Even Season 3 had some emotional moments.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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If we have to base Data's lack or possession of emotions on early Season 1 episodes then he definitely had something going on. He made "The Cage(TOS)" Spock seem downright cold and insensitive.
I find it helps to consider season one of TNG as broad-strokes canon, since it's occasionally bonkers even by the regular standards of early installment weirdness. When Data meets Riker in "Encounter at Farpoint" he smiles, he drops contractions like mad up until "Datalore", and there's the bizarre scenes of him cracking jokes with Geordi about the Ferengi in "The Last Outpost" while they're right on screen in front of him.
I can only assume that the production team and Spiner were trying to avoid a completely unemotional Spock-like performance early on, before settling on the nuances of the Data we know and love.
I recently watched Brothers (season 4), which I think clearly shows Data isn't without emotions when he says his final goodbye to Soong- and Soong recognises that when he says that Data will grieve for him in his own way after he's dead.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but when we met Spiner in 2016 someone asked him “how do you play a character with no emotions?”
He said “You don’t. You play a character who pretends to have no emotions.”
In any event, I think the main difference was that Data was much more child-like in the beginning. They dropped some of the cutesy stuff as the series progressed.
He said “You don’t. You play a character who pretends to have no emotions.”
In any event, I think the main difference was that Data was much more child-like in the beginning. They dropped some of the cutesy stuff as the series progressed.
It is interesting to watch Spiner and Nimoy play off one another with no other actors participating in the dialogue. Both are - at least on the surface - without emotions but both betray that they have them and just downplay or don't display them the same way a human would.
Actually, I don't think the Borg are as much ahead of UFP as the Q are ahead of the Borg.
If that was the case, there is no way the UFP would have been able to resist a single Borg cube... let alone come up with ways of thwarting them.
No... on a technological and evolutionary scale... the Borg are ahead of UFP... but probably not by too much.
The Q would be on a whole new level though... Quinn inferred that his species are similar to how UFP appear to some underdeveloped species.
I would imagine that their powers/abilities are probably tied to some kind of technology as much as it is to their physiology... just a form of technology and physiology that UFP has yet to START understanding.
As for the Q being reprimanded by the Continuum because he rattled up the Borg... well, actually, it wasn't suggested Q was stripped of his powers specifically because of that. It was more because of his continued meddling in mortal affairs (so provoking the Borg was PART of it - but not the whole story).
Otherwise, Q's son messed with the Borg in S7 of VOY and nearly got the crew assimilated in the process... to which his father said: 'If the Contniuum has told you once, they told you a thousand times... DON'T PROVOKE THE BORG!".
Provoking the Borg is a big no in this particular instance because young Q specifically made 3 Borg cubes appear there and attack Voyager. I think you can 'meddle' maybe once as a way of introducing A species you think could potentially benefit from the encounter (like the Q did for UFP in "Q Who" by throwing the ENT-D near a Borg Cube).. but actively making the cubes appear in a part of space in front of a ship makes things problematic because first the Collective would wonder about how their ships got from one location to the next without any explanation, and if they started getting a whif of the Q and their abilities... well, that complicates matters obviously.
I agree. I always had the feeling the Borg were 'only' a few centuries beyond the UFP, technology wise.
We see species and entities that are probably beyond the Borg but that are still corporeal. The Voth could be an example of that. No need to 'adapt' to photon torpedoes if you can just turn off your opponents' technology like a light switch. V'ger might be another (though that is one that is on the threshold of becoming incorporeal).
And the Borg would already know about the Q. After all, they assimilated Picard and therefore would know everything he did at that point in time. Including the fact that Q brought them to J-25 and back.
We see species and entities that are probably beyond the Borg but that are still corporeal. The Voth could be an example of that. No need to 'adapt' to photon torpedoes if you can just turn off your opponents' technology like a light switch. V'ger might be another (though that is one that is on the threshold of becoming incorporeal).
And the Borg would already know about the Q. After all, they assimilated Picard and therefore would know everything he did at that point in time. Including the fact that Q brought them to J-25 and back.
I wouldn't necessarily say the Voth are beyond the Borg.
The Voth employ dampening field technology to turn off power on alien ships... which is something UFP can do too.
Or at least, we've seen cases where they used dampening fields.
The Voth merely use the said technology on a larger scale because they have larger (city) ships... and are probably able to suppress power on ships that are smaller (such as Voyager).
It would probably be difficult for the Borg to capture and assimilate Voth and their technology... though they wouldn't necessarily have to have access to their technology... just a Voth individual who is knowledgeable enough in their technology.
If I'm not mistaken, there were Voth in Unimatrix Zero (at least in the background)... suggesting the Borg may have assimilated some Voth.
Technically yes. Its just I think they wouldn't really be able to do much about the Q... but its also possible the more knowledge about the Q they encounter, the closer they might get to understanding them, and possibly benefit from that knowledge (in the sense it would make them more powerful).
You just nailed something about the Kurtzman era that has been bothering me in the back of my head but couldn't quite figure out what it was. That was it!
There are more collisions in a single episode of the Kurtzman era shows than just about an entire SERIES in a Berman era show.
Thank you for figuring out what was trapped in my brain!
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Precisely why I didn't like the battle at the of DISCOVERY season 2... too much clutter.
My interpretation of series-era Data is that he has emotions, but he doesn't have the full range of human emotions and the ones he has are much less intense than what Humans experience, and that their triggers are very different.
Star Trek treats nebulas like soup, sound travels through space and ships move in a way entirely inconsistent with zero-g. And too many space collisions bother people?
Only sometimes.
Let's just say if you're coming to Star Trek for the science: you poor, poor person.
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Given that Data's backstory was rather different until quite late in the day, and arguably even into very early filming, that's understandable (the original concept was that he was built by an advanced race of secretive AIs and sent to the Federation to study humanity – basically the same as Isaac in The Orville). I always got the impression, particularly early on, that Data was being played as someone who was much younger than he turned out to be. It's really weird to think that although he's 26 in "Encounter at Farpoint", he's already been in Starfleet for 18 years and is comfortably the Enterprise-D's second most tenured officer after Picard – especially given how undeveloped he is. A lot of TNG makes more sense if we assume that Data is, literally, child-aged instead.
Yeah Data kind of has a "Fresh out of the Box" feel in early TNG and appears to encounter many things for the first time (bickering people in Haven, somebody close to him dying in Skin of Evil, Perfume in Angel One etc.). And really even as TNG went on and thing developed into a different direction, he never quite lost that.
I think in his previous assignments, no one bothered to treat him, truly, like a person. In "The Next Phase", he tells Worf he never had a friend until Geordi... someone who accepted him exactly as he was.
That could definitely explain a lot of his first experiences happening on the Enterprise... no one before really took any time to BE with Data and teach him.
That could definitely explain a lot of his first experiences happening on the Enterprise... no one before really took any time to BE with Data and teach him.
Author Christopher L. Bennett reconciled this a little bit in his novel The Buried Age. He depicts Data as having had a series of low-prestige Starfleet assignments where his COs and crew members basically avoided him and isolated him out of prejudice. Picard encounters Data and realizes his potential, and encourages Data to assert himself and start being pro-active abouthis career. But that does go a little ways to explaining why Data was so unfamiliar with basic humanoid social situations.
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