The big plot hole that always got me about "Datalore" was its claim that nobody knew who built Data, even though he was based on the positronic-brain principle that Noonien Soong was famous for advocating. That stood out to me as a self-contradiction the first time I saw the episode (or at least the second), and it's never gotten any clearer. And of course, it was retroactively made even dumber in "Brothers" when they cast Brent Spiner as Soong (instead of Keye Luke as originally intended). "Gee, this android we found has Noonien Soong's face and voice and is based on theories that only Soong believed in. We have no idea who possibly could have built him."
Keye Luke would have been
FANTASTIC (thanks for namedropping!). Sadly, he died in January 1991 so I wonder if he had health issues preventing taking the role.
I also thought it was lazy and derivative to crib the concept of a positronic brain from Isaac Asimov. Aside from being imitative, it's a concept that even Asimov admitted was scientifically nonsensical. Although part of the reason I found it cheesy was that the really stupid Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode "Shgoratchx!" had also cribbed the concept of positronic brains seven years earlier, and I'd felt it was an affront for such a dumb show to invoke the work of the sainted Asimov. (That season of Buck Rogers also had a character named Admiral Asimov, supposedly a descendant. I didn't know at the time that the new showrunner brought in for season 2 had worked with Asimov on an abortive film adaptation of I, Robot, so they actually knew each other and the homage was more legitimate than I'd assumed.) I didn't like seeing TNG sink to the same level as Buck Rogers (as I saw it).
I recall BR/season 2 mentioning "Positronic" and thought it was just genre-standard technobabble being reused (heck, BR did callbacks to Trek on occasion with the most famous being a call to a Christopher Pike ("A Dream of Jennifer"...)
Did not know Asimov thought "positronics" was nonsensical. TNG season 1 could be varied, but not down to that level when even when TNG was otherwise striving to include known scientific accuracy where possible (my favorite of which being Data's suck vs blow in space dialogue to Riker in "The Naked Now" of all episodes, sheesh...)
Way-cool that the showrunner had known Asimov, so the homage was a cool touch. I did like that idea that a famous author's descendent, knowing of their distant progeny's work, would go into an element of the field that said lineage wrote fiction about - well, in-universe anyway. Now it seems just a tad larger as a result. A shame season 2 was such a wild mess...
There's also the fact that Data used one or two contractions in the first half of the episode but was suddenly asserted not to use contractions in the second half of the episode. That felt like very sloppy rewriting to me, like there were bits of different drafts in there and they hadn't managed to reconcile everything. Never mind that Data had used plenty of contractions in previous episodes.
Definitely feels like a botched rewrite and the episode is loaded with issues (the tone, presentation and acting make up for a fair amount but it's still way too cringeworthy in some aspects but, somehow, Brent Spiner carries it with his dual role and evil nature of Lore that's just eminently satisfying, even with the shields up that would otherwise prevent beaming bits of the Entity over.) Might have been more interesting if Lore subdued Data then reprogrammed him to stop using them, if they wanted to differentiate the two somehow (role reversal instead of the facial twitch nonsense), had the time to actually iron out the plot bugs took place.
Part of me wonders (sans proof) if that the contraction issues were due to having to hurry filming and nobody noticed until editing stage and couldn't fix it via dubbing. Even some stories after this one, in season 1 and later, bring up contractions (e.g. "We'll Always Have Paris" has a real goody in it). There's also a hilarious gaffe in "Conspiracy" where Riker orders warp 6 and Geordi replies 'Aye sir, full impulse". Among others.
