My wife and I are rewatching The Next Generation and just finished Measure of a Man, the episode in season 2 in which Data’s personhood is legally debated and his life hangs in the balance.
I genuinely found this episode infuriating in its stupidity. It’s the first episode we skipped even a little bit. It was like nails on a chalkboard.
There is oodles of legal precedent that Data is a person. He was allowed to apply to Starfleet, graduated, became an officer and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander with all the responsibilities and privileges thereof.
Comparing him to a computer and the judge advocate general just shrugging and going to trial over it is completely idiotic. There are literal years and years of precedent that he’s an officer.
The problem is compounded because Picard can’t make the obvious legal argument and is therefore stuck philosophizing in a court room, which is all well and good, but it kind of comes down to whether or not Data has a soul? That’s not a legal argument.
The whole thing is so unbelievably ludicrous it just made me angrier and angrier. It wasn’t the high minded, humanistic future I’ve come to know and love, it was a kangaroo court where reason and precedent took a backseat to feeling and belief.
I genuinely hated it.
To my surprise, in looking it up, I discovered it’s considered one of the high water marks for the entire show. It feels like I’m taking crazy pills.
Every Star Trek episode involving a trial shows that the way Starfleet conducts its justice system is incredibly stupid.
The Menagerie, Measure of a Man (and like 3 other TNG episodes), Ad Astra Per Aspera, that DS9 one where the Klingons want to extradite Worf… all stupid.
The only one you can’t really blame for being stupid in this regard is Voyager, because they always have the “we aren’t in the Alpha Quadrant” excuse to fall back on.
There must be something to their judicial system, taking Voyager as the example, clearly as soon as they are beyond the reach of Federation justice captains turn into genocidal war criminals in very short order.
I mean… they’re genocidal war criminals inside the system.
Sisko sure was.
The important thing is that he could live with it
Janeway murdering Tuvix was a cliff for me. Couldn’t come back from that, no matter her moral equivocating.
I think it’s so funny that people are so pissed at her about Tuvix and just ignore the fact that she essentially tried to wipe out Species 8472. But that’s okay because they’re “the bad guys.” Every last one of the trillions of them.
As someone who grew up on TNG, and Picard, I just never found Janeway to embody any of the qualities of a Starfleet Captain, as they had been outlined. She lacked the essential intellectual curiosity that was supposed to be the bedrock of exploration.
So I can chalk it up to the writers, but that’s still an L for the series, as a whole.
I agree, janeway was straight up a bad captain. I can dismiss some of it as being stranded, but she barely towed the starfleet line.
*just fyi, the idiom is you toe a line, as in step up to the line.
He’ll probably invoke some kind of godhood defence. The federation is pretty fucked up in general.
Trek writers really revel in the idea that the Federation and Starfleet are actually super flawed and not a utopia at all.
Which is a little annoying honestly.
they grew up with the idea that their country was a “shining city on a hill” and that ideal was shattered. they want to put it into their fiction, and they got hired for star trek. the federation is the “shining city on a hill” equivalent in star trek. At least that’s what I’m taking from it.
Maxwell too