And the very act of accepting him means he is not the property of Starfleet.
Either way Data is out. Sentient because you accepted him. Not sentient means his acceptance contract is void and obviously not property of Starfleet.
Starfleet rescued him off the planet and reactivated him. He was next to Lore who was completely disassebled. To people thinking Data isn’t a person, it was a salvage operation, not a rescue. Same as getting back a derelict doesn’t make it a person and makes it the property of Starfleet.
I’m having a hard time understanding what you’re trying to say.
Salvage rights are very complex on their own, you don’t automatically own other stuff simply because you come to their rescue (as in rescuing a ship) or flip a switch. It’s quite literally someone else’s property. So Starfleet didn’t own him.
Second, he’s an officer. You have to apply to officer school. Just like the children on the ship aren’t automatically enrolled in Starfleet, they and he have to apply. It’s a serious application. It’s not like this android was just kicking around on a ship and fell into being an officer. (Same goes for enlisted.) *For anyone that doesn’t want to read my next longer comment: Data signed a contract to enlist. To sign a contract requires agency, which starfleet accepted.
Abandonned property can be taken and used. It was thought that whoever was the “owner” of Data died in the crystaline entity incident.
As for enlistment - Data could learn what he needed to probably in a day. He was a huge asset and denying him entry would be a detriment to Starfleet, even if he was a “thing”. I don’t see enlisting as something that would only be offered to humans / not things, we see a ship “enlist” in Discovery for instance.
What about him joining Star Fleet proves without any doubt that he is a person?
It’s not about proving it beyond a doubt, the OP’s frustrarion is about how the whole courtroom drama was inaccurate.
The assumtion is this: Legally, Starfleet only allows sapent adults to join its ranks. So a toaster cannot be a starfleet officer, and neither can a dog.
The fact that he is an officer means that in legal terms, Starfleet has already decided that he is a person, and any court that asks this question has a quick and easy answer.
That’s because Star Trek is sometimes a show about introducing basic philosophy and ethics to American nerds who genuinely could not and often still do not grasp the idea of giving at least theoretical personhood to someone that wasn’t biological.
Just ask half of this community what they think about Fallout 4 synths if you don’t believe it.
Every Star Trek episode involving a trial shows that the way Starfleet conducts its justice system is incredibly stupid.
The Menagerie, Measure of a Man (and like 3 other TNG episodes), Ad Astra Per Aspera, that DS9 one where the Klingons want to extradite Worf… all stupid.
The only one you can’t really blame for being stupid in this regard is Voyager, because they always have the “we aren’t in the Alpha Quadrant” excuse to fall back on.
There must be something to their judicial system, taking Voyager as the example, clearly as soon as they are beyond the reach of Federation justice captains turn into genocidal war criminals in very short order.
I mean… they’re genocidal war criminals inside the system.
Sisko sure was.
He’ll probably invoke some kind of godhood defence. The federation is pretty fucked up in general.
Janeway murdering Tuvix was a cliff for me. Couldn’t come back from that, no matter her moral equivocating.
