Inheritance

The struggling writing team digs up another family member from nowhere, this time it's Data's mother

The Enterprise is called in to avert a natural disaster, like it used to do back in season 3. Technobabble to the rescue! Data and LaForge have buckets of the stuff just lying around, thankfully, so after a briefing about ‘ferro-plasmic infusion’, a woman declares herself to be Data’s mother because, of course she is. Data has some difficulty accepting his new maternal upgrade, but then they’re getting on like a warp core on fire, going through his old paintings and playing string duets in a weirdly empty Ten Forward. Then suddenly she reveals that she lied about not being able to rescue Data from Omicron Theta - she wanted to leave him behind! Shock reveal. But that’s nothing - the big reveal is that Data’s mum is an android! Is this twist enough to save the episode from irrelevance? Well, it works for some people, anyway.

Words

This episode originated as a pitch from Dan Koeppel, who was a mountain bike journalist. Indeed, he was editor for the magazine Mountain Bike during his time working on this episode. This is his only Trek contribution, and he only has one other writing credit, as co-writer for the 1994 movie The Lost Words. How Jeri Taylor came to accept this pitch I don’t know, but René Echevarria was assigned to make revisions, and these were significant enough that he shares the teleplay credit with Koeppel.

It’s packed full of technobabble phrases like ‘ferro-plasmic infusion’ and ‘plasma infusion units’ all of which basically covers for the idea of reheating the planet’s core. It’s a weird kind of disaster, to be honest, as it can only be discussed in technobabble. I suspect that’s the reason for it being here: it’s a cheap kind of disaster because we cannot see it. Of course Michael Okuda can make images for anything - check out this Okudagram that’s absolutely about ferro-plasmic wotsits and not just a pie chart with sections coloured orange!

Fans consider this story to have a bit of a logical gap in it. The holographic version of Dr Soong claims that Juliana left him. But if she’d already left him, how did he get the information chip into his ex-wife’s robotic clone? We could paper over this problem by saying that the information chip was updated remotely, I suppose, but it requires a bit of a stretch of the imagination. However, we might preserve the logic of the episode by suggesting the information chip was linked to Juliana-bot’s positronic matrix, and therefore could update holo-Soong’s perspective as required. This is consistent with the fact that it was necessary to return the information chip to her circuitry to reactivate her. I’m content with this explanation, but as ever your warp speed may vary.

Philosophically, however, I have issues with this episode’s claim: “The truth is that in every way that matters, she is Juliana Soong.” The implications of this claim are much more complex than it at first sounds. Firstly, it pre-supposes that we are nothing but our mind and memories, which massively underestimates what it means to be embodied as a human. This is a nasty hangover from Descartes’ philosophy that causes a lot of philosophical problems these days. Secondly, it implies that if the flesh and blood Juliana were still alive there would be two of her. And this is an implausible conclusion. They would, just at a fundamental level, be two different beings, as we already explored in “Second Chances”. No, I must reject this assumption, for all that sci-fi fans believe it very strongly. There is far more to who we are than just our memories.

Acting Roles

The entire episode rests on the rapport between Brent Spiner’s Data and Fionnula Flanagan’s Juliana Tainer, and fans are divided on whether it works.

I’ve noticed it seems to rest to some extent on whether you’ve had prior experience of Flanagan - but despite her rather long career of both TV bit parts and cinematic roles, I don’t really associate her with anything. I don’t even remember her being in DS9 (which she was shortly before this), and I certainly don’t remember her from Enterprise after this. If you have fond memories of seeing her in something, please do share it in the comments!

Allegedly, our mountain biking guest writer named Juliana Tainer after mountain bike racer Juli Furtado, whose full first name is ‘Juliana’. Well, it makes a change from naming characters after people you've dated, I guess...

This episode marks the final time Brent Spiner plays Dr Noonien Soong.

It’s a fine performance such as it is, but it lacks the punch of his powerhouse outing in “Brothers”.

In support, we have William Lithgow as Pran Tainer, who I guess is Data’s step dad?

He has so little to do, it barely seems worth having put him through the hours in the make-up chair to attach his giant comedy ears.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Scenic artist Wendy Drapanas created this painting of Lal that appears as a prop.

Personally, I would rather have seen Data’s painting in the style of the early French impressionists but never mind.

SFX-wise, it’s a bit weak, with an Okudagram and a fair amount of Sound Stage 16 as Generic Alien Cave to carry the sci-fi premise, and zero matte paintings to make it look cool.

We do get to see inside an android, I suppose…

...but it's not like we haven’t seen this a hundred times before.

All in all, I’m pretty underwhelmed with this episode, which I barely remember seeing before, and feel confident I will forget once again. I didn’t remember that she was an android until about halfway through, and you’d think that at least the twist would stand out. Still, it’s not the worst exhuming of a family member in season seven, although it would have been a lot better if they’d sprung for a matte painting of the surface of the planet.

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