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>The fact that they sent Data to starfleet academy, gave him a commission in the starfleet, let him attain the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and then decide that actually he's a machine that can be dismantled seems like quite a turn.

Data is basically an Isaac Asimov android (down to the positronic brain) and Measure of a Man is an Asimov-type story whose tropes don't entirely fit within in the Trek universe.

It makes no sense within the context of the Trek universe that Data is unable to use contractions for instance - but it makes sense in the context of how a robot might have been conceived of in the 1940s.

by jordanb6 hours ago|

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Interestingly there are other episodes where starfleet officers are weirdly prejudiced against Data. For instance in the episode Redemption II when Data takes command of a starship and the crew doesn't want to serve under him.

There are also a few early episodes of Voyager where the crew treat the doctor badly.

It seems odd in a universe where these people are having relationships and children with aliens from another planet, that they'd be weird about computerized people.

My retconn is that there must have been a lot of stochastic parrot/AI psychosis in the Star Trek universe when they first started making Majel Barrett-voice computers.

Maybe lots of people got confused and thought they were talking to a person when they started having conversations with the computer, and this lead to an over-correction where people were highly disposed to say "this machine isn't a person" even when it presents like one.

by krapp3 hours ago|

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My personal headcanon is that every Star Trek series takes place in its own universe, parallel to the others. That's the only way it makes sense that Data as an android is viewed as a unique being when in TOS Harry Mudd was grifting an entire planet of fembots and no one batted an eye.

by jordanb34 minutes ago|

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Roddenberry did not want TNG or even the original-cast movies to maintain tight continuity with TOS because he thought a lot of stuff in TOS was hokey and campy. He wanted the movies and TNG to set a more serious tone in a more believable universe.

TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT and the movies were all fairly explicitly in the same universe and with characters referencing things that happen in other series and a reasonable effort at continuity.

A example of this is the ENT episode where they meet the Ferengi. It had been established as cannon already that Picard made first contact with the Ferengi on USS Stargazer like 150 years later, so they just added this scene where the ENT characters memories of the event was wiped, so that the "official first contact" could still be Stargazer.

The Neutrek stuff isn't in the TNG universe for a variety of reasons, although I think part of it is they didn't want to put the work in to maintaing continuity. None of the TNG era producers or show runners were involved and nobody they wanted to hire really knew the lore.

That being said I don't think there's really a continuity problem with Mudd's androids because he didn't make them they were from another galaxy, and the fembots weren't really implied to be sentient except when they had a human brain put in them.

TNG kept "accidentally" making sentient machines from Data/Lore to the drilling robots, the nanites, and Professor Moriarty. It does seem strange after all that they still considered Data unique.