In Star Trek, Commander Data is socially awkward because he lacks training data. This might be because he was built and developed in isolation from the rest of society.
Yeah, but Data is actually intelligent and brilliant. ChatGPT is often just giving best averaged answers based on what’s most likely - and still hallucinates even in the latest version.
I haven’t used it, but it happens even in the demo they showed.
Technically he’s a Spock stand in: hyper logical but not quite getting humanity.
This characteristic… In fact lots of characteristics get shared and mix and matched across DS9, TNG, and Voyager.
In Voyager Seven of Nine and The Doctor are the “not quite understanding humanity” characters. In DS9, it’s Odo.
Ideally newer Trek would do this too, but it might also want to have:
A quirky or modded engineer: LaForge, O’Brien, Scotty, Be’lana.
A superior strength character: Spock, Data, Odo, Worf, Seven of Nine, Tuvok.
…and maybe a couple of psychic characters, Spock, Kes, Tuvok, Seven of Nine, Benjamin.
You’ll probably also need some mentally brilliant characters, a Klingon, and someone who doesn’t fit in due to a negative background and is jaded about it.
…a brilliant doctor helps too.
These characteristics are needed so you can write certain storyline types and stand alone episodes.
Data was very interested in becoming more human, thus the Pinocchio reference. Spock had bemused disdain for humans and had no desire to be more like them.
The use of the characters throughout the shows are as you described though, a useful foil to show humanity through.
It’s great that the two characters discuss this topic, I think it’s in the multi-part TNG episode where Ambassador Spock is creating a dissident movement on Romulus.
He lacks emotions. He can’t understand what others are feeling because he doesn’t feel things. He was built and developed with the human colonists where Soong worked. He lived with them, and their input shaped his programming; he was not kept in isolation apart from the society around them (though he did have those memories wiped when Soong implanted the memories of the colonists when the Crystalline Entity attacked). The only thing he lacks is an emotional understanding, since he has no emotions.
That was one of my thoughts, the amount of social data he could get from Starfleet Academy would be huge. Its not like he needed to study the material. I guess there’s an argument that Data was only as social as he was because of the academy. Or maybe the computation needed to make the officer decisions are much more intensive than we think, contrary to what Lower Decks shows heh,kidding I love that show.
You make another good point. He would have started as an Ensign, not an officer. Should have been a few more years os socializing there before being promoted.
Could’ve sworn Data was built specifically to be that way because the prior model unnerved people, and also conspired to kill an entire camp of federation colonists.
He also learned more social skills with experience during the show, but retained some level of awkwardness from his early experiences. This is in line with how people work.
Data/B4/Lore were all partitioned in the same positronic brain that was in a “new” Data body.
And Lore and Data had an internal fight over the body.
That seems unusual, that one positronic brain can handle all three of those at once, but it sounds like a potentially interesting episode.
I feel bad for B4, sounds like he’d be way out classed by the other two.
Also you really should give Strange New Worlds a try at least.
I might if it ever comes to a service that I have a sub to where I can see it.
But fundamentally, I’m kind of a ‘substance over style’ type of person, and all the new Nu Trek stuff seems like all style and all amateurish storytelling retcon, no world building/lore substance.
I kind of feel like that if the writers can’t respect the lore and the world building in the Star Trek shows that came before them, and only doing them lip service later on when they’re desperate and pandering for viewership, then they’re not respectful of me or my viewing time, and hence not worth my effort to ‘engage’ (pardon the pun).
But I will keep an eye out for Strange New Worlds, and if I see an episode on cable/streaming service, I’ll check it out. I’ve seen some shorts on YouTube, and it peaked my interest a little bit.
I like Picard and Discovery because they do better at this. At least they have a story arc over a season, and both seem to fit with canon well enough for me. The first season of Discovery is the best Star Trek ever
Strange New World is also good, but it took a lot longer for me to get into because it is more “story of the week”, similar to older series. Plus the previews/ads did not appeal to me at all. Eventually I did get over it and enjoyed the show for what it is
Ah, I got mixed up because the original point was about TNG. I guess I somehow missed that he said Picard, meaning the show. My bad. Picard is definitely Nu Trek.
Data is just information, while lore is storytelling. It’s why Data’s character is more clinical in behavior while his brother Lore is more chaotic and “human”
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