“Are you prepared for the kind of death you’ve earned, little man?”
For an episode that is generally well-remembered and which ceded Star Trek: The Next Generation one of its most popular recurring characters in Data’s evil duplicate, Lore, “Datalore” is rather preposterously written and scarcely hangs together at all as a final episode. Were it not for Spiner’s committed performance as the inexplicably berserk Lore (psychological motivation for the character would have to wait three long years), “Datalore” would likely stand at the bottom of Season One’s trash heap. It’s something of a further shame, in that the episode represents Gene Roddenberry’s last writing credit on any incarnation of Star Trek. “Datalore” was notoriously hard to script, produce, and direct, and it shows in its numerous inconsistencies, narrative dead ends, and outright bits of stupidity – none more egregious than the entire bridge crew (save Wesley) being so out to lunch that they can be convinced that the evil identical android is not the good identical android just because his face occasionally twitches. Because no one could ever fake a facial twitch, right guys?
It doesn’t make a lick of sense that Data would be unaware of Dr. Soong’s presence at the Omicron Theta colony, and would not have explored the colonists’ memories – to which he has access – till this moment, 26 years after his discovery there. In fact, the entire colonists’ memories runner goes nowhere in the episode, and feels like an artifact from an earlier draft that Roddenberry forgot to delete. (Several years later, another episode, “Silicon Avatar,” would pick up the thread – to no great effect there, either.) The chronology of the destruction of the colony doesn’t make any sense either, unless it was under repeated, sustained attack by the Crystalline Entity – which is the only way to explain how or why the colony not only had time to construct an entire underground base in which to hide from the monster, but why the colonists’ children actually had time (and familiarity with the Entity) to make doodles of the fucking thing.
Between Lore’s “hey! I’m really evil!” theme music and his nasty facial tick, “Datalore” makes zero effort whatsoever to conceal its “evil twin” angle from the moment Lore is discovered, which zaps the narrative tension and treats the audience as stupidly as the episode treats the Enterprise crew. Ron Jones incorporates some nice echoes of Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien score in his soundtrack for the episode, but on the whole it’s not a highlight of his long and substantial contribution to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s canon of music. Director Rob Bowman shoots his way around the split-screen effects with aplomb, but Brent Spiner’s body double (who turns up a few times over the course of the series) is such a bad physical match for the actor that two-shots look laughable; so, too, are the prosthetic Data heads which appear here for the first time.
Also up first in the episode: our first glimpse of Data’s quarters – a nice grace note being the fact that the android has apparently volunteered to take a cabin with no window, as he wouldn’t care. We also get to see a phaser fired in mid-beam, and learn of Data’s off-switch, located in the small of his back. And for those wondering, “Datalore” has a few seconds of Data vs. Worf (or rather, Lore vs. Worf), though it’s no terrible surprise that the Klingon is outmatched.
One last thing: “Datalore,” like “The Naked Now” before it, evinces such a fantastically pre-internet conception of computers; here, as there, we watch an android “learn” by reading information off a computer screen at high speed. I’ve taken this for granted for most of my life, but re-watching the episode now, it finally occurs to me that this entire notion – of computers as non-interlinked objects – would have been the norm in 1987, and would have become completely obsolete only a handful of years later. It’s charming, in its way, as is the notion that Data, or Lore, would ever need to learn anything.
Update: I’m giving “Datalore” two Enterprises out of five.
My first presence on the internet was a Geocities site back in 1997, and having nothing better to do with it, I blogged about the new episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager that aired each week. Blogging The Next Generation is like that – for Star Trek: The Next Generation, every single episode, on blu-ray.