Star Trek Legend Walks In Famous Author’s Footsteps

You may need to buckle up here because this strange tale spans all the way from the 19th to the 24th century. In the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data,” the title android effectively ruins Geordi’s holodeck recreations of Sherlock Holmes stories because his perfect memory helps him instantly solve every mystery. His frustration at this along with Dr. Pulaski’s claiming that Data could never solve a unique mystery prompts Geordi to give the Enterprise computer a special task: to create an original mystery and a holodeck villain capable of defeating Data.

Of course, this spectacularly backfires, and “Elementary, Dear Data” establishes that the computer gave Moriarty both self-awareness and access to the ship’s computer. He uses this to mess with the ship’s stabilizers and try to extort the crew for his freedom. Captain Picard manages to save the day (at least, until Moriarty reappears a few years later), and while it flew over most audience’s heads, Geordi La Forge’s actions in this episode had Sherlock fans grinning for a very special reason.

You see, La Forge’s motivation in “Elementary, Dear Data” was a perfect mirror of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was writing the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Final Problem.” Back then, Doyle worried that focusing on his famous detective stories was keeping him from writing something more serious. He intended to kill off Holmes in this story, but he quickly ran into a problem…how could he kill a character that he had established as so smart that he bordered on the invincible?

The writer’s answer to this conundrum was to create Moriarty, a genius supervillain and criminal mastermind who was the evil equal of Sherlock Holmes. The short story famously ends with these two characters dying by falling into a gorge while fighting one another. Due to fan demand, Doyle eventually brought Sherlock Holmes back; similarly, fan demand led Paramount to bring Moriarty from “Elementary, Dear Data” back a few years later in the memorable follow-up episode “Ship In a Bottle.”

As you can tell, having Geordi La Forge accidentally make a supervillain out of Moriarty because Data was just too smart perfectly echoes why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created this literary legend in the first place. Fortunately, the android’s holodeck adventure didn’t end as poorly, and both he and his holographic foe survived both this and their later encounter. Those encounters wouldn’t have happened in the first place, though, if everybody’s favorite engineer (someone who has a tendency to worship famous figures like Zefram Cochrane) hadn’t accidentally walked in the footsteps of history’s greatest mystery writer.