TNG Deathmatch Episode 10: Haven vs Inheritance

Mother issues!

 

Okay, Haven is one of those that’s actually not as bad as I remember. I have been known to not skip this one on rewatch. It’s got problems, of course – I mean, basically the whole plot is a problem, but the execution isn’t bad.

 

First off, the issue of Troi being betrothed as a child – okay, I can buy that it’s an alien culture with alien customs. Her mother is an ambassador and obsessed with heritage so it makes sense that she at least would insist that Troi go through with this, especially if there was some vital political purpose to it.

 

Except she doesn’t insist. I can’t recall any point at which Lwaxana seems particularly bothered one way or another whether Deanna gets married. And there’s no political purpose, either: her betrothed, Wyatt Miller, is human, as are his parents, as was Deanna’s father. The Millers live on Earth and having Deanna marry Wyatt seems to have no greater significance. So why does she get all weepy and regretful as though she’s being made to do it? There’s never any indication that, if Deanna just said “fuck this archaic bullshit, I don’t wanna”, anyone would even mind.

 

If she was betrothed to the son of an important Betazoid family, it might make more sense, as would Wyatt’s apparent psychic connection to a tousled video vixen from beyond the stars. Seriously, this guy has been dreaming of a woman since he was a kid, drawing pictures of her (that look nothing like her – I get the feeling they were drawn before they cast the actress – even though Troi immediately recognises her from the drawings), and she turns up on a plague ship because…fate, love, destiny, something something.

 

Okay, there’s a lot of wibbling bollocks in this episode, and it seems like the only reason the Millers had to be human is for comedy value, so that they could react with shock at the idea of being naked at a Betazoid wedding. (Even this makes no sense – they entered into a Betazoid wedding pact, they lived on Betazed, they’re old friends of the Troi family, or at least part of it, and they didn’t know Betazoid weddings are nude?)

                                      

I do enjoy the dinner party scene, though. Screw this “no conflict” edict, half these people loathe each other and the other half are just getting off on watching the bitching. Yar’s face as Lwaxana holds court is priceless, as is Data’s request for them to continue the “petty bickering”.

 

In all seriousness, the whole “Roddenberry’s box” thing, the idea that TNG-era humans are supposed to be above interpersonal conflict, is just not adhered to in season one at all – the one season you’d expect it to be most present, since he was actually present and involved for it. In this episode alone, Riker petulantly leaves the party, Troi blows her stack and runs out in tears, and Mrs Miller and Lwaxana can hardly stomach one another. So, all this is fine for enlightened future humans, but Jeremy Aster couldn’t be allowed to cry for his dead mother in The Bonding because humans are “beyond that” and accept bereavement as natural and – you know what? With all respect to Gene Roddenberry’s many skills and achievements, nonsense like this is why I have no truck with the supposed purity of his vision of enlightened humanity. It’s okay for Riker to get pissily territorial about Troi’s engagement, but a kid can’t grieve because we’ve moved beyond that? Interesting to see who is allowed to be human, in this future. Grown man bitching about his ex moving on after he abandoned her - acceptable emotion. Child grieving dead parent - specifically vetoed by Roddenberry. Messy, inconvenient, gone.

 

Inheritance is one of season seven’s Meet The Family episodes, and in this case the previously-unseen relative is Data’s “mother”, Juliana O’Donnell-Soong-Tainer, who was Noonien’s colleague and wife. From the dialogue in this episode it seems Juliana was an equal partner in Soong’s labours, so it’s troubling that her contribution is not mentioned anywhere else, not by Soong, not by Data, not by anyone. When Geordi meets Soong as a dessicated, dying man, twenty-odd years after he went missing, he still recognises him, that’s how well-known Soong is. Yet no word ever existed of Juliana O’Donnell? She never tried to contact Data before, never tried to claim her place in history. Why not? Was this part of Soong’s programming? If so, why would she reveal herself now?

 

Oh, yeah, she’s not actually human. She was, and when she died, Soong put her consciousness into a robot body so perfectly disguised even she wouldn’t know she wasn’t human.

 

Soooo…okay, on the plus side, Juliana herself is lovely. Fionnula Flanagan is a delightful actress and I would watch her in anything. Her scenes with Data are charming. I have a huge problem, though, in there’s nothing about Juliana’s story that doesn’t absolutely scream misogyny, and the script seems not to recognise this.

The fact that this woman made a huge contribution to cybernetics and has been completely ignored in favour of her famous husband is not even mentioned by the episode. I imagine the writers were too focused on retconning Data’s childhood to be worried about the implications of what they were doing - literally erasing a female scientist, Soong's partner in creating Data, from history. Given the historical tendency to elide the contributions of women scientists from the record in favour of crediting their male colleagues, I kind of wish the whole episode had been about Juliana working to reclaim her place in history as a scientist rather than just trying to reconnect with Data.

Aside from that, the concept of a super-realistic android wife is creepy as hell, and the script doesn’t seem to realise that. I have to be crude now, because the really is crude: in one scene, Juliana talks about how Soong walked in, having modelled Data’s head after his own. Think about that for a minute – Soong sitting there, tinkering away, crafting a perfect replica of his own face. Follow that train of thought. Ever thought about how Soong had to design Data’s fully functional penis so he could put his sexuality program to good use? You have now! Picture him there, bent over his worktable, scanning his own penis into the Mac and firing up the 3D printer. The future is full of wonders.

 

Now think about the fact that the creation of the Juliana-droid was done after her death, and she was sufficiently realistic to remarry a man who never suspected that she wasn’t fully organic. At some point you have to address the fact that Soong sat down and created a robot vagina modelled after that of his dead wife, a wife that he also failed to mention to Data when they met, a woman whose contribution to Data’s existence and Soong’s work has gone unacknowledged. Call me crazy, but I find the idea of a man creating a lifelike replica of his dead wife’s genitals a little bit weird. I’m harping on the vagina here mostly because it amuses me to do so, but also because it bothers me that Soong could have spent his time celebrating his dead wife, telling the galaxy what a genius she was, how she was his partner, honouring her memory by making sure she got equal credit for what they did together. Instead, he resurrected her as a fuckable robot and didn’t even tell her.

 

As a living woman, she was apparently ignored by the same scientific community that worshipped her husband. In death, she was recreated by her husband and stripped of her agency – she exists now because he couldn’t bear to live without her, so he created her without knowing if she’d want to live as an android, without giving her any knowledge about what she was, and his holographic avatar even begs Data not to reveal the truth to her when he discovers it. Just let the woman live out her days in ignorance, yeah? I’m…not a fan of that concept. She’s a smart woman and she doesn’t have any kind of prejudice against artificial life, so why not actually let her know the truth of what she is? 

In DS9's Shadowplay, Dax and Odo encounter a village composed of holograms who don't know they're holograms. People have been disappearing, and after investigating the more macabre possibilities, they find that a faulty hologenerator is the problem, and they don't even pause for breath before informing the villagers of the truth. The villagers accept this information with minimal hand-wringing. Better to know the truth, is the moral of the story, especially if the lie will likely injure you down the line. You can't deal with what you don't know. So it should be with Juliana, who may come to injury again in the future and find out anyway. Why maintain the lie?

 

The answer is, at heart, because that’s how Noonien Soong wanted it. Even in death, his wishes trump her interests, her right to choose. The crew even agrees with this: after a lengthy discussion, they leave the decision of whether or not to tell her what she is to Data, her son who has only known her for a matter of days, because apparently the emotionless android is the best judge of what’s right for her. In the end, telling her the truth would mean robbing her of the humanity he has always sought.

 

So, to recap, Soong created Juliana to be his replacement wife without asking her if she wanted to be resurrected, and didn’t tell her what she really was; Data decides to carry on hiding the truth from her because he wants to be human. Soong’s wishes, Data’s wishes. The correct answer here should have been to tell her the truth and restore her agency, rather than have a succession of family members make her choices for her.

 

Aside from the creepy paternalism and inconsistency borne of this massive retcon of Data’s life, the episode is actually a nice character piece, even if it is saddled with a lot of manufactured peril, in the form of a planet whose molten core is cooling – it really, really doesn’t matter. I will never understand why the writers felt they had to weigh their stories down with a sci-fi subplot this late in the day. The meat of it is all in Data’s conversations with Juliana, and they’re endearing, despite the hoops the script has to go through to get to them. 

WINNER: Inheritance