Star Trek’s Biggest Moral Dilemma Is One Big Plot Hole
Ask any given Star Trek fan, director, or actor what their favorite TNG episode is and they are likely to say “Measure of a Man,” the episode where Data must legally prove that he is alive and not simply Starfleet property. The story makes for an excellent moral dilemma, and it’s genuinely difficult to hear Captain Picard’s passionate defense of his android colleague without getting the shivers. Unfortunately, this moral dilemma is basically a plot hole, because in an earlier episode, Dr. Pulaski bluntly states that Data’s service record declares that he is “alive.”
Measure Of A Man
We’re going to have to recap some Star Trek stories and characters for this big Data plot hole to make much sense, starting with everyone’s favorite episode. “Measure of a Man” is about an ambitious Starfleet cyberneticist who wants to try to create more androids like Data in a process that may be harmful or even fatal to this artificial officer.
Data quits the service altogether when he is ordered to comply, leading to a messy trial (albeit one with a happy ending for our hero) about whether Data is a sentient being or just an exotic piece of Starfleet property.
A Major Retcon?
To most Star Trek fans, this Data plot made perfect sense: after all, the character is a machine who aspires to be a man, and this was a trial that was all about whether he was more man than machine…whether he was alive in any meaningful way. However, to fans with a good memory, this entire trial was either completely meaningless or the result of a pretty big retcon. That’s because in the earlier season 2 episode “Where Silence Has Lease,” Dr. Pulaski mentions to Data that “Your service record says that you are alive…I must accept that.”
Pulaski
In case you don’t remember, Pulaski was only on the show during the second season of The Next Generation, and her cranky character was very much in the spirit of the curmudgeonly Dr. McCoy from The Original Series. In fact, many assume that her verbal sparring with Data was an attempt to recreate the Spock/McCoy dynamic of the original show.
However, the Star Trek fandom mostly hated how she treated Data like just another machine, and the line above is her grudgingly admitting that she has to consider Data “alive” because Starfleet does.
Alive
You can see the problem, of course: if he was considered “alive” in the second episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s second season, it doesn’t make any sense that seven episodes later, we have to have a big trial to determine if Data was alive or not.
It’s possible that the later episode was intended to retcon the earlier one, but it’s far more likely that the producers simply overlooked the discrepancy.
Season 2 was greatly affected by the 1988 writer’s strike, forcing producers to use scripts they already had. “Measure of a Man” was originally a spec script submitted by Melinda Snodgrass, someone who wrote this before Pulaski’s comment ever aired onscreen.
She later ended up becoming a writer for the show but left after season 3 due to butting heads with showrunner Michael Piller.
You Can Still Enjoy It
None of this Star Trek trivia should necessarily keep you from enjoying “Measure of a Man”…it’s a great Data episode, and the extended version on the Blu-Rays is even better. However, this story might be a reminder that for as much as we love this franchise, it’s fine not to treat everything the characters like Pulaski say as deep, sacrosanct canon. Sometimes, it’s enough as a fan to just turn your brain off (no assistance from Riker required) and just enjoy a brilliant hour of television.
