TNG Deathmatch Episode 12: Datalore vs The Pegasus

Mysterious pasts ahoy! Data’s origin story versus Riker’s (sort of). 

 

Datalore is another episode that I thought was pretty good, back in the day. I can only assume that this was by comparison with the rest of the first season, because this episode is a mess. It introduces us to Data’s Evil Twin - sorry, older brother - Lore, who is so blatantly evil he doesn’t even need a goatee to give the audience the hint.

 

The crew takes a trip to Omicron Theta, the planet where Data was discovered 26 years ago, and tries to fathom what happened to the colony. They discover Data’s doppelgänger in pieces, in a drawer, and assemble him, and discover that his name is Lore and he’s a bit of a dickhead. After that, we have to watch everyone act stupid so that Wesley can look clever by comparison. Lore switches places with Data and contacts the Crystalline Entity - a giantic snowflake in space that devours life and was responsible for the destruction of the colony, and has, I guess, been hanging around the neighbourhood ever since…? I don’t know.

 

Anyway, Lore is incredibly bad at imitating Data, Wesley spots it immediately, having been assigned to keep an eye on the new android, but everyone ignores him and tells him to shut up because that’s how wonderful humanity is in this utopian conflict-free future. Lore sets Dr Crusher’s arm on fire, the crew finally realises that he’s a dickhead just like Wesley said all along, and they beam him into space.

 

The plot is muddy with inconsistencies, and those are compounded further still by later episodes dealing with Data’s past (Brothers, Silicon Avatar and Inheritance).

 

Datalore describes his discovery on Omicron Theta: he was activated when motion sensors detected the approach of the Tripoli’s landing party. (He was covered in a layer of dust, which suggests that he was lying there for some time following the planet’s destruction.) 

 

He was programmed with the colonists’ knowledge, presumably because they knew they would not survive. However, he does not recognise the drawings of the entity, and he has no recollection of the event itself.

 

It turns out that Lore colluded with the crystalline entity to save himself. It also later turns out that both Dr Soong and Juliana O’Donnell left Omicron Theta to escape the entity. They knew that Data would not be harmed by the entity, so there was no problem leaving him behind.

 

In Silicon Avatar, we actually see the crystalline entity in action. It appears in the sky and razes the ground with a beam of light that destroys every living thing in its path. It arrives without warning and acts quickly, although if its narrow beam is consistent as it appears in that episode, it would take a LONG time to strip a planet of all life. Imagine The Straight Story with lasers.

 

None of this makes sense.

 

1. If the colonists had sufficient time to get underground and let their kids draw pictures of the crystalline entity, why didn’t they call Starfleet for help? If they had time for Soong and O’Donnell to have a domestic about whether to take Data or leave him, they surely had time to send an SOS.
2. If they got underground and survived for a time, why did they eventually get killed? (I suppose the entity could have been busy destroying one side of the planet while they hid, and then they came out of hiding only to get zapped?)

1. If they programmed Data to retain the colonists’ memories, why not include details of what killed them? “Their fear of being discovered led to their storing information in me.” Information we later learn includes full letters and voice samples of local children that allow him to imitate Dr Marr’s son. So, it was considered important for Data to know how Renny Marr was doing at school, but there was no room for a big file marked “watch out for the giant killer snowflake because that’s what attacked us and it's still out there”?
2. How did Lore contact the crystalline entity in the first place? Did he summon it from a distance to attack the colony? Why? Revenge for being rejected by the colonists? Why not just kill the colonists himself? He’s happy enough to turn a phaser on Crusher later on, he’s capable. It’s not like it even saved him, they still disassembled him.
3. So, Lore convinced the entity to let him live, by giving it the colonists instead. Why did Lore ever think he was in danger? He’s an Android. The entity only wanted to consume biological life. Data survived unharmed, and according to Juliana in Inheritance, they KNEW that Data wouldn’t be in danger if they left him behind. So why did Lore feel the need to bargain for his safety?
4. Why did the Crystalline Entity agree to aid Lore? It could have razed the planet just as well without his help. It’s not like he lowered the shield or anything: there wasn’t one.
5. As an aside: why does Data only have an impression that “a Dr Noonien Soong” worked in the lab? Geordi has to inform him that Soong was a major leader in cybernetics. Yar and Riker fill Data in on Soong’s work on the positronic brain. Even if Data has never considered that Soong created him, surely he would have known who the man was?
6. So to sum up: Lore lured the entity to the colony, leaving the colonists plenty of time to download their memories into Data but not enough time to call for help or alert Starfleet; the colonists were safe underground in an “installation big enough to hold hundreds of people” but they still got killed; everyone hid in Soong’s lab except Soong and his wife, who escaped, “running from a giant snowflake”, but apparently nobody else managed to get out, though someone took the time to disassemble Lore and pack him away neatly in storage; the colony’s destruction was never investigated in the 26 years between Data’s discovery and this episode; Soong and Juliana never bothered to tell anyone what had happened to the colony or that the crystalline entity even existed, and though he went into hiding afterward, she apparently didn’t.
7. Oh, and despite the crew experimenting with communicating by vibrations in season five, in this episode Lore calls the entity up and just talks to it in English.

 

As I said, it’s a mess.

 

Lore is so cartoonishly evil from the start that it’s impossible to care about his relationship with Data. (He makes a lot more sense in Brothers as a bitterly resentful, petulant, neglected child.) If Data and Lore had actually bonded in any way - if Lore’s arrival had reactivated some memories in Data, maybe - and if Lore had been less obviously villainous, we might have had a reason to care what became of him. Instead, he’s just a villain-of-the-week, and that’s a bit of a waste.

 

The Pegasus, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favourite episodes of TNG. It’s brilliant from start to finish. Terry O’Quinn appears as Admiral Pressman, another in Star Trek’s long history of antagonistic superior officers; he’s not insane or evil, and maybe he’s even justified in his actions, even if he is a dick. (I mean, he’s not wrong that the Federation is at a massive disadvantage in not having cloaking technology. Picard cites the Treaty Of Algeron as the reason they’ve never developed it and also says it’s kept the peace, and he’s persuasive in that, but it’s hard not to see Pressman’s point that it also makes the Federation look like schmucks. I love Star Trek when it leaves breathing room for both sides’ views.) It also gifted us with the wonders of Captain Picard Day.

Briefly, after taking the piss out of his Captain and the many effigies of him that the Enterprise’s schoolchildren have produced, Riker gets a karmic slap in the face via the arrival onboard of Admiral Eric Pressman, his former captain on the USS Pegasus. Years ago, Riker leapt to Pressman’s aid when the crew mutinied over his use of an experimental phasing cloak, illegal in the Federation. They escaped, but the ship was lost, and is now discovered adrift, at risk of capture by the Romulans. Pressman is eager to find the ship and resume testing the cloaking device, to Riker’s horror. (I don’t know if there was any intended thematic link between the kids’ worship of their remote, baffled Captain, and Riker’s former obedience to Pressman, but it feels like it to me. Blind reverence for authority leads to disaster, like ending up on the wrong side of a mutiny, or producing lumpy sculpture.) 

 

It’s well-plotted, with a lot of pleasing moral ambiguity – as I said, I’m not unsympathetic to Pressman’s views, and with the exception of a scene where he rashly tries to assume command of the Enterprise, he is not painted as some obsessive madman (rare, among Starfleet’s admiralty). The episode even continues to include him in the mission after that scene, recognising that he is still a smart man with a contribution to make, rather than simply throwing him in the brig. It has a fascinating science macguffin, an entertainingly oily Romulan adversary whose name escapes me, and some genuine emotional meat for Riker. The scene where Picard grills him about what happened on the Pegasus is wonderful: Riker eyeballs Picard meaningfully as he says that he’s under Pressman’s orders not to speak about the issue. The message is clear: you might be right in suspecting something’s afoot but I can’t talk about it, so please don’t ask; and Riker is clearly confident that their mutual trust will be sufficient to convince Picard to drop the issue. 

 

Picard does no such thing, because it’s precisely that trust that is in jeopardy, and he curtly informs Riker that if his trust has been misplaced, then he will have to “reevaluate the command structure of this ship”. Riker’s face after this dressing-down speaks volumes: previously, he could subdue his misgivings over the events on the Pegasus, leave it all in the past, but Picard is the voice of his conscience made manifest. He has to choose who he wants to be – the man who defended Pressman years ago, or the man who Picard respects now.

 

(Apparently some fans are annoyed because the last episode of Enterprise uses The Pegasus as a springboard, and sees Riker watching a video of Captain Bakula to guide him through this difficult time. I haven’t watched Enterprise and I have absolutely no problem ignoring what sounds like a thoroughly stupid episode, but I feel a bit sorry for the Enterprise cast, who were apparently rendered secondary characters in their own series finale, poor buggers.)

 

WINNER: The Pegasus