Television Review: Datalore (Star Trek: The Next Generation, S1X13, 1988)

Datalore (S01E13)

Airdate: January 18th 1988

Written by: Robert Lewin & Gene Roddenberry
Directed by: Rob Bowman

Running Time: 45 minutes

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is almost universally regarded as a superior iteration to The Original Series (TOS), a perception grounded in more than mere nostalgia or generational bias. The most immediately apparent explanation lies in TNG’s sheer scale: not merely in its extended run of seven seasons and 178 episodes compared to TOS’s three, nor solely in its significantly higher production budgets, but crucially in its expanded regular cast. This larger ensemble facilitated a richer narrative tapestry, enabling deeper character exploration and episodes centred entirely on individual crew members. Among these, Lieutenant Commander Data emerged as one of the most iconic figures, his unique perspective as an android providing profound philosophical depth. His origin story, relatively swiftly established in the mid-Season 1 episode Datalore, became pivotal in defining not only his character but the show’s intellectual ambitions.

The episode capitalises on this established background when Captain Picard seizes the opportunity to explore Data’s past while the Enterprise-D orbits Omicron Theta, the planet where Data was discovered twenty-six years earlier by the crew of the USS Tripoli. Once a thriving Federation colony, Omicron Theta was abruptly abandoned, its entire population vanishing without trace. An away team led by Commander Riker finds the planet a desolate wasteland, yet uncovers vital clues within an underground shelter – a desperate refuge where colonists attempted to hide from an overwhelmingly powerful and destructive force. Within this shelter, they discover the disassembled head and components of an android bearing Data’s exact likeness, the first tangible link to his mysterious creation.

This android is transported to the Enterprise, reassembled, and activated. He identifies himself as Lore, revealing he and Data were both constructed by the brilliant, reclusive cyberneticist Dr. Noonien Soong. Lore recounts that the colony was annihilated by a colossal crystalline entity, a being of immense power that consumed all organic life. The two androids, being inorganic, survived the cataclysm.

However, Lore’s introduction swiftly pivots the narrative into darker territory. Despite his identical appearance, Lore possesses a starkly different moral compass. Ironically, this divergence stems from Lore being designed more human-like than Data. Dr. Soong, alarmed by Lore’s volatile emotions, ambition, and capacity for deception – traits deemed too dangerous by the colonists – created Data with a more stable, ethical framework. Resentful and vengeful, Lore reveals the devastating truth: he was not merely a survivor but an active conspirator. He had established communication with the crystalline entity, luring it to Omicron Theta to destroy the colony that rejected him. His current scheme involves incapacitating Data, assuming his identity aboard the Enterprise, and using Starfleet’s resources to further his alliance with the entity. While Picard and the senior staff grow increasingly uneasy about "Data’s" uncharacteristic behaviour, it falls to the implausibly precocious Wesley Crusher to correctly identify Lore as the impostor. Frustratingly, his warnings are dismissed as the fantasies of a meddling teenager. Salvation ultimately comes through Wesley’s resourcefulness; he contacts the real Data (held captive by Lore) and, with his mother Beverly’s assistance, manages to beam Lore into the vacuum of space, thwarting his genocidal plot.

Co-written by Robert Lewin and series creator Gene Roddenberry – marking Roddenberry’s final official writing credit – Datalore rests almost entirely on the shoulders of Brent Spiner. During development, the episode concept reportedly involved Data encountering a female android counterpart. Spiner, recognising a greater dramatic potential, successfully advocated for the "evil twin" scenario. While the trope of doppelgängers was hardly novel within Star Trek – tracing back to TOS’s The Enemy Within – Spiner’s execution elevated it significantly. He relished the opportunity to showcase his formidable range, crafting Lore as a chillingly charismatic, emotionally volatile, and intellectually arrogant foil to Data’s serene logic. Spiner’s performance is the episode’s undeniable cornerstone, making Lore instantly memorable and establishing a recurring antagonist of genuine menace.

Spiner’s exceptional work was amplified by Rob Bowman’s direction, which, alongside Ron Jones’s atmospheric score, drew heavy inspiration from Ridley Scott’s Alien. While the physical sets sometimes betrayed their studio-bound, plastic origins reminiscent of the TOS era, the sequence depicting the Enterprise’s confrontation with the crystalline entity showcased notable advancements. The nascent use of CGI for the entity itself, though primitive by modern standards, represented a significant step forward in Star Trek’s visual effects, lending the cosmic horror a tangible, otherworldly presence.

Nevertheless, Datalore is significantly hampered by substantial script deficiencies. It adopts a cavalier attitude towards continuity and features stretches of clunky, expository dialogue that feel forced. Most egregiously, the plot hinges on the near-total incompetence of the Enterprise crew. With the singular, grating exception of Wesley Crusher – whose infallible intuition and access to the ship’s systems defy belief – the senior staff behave with astonishing stupidity and carelessness. Picard and his crew fail to notice Lore’s glaring deviations from Data’s established behaviour, despite overwhelming evidence. Their collective gullibility severely undermines the episode’s tension and strains credulity to breaking point, making Wesley’s eventual triumph feel less like cleverness and more like narrative necessity born of the writers’ need to sideline the actual command crew.

One of the script’s saving graces, however, lies in its exploration of humanity’s definition. Roddenberry, through Picard’s insightful remarks, explicitly expands the concept beyond biological humans. Picard observes that humans are, in essence, complex biological machines, no less mechanical in function than Data. This philosophical thread is crucial to maintaining the optimistic, progressive core of Roddenberry’s vision, suggesting that consciousness and personhood are not exclusive to organic life. Furthermore, the episode pays direct homage to Isaac Asimov, the seminal science fiction author who profoundly shaped robotics discourse. By equipping Data and Lore with "positronic brains" – a concept central to Asimov’s I, Robot – the script acknowledges its intellectual debt and situates Data’s ethical dilemmas within a respected literary tradition.

Ultimately, despite its narrative stumbles and questionable character decisions, Datalore is a solid and fundamentally important episode. It successfully fills a major narrative void concerning one of TNG’s most compelling characters, providing essential context for Data’s existence and motivations. More significantly, it constructs a vital foundation for the series’ future. The episode establishes Dr. Soong, the crystalline entity, and, most crucially, Lore as a recurring antagonist. Lore’s introduction as a charismatic, morally bankrupt counterpart to Data opened vast storytelling potential, exploited effectively in later seasons. His presence, alongside the lingering threat of the crystalline entity, enriched TNG’s mythology, proving that Datalore, for all its flaws, was far more than a mere origin story – it was the cornerstone upon which some of the series’ most enduring conflicts and philosophical inquiries would be built. Its ambition to grapple with artificial consciousness, even amidst its scriptural shortcomings, secures its place as a pivotal, if imperfect, chapter in Star Trek’s legacy.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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