TNG s2e9 “The Measue of a Man”
One of my favorite episodes exposing that just because someone is different and built differently doesn’t mean there less of a person. Idk how you all don realize that this show has extreme amounts of subtle political tones to it. As someone who is autistic I even see it. It a show and sometimes not everything in it lines up. It’s for entertainment. that episode helped me realize that just because I’m autistic and trans doesn’t mean I’m less of a person because I’m different.
That episode annoyed the shit out of me.
First off the entire premise of a court martial or hearing is freaking stupid.
The admiral forcing Riker to “prosecute” Data is stupid.
The idea that Starfleet (or the federation) doesn’t already have some list of qualifications for sentience or sapience or whatever term you want to use to say ‘they’re like us’; is patently stupid. And we’ll add to it that an Admiral whose job it is to weigh in on these matters, wouldn’t have checked if such a test existed, is even more so.
The only realistic thing in this episode is some exploitive asshole shopping around for an incompetent (or bribable?) judge.
but what bugs me most of all? when Riker makes the “So he can be turned off,” argument, Picard didn’t immediately whip out a phaser and say, “yeah. So can you. <ptssssrrrshhhh>” and then have Crusher bring him back just to make a point.
Another nit about Riker’s argument: at one point he detaches Data’s arm to demonstrate that he’s a machine. Four years later Riker’s arm was amputated and reattached by the subspace aliens in Schisms.
You could consider that karma.
well, I’d settle for that bit where Riker takes his arm off, “I’d like to call Riker to the stand, please”, and then a curt gesture to Worf, armed with a batleth.
(if you’re getting the sense that I don’t like Riker… there’s a reason for that. )
Look, just because the affair didn’t turn out well doesn’t mean you should have bad feelings towards Riker. Will has to do what Will has to do and there are just so many life forms out there that he has yet to fuck.
Man, okay, I’m being pedantic, but it’s a pet peeve of mine, so bear with me. It’s “court-martial”, not “court marshall”. “Martial” means “pertaining to war” or, by extension, the military.
Apparently the process of setting up a hearing and appointing advocates that way is borrowed from US navy processes, which is a fun factoid I read somewhere, but it does raise questions about why Starfleet seems to model its legal system and a bunch of other stuff on an archaic national military tradition despite being neither American nor the military. But then again, it actually isn’t the first time Trek sets up that bit of lore, since it’s also the framing of the flashbacks for The Menagerie in TOS. Where, by the way, they outright say Starfleet has the death penalty, which just seems insane and barbaric.
The legal argument makes less sense, and I sympathise with the impulse to want a specific standard for sentience. But again, Trek shows a bunch of times they don’t have one. TNG alone has like what? Three, four examples of episodes where the plot hinges on whether a nanomachine or a non-humanoid entity or some other random hostile thing is sentient or not.
The sentience argument also crops up again in DISCO after the ship absorbs the sphere data and becomes known as Zora.
also in the episode with data’s daughter, Lal, and with the exocomps, and with Vger (er, that was the voyager probe,) and with the M-5 unit and then if we go into non-AI/synthetic… we got the Horta and the microbes in Home Soil and such.
fixed the typo, I should have known better.
In any case, like, the Prime Directive absolutely would require a robust, well crafted definition. Like. without one… are Serpent Worms sentient? I mean, they probably have some form of sensory apparatus, right? they feel. yet how often do we see starfleet officers slurping down gagh? or beaming down to some random world and fucking up the environment for science? at least some of those plants and all the animals “feel”.
In order for the Prime Directive to be enforced… it would have to be something that’s not totally left to arbitrary standards. Even if the courts were ran by some of the galaxy’s most notorious stoners… it’d still have to have some level of precedent.
And it’s not like this isn’t the first time they came up with artificial intelligence that’s possibly sentient. You got Vger, the M-5 multitronic thingamadoo. Then y you got things that weren’t immediately recognized as sentient- Horta, the microbe thingies discovered earlier in Home Soil. the Crystalline Entity in Datalore.
this question would come up every single time a ships captain makes first contact with a new species. it’s part of why they have the prime directive.
Like, IRL, JAG-lady would have just interviewed Picard, maybe Riker or some of the other senior crew, Maybe consulted Troi. Sat down with Data and worked through whatever test would almost certainly exist for guidelines and then render a decision. (this technically would have been a deposition.) And that decision would have been “Maddox you’re an ass for wasting our time with this shit.” (maybe worded a bit more politely.)
The underlying purpose of the article is to show that while some in starfleet are… not as enlightened, most of starfleet is and it makes the right decisions. But like. nope nope. That this went that far shows they’re not nearly as enlightened as they think they are.
Which could have been a very sinsister and subversive backplot that could have been amazing, I guess. but then they stuffed it down like it wasn’t. (I mean, a lot of people in the US think our legal system is amazing and fair and enlightened. it’s not.)
Yeah, sorry for being pedantic about it, it really isn’t a big deal.
You WOULD think the Prime Directive would include better definitions for both upper and lower bounds, right? And yet it remains one of the most inconsistent, arbitrarily applied fake regulations throughout the entire show. They can’t decide if it applies to direct contact, interference, interference but only if it’s widely known or whatever the hell.
Most of the fanbase seems to interpret it as “no direct contact unless they have warp”, but that is definitely not what is consistently implied at all.
And don’t get me started on the lower bound problem. Somehow it’s not cool to rescue a child from certain death, but it’s cool to quietly divert a comet, but also it’s cool to take a freshly born AI or nanomachine cluster you just created yourself and tell them everything about Starfleet.
My read on the intent is certainly that while Starfleet is all high and mighty they’re a bad week away from enacting dehumanizing regulations, and that this is something they’ve done multiple times in their history (as far as humans are concerned, anyway).
Which is a super enlightened argument to make in TNG. It gets a bit murkier now that the canon is that they did indeed end up creating a race of slaves out of Data’s template. But hey, I can pretend that Picard didn’t happen and so can you.
It also annoyed me because the ending of the TOS episode I, Mudd was about how the androids were given freedom and independence and were now able to form an independent society and develop as a culture.
But suddenly androids don’t count?
The arguments made should already be sorted, undoubtedly. It’s the grandiose speeches and courtroom drama in and of itself that make it memorable. Strange New Worlds s2e2 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” is a more worthy entry.
I dunno. I think Picard taking a phaser to Riker because he’s being a dick would be even more memorable. Glorious. Possibly even grandiose if Picard put a little brandish in the draw.
Lets just be realistic here, the Prime Directive wouldn’t work if they hadn’t already sorted them. first off, the PD is restricted to sentient life or cultures. If it weren’t, eating a non-replicated salad would break the PD. or keeping a houseplant. Which, then would obviously require some highly codified definition of what ‘sentient’ was- and almost certainly would have already had massive amounts of precedent, including standardized tests to be applied whenever someone who might be sentient is found.
Presumably, the only reason the PD would not apply to Data is because he was “made”. but the PD applies to clones, which are also made.
“Did you run the sentience tests?” “yes…?” “Did he pass?” “but he was manufactured!! they don’t apply?” “Did he pass?”
Maddox new this, is which is probably why he waited until Data was off Earth, or so far on the fringe that the only appropriate place to hear this was on a fringe space station so new that the JAG officer didn’t have enough jurors and had to do a drumhead trial.
Absolutely the hell not. Ad Astra Per Aspera actually has all the issues people sometimes attribute to Measure of a Man with the added problem of being effectively a rehash of Measure of a Man with a much worse script.
I mean, in Ad Astra they are literally having a hearing about an officer having illegal genetics because she was modified by her parents. The entire notion is absurd, as the implication is that had she disclosed her mods she would have been rejected while hiding her mods is itself illegal. So suddenly Starfleet doesn’t just outlaw making genetic modifications, it straight up makes people WITH genetic modifications illegal.
Which is crazy and wouldn’t even fly on any semi-reasonable legal system today. It’s straight up genocidal, as presented. At the very least it’s actively racist. And for lore reasons they end up needing to simultaneously let her off the hook while keeping what is now recontextualized as outright apartheid stand because it needs to remain in place to still not make much sense when it applies to a different character later in the lore.
I get what they were going for, but man, it was one of the early instances of SNW wanting to do a thing and not quite getting the point of the thing they were trying to do.
So suddenly Starfleet doesn’t just outlaw making genetic modifications, it straight up makes people WITH genetic modifications illegal.
I wouldn’t say suddenly, that was what was made clear in DS9 as well. Bashir was going to have to go to whatever asylum they put the crazy augments he met in.
Honestly, it’s ludicrous to take the position that because of one war on one planet centuries before it was formed, all genetic modification in the Federation is illegal. “Oh, you carry the sickle cell gene? Nope, we’re not modifying your DNA. Enjoy the anaemia.”
Why the hell would the other founding members agree to that anyway? If anything, considering their whole purity thing, you would think Andorians would be in favor of it.
I think in-canon there are exceptions for medical treatment, although writers seem to forget about that depending on what metaphor they’re trying to put on top of augments. Not that it’s particularly consistent anyway, early in TNG there is a whole federation colony of genetically altered psychic rapidly aging children with infectious progeria and nobody seems particularly outraged by this.
And yeah, it doesn’t work in DS9, either, but that’s why you shouldn’t be trying to make a prequel to DS9 where you debate that specific issue in court. It just doesn’t work to give the episode a feel good ending to then leave the issue unresolved for centuries for nerdy lore reasons.
All fair. My guess would be Kurtzman and the suits at Paramount not wanting to “shake the apple cart” more than necessary.
Nah, it’s a pretty consistent issue with the writing in SNW, honestly. And it’s not like they had another option, given that the show is very early in the timeline and the lore is all set.
The problem is wanting to do Measure of a Man around this idea for the character in the first place. It didn’t fit but they went for it anyway. They could have come up with a different, interesting sci-fi setup, but they just had to be referential. Which, admittedly, does seem like an issue with how the show is conceptualized, at least as of S2.
Very easy fix: Data is captured by people on a planet who argue that they can keep him because he isn’t alive. The Enterprise crew has to work within the system because blah blah Prime Directive or treaty negotiations or whatever.
Suddenly the whole episode works.
Hard disagree. The entire point of the episode is reflecting on how “we” (as in, presumably the US, which is what the Federation has always been a stand-in for) dehumanize people for convenience. Very much in the first person. There’s a reason it’s Goldberg making the slavery argument and not, say, Troy.
If you turn it into something that happens to a different, less “evolved” society it suddenly is no longer a metaphor of acknowledging the faults it suddenly isn’t self reflection and instead becomes gloating about how the US fixed racism.
So yeah, no, it’s pretty fundamental to the point that it’s Starfleet’s legal system that is threatening to dehumanize a sentient being, and not anybody else’s.
Man, it always gets me.
Not even the Picard speech, although it’s a good Picard speech.
It’s the slavery bit with Guinan. Goldberg is gut-wrenchingly good in that scene. She defines the character, the episode, the subject and the entire show with the energy of a “very special episode” but the gravitas and emotional punch of genuinely all-timer good sci-fi.
It’s too bad Whoopi Goldberg has ruined so much goodwill by being generally unpleasant because she really is a terrific actor.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m not particularly keen on projecting artists onto the finished product, particularly compared with the average outrage culture of US terminally online people. Even if I was, she isn’t a presence in my local media, so “generally unpleasant” wouldn’t be a factor anyway.
How can I be a good man if we don’t discuss what a good man is?
There might be a few bits of discussion glossed over. Furthermore…
This is like “Thanks, I’m Cured,” for Data lol
A platitude nestled amongst a plethora.
Oh, yes,
JefeEl Guapo, you have a plethora
My thoughts every time I see that episode:
That’s a great quote. I like it.
The stoicism of Marcus Aurelius rings true even now. Also a brilliant TNG episode, well worth the occasional rewatch.
Idk, kind of a trash philosophy when applied.
I’m sure all the world’s greatest dictators thought themselves the best of men.
The assumption being that no outside influence or previous experience be considered is a bit short sided. Of course, so is the originating quotation. We try to hope for the best and work with what we’ve got.
But we should always strive to learn more rational, logical, infallible truths than we currently know.
He’s not wrong, dammit. He’s just an asshole.
Being a good person is a trash philosophy?
Right, now go read the second of two sentences in my comment.
So… don’t be a good person because you could actually be one of the world’s greatest dictators. Yeah, that makes sense.
Good being purely subjective and constantly misappropriated by evil makes it a pretty shit philosophy, yes.
Being “good” without democratically and meritocratically defining an objective good is a shit philosophy.
