So Data's dead and Trip gets a second chance at ponfar?

[David cgc]

That Klingon Messiah thing is actually from the show, so the novelverse had to take it into account, too.

 

[RandyS]

But that doesn't change what I saw in Nemesis, which is that B-4 appeared to be a blank slate.

I don't see why you'd think that. If he were a blank slate, he would've just been inert and passive. Instead, he was childlike, inquisitive. He may not have had much ability to retain new information, but he had curiosity, the instinct to seek answers. And he clearly had the initiative and will to formulate and pose questions rather than simply responding to prompts. So clearly B-4 had some degree of sentience and personality, even if they were at a very childlike level.

I think that because that's how he was presented in the film. In every scene he was in, he followed Data around. Clearing showing that he could not think for himself. And the way that it was presented in the film, the download scene was clearly meant to show that Data's more dominate personality would assert itself at some point. the final scene would also seem to bear this out. All of this suggestions to me that B-4 has no personality of his own, and was therefore a blank slate.

 

[Christopher]

I think that because that's how he was presented in the film. In every scene he was in, he followed Data around. Clearing showing that he could not think for himself.

In his very first scene, B-4 was constantly asking questions. An entity that can't think for itself cannot formulate or initiate questions; it can only respond to others' queries or prompts. Curiosity is one of the most irrefutable indicators of intelligent thought.

And the way that it was presented in the film, the download scene was clearly meant to show that Data's more dominate personality would assert itself at some point. the final scene would also seem to bear this out.

I don't think that was "clearly" the case at all. If anything, the download scene showed that B-4 couldn't assimilate Data's knowledge despite Data's hope that he could. And it was never about personality, it was about information. Recall when Data downloaded Lal's memories into himself. He didn't absorb any of Lal's personality, because the transfer only contained information. By that precedent, the download to B-4 should only have been about transferring knowledge, not identity.

What the final scene says to me is not "B-4 will become Data," but "B-4 may finally be starting to live up to Data's hope that he would gain the ability to grow and learn." Yes, of course, looked at metatextually, it's clear that the studio asked for that as a back door they could use to resurrect Data in a future film if the box-office returns on Nemesis were huge enough to warrant it. But it's kind of wrong to bring metatextual considerations like that into an analysis of the in-story meaning of the events. Going strictly by what we were told and shown in the film, ignoring such external, real-world concerns, the download and the final scene were about Data attempting to give B-4 the ability to evolve on his own, not about Data's personality overwriting B-4.

 

[STR]

That Klingon Messiah thing is actually from the show, so the novelverse had to take it into account, too.

Lord, do I loathe Voyager even more, I did not know it could be so. So that's STO +1, and B&B -1.

 

[Christopher]

^Actually "Prophecy" was a pretty good episode of VGR. And it only established that one fringe sect of Klingons suspected that Miral might be the kuvah'magh because a certain interpretation of an ancient prophecy lined up with aspects of her conception. In fact, the leader of the Klingon sect in that episode (one that had left the homeworld and spent a century traveling to the Delta Quadrant) was deliberately faking his claim that Miral was the kuvah'magh because he wanted to convince his people to give up their quest and settle on a suitable planet, and they'd only do that if he could convince them it was their savior's will. Then, it so happened that her hybrid genome provided a cure for a disease the Klingons of that sect were carrying, so that in a sense she was their "savior" after all. But overall it handled the matter quite rationally, never showing it as more than one sect's belief and never addressing it beyond that one episode. It was the decision of later adaptors in the novels and the online game to take the kuvah'magh idea and develop it further.