“The intervals between blinks were governed by the Fourier system, the same mathematical system my father used to give my blinking pattern the appearance of randomness.”
And now, because we’ve done the one with Geordi’s Mom, and had a final lap for Deanna’s Mom, it’s time to do the one with Data’s Mom. Before the season is up, we’ll do the one with Worf’s Other Brother, the one with Picard’s Son, the one with Wesley’s Tribe, and the one with Ro’s Surrogate Father (Who Is Picard). Fucking hell. The only two people on the goddamned crew who don’t get late-game family adjuncts in Season Seven of Star Trek: The Next Generation are Riker (because we’ve already covered that) and Beverly (because she’s Wesley’s Mom, dammit, and she can’t have any further family relationships than that, right?). Before the year is out, we’ll even get around to the one with the Enterprise’s Baby. Because why the fuck not?
To the matter at hand: Data has a mom now. Next Gen was always playing fast and loose with the continuity of Data’s creation, particularly around the singularity of Data himself. He went from the only one of his kind at the inception of the series, to one of a pair with the introduction of Lore, and eventually a trio with B-4 in the mix. And in addition to ginning up an opportunity to bring Dr. Soong himself back to life in Season Four, we now add the wrinkle that somehow in all that, Soong perfected the android creation process to such a degree that he could create a Frankenstein’s duplicate of his own dead wife, and that she would live unwitting as a human being for thirty years – and would have immediately made the (rather correct, IMHO) decision to divorce Soong and get the hell outta there. Even for software development cycles, that’s a pretty rapid turn.
Fionnula Flanagan (who would go on to kick various forms of ass on LOST, and yes, in my headcanon Data and Daniel Faraday are brothers) is a welcome addition as Juliana Tainer, Data’s mother, There isn’t a lot of story here, besides Data getting to know her – but it’s an opportunity to circle back on a lot of the… ahem… Data “lore” that has sprung forth over the course of the series. We revisit Lore and Lal and Dr. Soong, the latter in person, and with one of the worst prosthetic makeup jobs imaginable.
But the result is an episode without a dramatic core, one of the rare instances in the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the writing proposes no conflict for the lead character, nor any in-episode conceptual arc. We find out Juliana is Data’s mother right away; he accepts it fairly quickly; he cottons to the fact that she is an android by the end of the third act; and the episode ends with Juliana’s belief in her humanity intact, after a single-scene dilemma for the android.
It’s a character piece only, and because we’ve strip-mined pretty much everything there is to do with Data from a character perspective, it’s a bit thin. Still, it’s fun to listen to Flanagan tell us stories about young, rude, happily nude Data running around Omicron Theta. And there’s a minor detail slipped into the dialogue that, apparently, no one including Brent Spiner picked up on: the episode announces that Data has an aging program (as does Juliana), explaining the character’s/actor’s visible progression throughout the series and, I suppose, leaving the door open for 75-year-old Spiner to be playing Data in Star Trek XVIII. One can hope.
Blogging The Next Generation is winding down to the end, as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The final season is in stores now.