Without warning, Data slips into a trance-like state and uses his superior abilities to seize control of the Enterprise and take it to an unknown planet. There he beams down alone to find alive and well his creator, Dr. Noonian Soong, who has summoned Data to give him a special gift. But unknowingly, the homing signal Soong used to bring Data there also summons his brother Lore, who has escaped alive from his previous encounter with the Enterprise. Meanwhile, aboard the ship, the crew struggles to retake control in time to save a young boy who, thanks to an older brother's prank gone awry, will die in days without advanced treatment from a starbase.
Rick Berman was the executive producer of all the "second age" Star Trek series. Although Gene Roddenberry was still alive at the time of this episode, Berman was already effectively in charge of The Next Generation's day-to-day mechanics. But the one thing he hadn't done to this point was contribute a script of his own. With things finally running smoothly in the third season (thanks largely to head writer Michael Piller), he took time in the summer to hammer out this episode as his first effort.
There are a lot of compelling things about the episode. The very idea of getting to meet Data's creator is an intriguing one, and indeed, the conversations between Soong and Data are surprisingly tender and illuminating. Also effective is the idea of a "Data gone mad," taking over the ship single-handedly as he remains two steps ahead of everyone's efforts to stop him. Plus, the episode is peppered with nice callbacks to earlier episodes, including a good-natured ribbing of earlier bad writing (the supposed rhyming nickname "Often Wrong Soong") and Data's torturous attempts to whistle "Pop Goes the Weasel."
But there are also a number of flaws in the episode. A major one is that, for all the other earlier episodes this one references, the episode it seems to ignore entirely is "The Offspring." Soong has to explain the human need to create a child, when Data essentially went through the process himself just a few months earlier. And wouldn't Data's attempt to create an android -- even if it resulted in failure -- seem like a rather important bit of news Data would want to share with his father?
The episode spends a fair amount of time answering specific questions the audience is sure to ask. How did Dr. Soong escape the destruction of his colony? (He had an escape plan in place.) How did Lore get rescued from deep space? (A Pakled ship stumbled on to him. Given the stupidity they displayed previously, Lore dealing with them creates a hilarious mental image.) But the fact that these questions are answered really points out that several more questions -- some of them just as important -- are not answered. Why was Dr. Soong hanging out alone, apparently for decades, without telling anyone he was alive? Why does he know he's dying now in particular, after all this time? Why does he not seem to care that Lore was responsible for so many deaths, including the entire Omicron Theta colony that Soong himself was there for?
Other minor plot holes abound. Unsupervised young children are allowed to remain aboard the Enterprise when their parents go on sabbatical? Suddenly, after three full seasons, there's no way for sensors to detect an android life form? What possible reason does Soong have for temporarily blocking part of Data's memory (other than the narrative necessity of removing Data's knowledge of a boy dying back aboard the Enterprise)? Does the Enterprise really have no security that kicks in when the same person (Captain Picard, in this case) seems to be located in two places on the ship at once (the bridge and engineering)? And given that we've seen the locator technology aboard the ship, shouldn't it know when it's being duped by a vocal impersonation?
The episode's structure itself is also a bit awkward, front loading all the action in the first two acts before transitioning into a low-key sort of one act play. In fact, the only jeopardy at all in Berman's original concept was the threatened life of the young boy back on the Enterprise, and Michael Piller wisely saw that this simply wasn't enough. It was Piller's suggestion to incorporate Lore into Berman's "Data meets his maker" story. Berman originally resisted this input, but was eventually persuaded to make the change.
All these nits having been picked, though, what a great episode for actor Brent Spiner! He plays Data, Lore, and Dr. Soong in this episode, and is strong in all three roles. Data's character fits like a worn glove, of course. But the child-like jealousy of Lore and the doting father figure of Soong are just as strongly drawn. And acting opposite oneself through the trickery of split screen is no easy feat.
To facilitate this demanding technical production, Rick Berman recruited veteran director Rob Bowman to helm this episode. After around a dozen episodes in seasons one and two, Bowman had been persuaded by his agents not to continue working on Star Trek. The possibility of working so closely with Brent Spiner again (after having directed him in key episodes "Datalore" and "Elementary, Dear Data") must have been too big a lure, and so Bowman returned for this one last episode. Knowing the acting challenge this episode represented, he closed the set for the two-and-a-half days of Spiner's solo work, and prepared ahead of time, carefully plotting out all the camera moves and blocking. Spiner filmed a full day as Data and Lore, then a full day as Soong, to stay in character more consistently (and minimize the number of times the complicated Soong makeup would need to be applied).
Oddly, this was not the only technical challenge associated with this episode. Problems also arose when composer Ron Jones went to score it. In creating the sound palette for this episode, Jones decided that the way to represent an especially mechanical Data in the early acts was to supplement the string section of his orchestra with extensive use of synthesizer. He used a then-cutting-edge Synclavier, intending to use MIDI to synch its prearranged performance with the film and the live musicians. But the sequence in which Data commandeered the ship called for an uninterrupted six-minute take of music, and exposed a limitation of the device. After about three minutes of performance, the synthesizer began to lag behind and gradually drift out of synch. By five minutes in, the machine was churning so hard, it crashed altogether. So the scoring session was halted with the music incomplete, and Jones later had to pay musicians out of his own pocket for a second session, completing the music mere days before the episode went out for airing.
This all happened because of Jones' dogged determination to avoid bland, emotionless music, the sort of boring wallpaper Rick Berman had on multiple occasions told Jones (and other series composer Dennis McCarthy) to write. And of all the episodes for this trouble to happen on, it happened on Rick Berman's own episode. This must surely have been a huge black mark against poor Ron Jones, even if the music was somehow finished on time and on budget. Following the confusion of the music for "Tin Man," I believe this was strike two. One more, and Jones would sadly be out.
Other observations:
- Although the episode wound up being a showcase for Brent Spiner's acting, the original plan had not been to have him play Dr. Soong. Reportedly, the producers initially considered for the role a handful of older Asian actors (including Keye Luke, probably best known to my generation as the shopkeeper in Gremlins). But they soon arrived at the idea of a three-roles-for-Spiner approach, so early in fact that director Rob Bowman, in the Blu-ray commentary for this episode, seems unaware that it was ever planned to be done any other way.
- We do get some nice glimpses of Dr. Crusher's bedside manner in this episode, as she tends to the dying child.
- Okay, one more nitpick. When Riker, Worf, and Geordi finally beam down and find Data at the end of this episode, they don't seem to even consider the possibility that he may still be in "unstoppable take over the ship" mode.
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