Shout out to SNW’s
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There are so many good lines in Measure of a Man…
The Commander is a physical representation of a dream - an idea, conceived of by the mind of a man. Its purpose: to serve human needs and interests. It’s a collection of neural nets and heuristic algorithms; its responses dictated by an elaborate software written by a man, its hardware built by a man. And now… and now a man will shut it off.
I am the culmination of one man’s dream. This is not ego, or vanity. But when Dr. Soong created me, he added to the substance of the universe. If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique, something wonderful will be lost. I cannot permit that. I must protect his dream.
A single Data - and forgive me, Commander - is a curiosity. A wonder, even. But thousands of Datas - isn’t that becoming… a race? And won’t we be judged by how we treat that race?
Consider that in the history of many worlds, there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no one else wants to do because it’s too difficult or too hazardous. And an army of Datas, all disposable… You don’t have to think about their welfare, you don’t think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people.
Now, the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this… creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be; it will reach far beyond this courtroom and this… one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom - expanding them for some… savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery? Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life; well, there it sits! - Waiting.
It sits there looking at me; and I don’t know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics - with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent nor qualified to answer those. But I’ve got to make a ruling, to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We have all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose.
That said, it also has Picard saying this line, which is pretty damn rich coming from him-
Starfleet is not an organization that ignores its own regulations when they become inconvenient.
This episode is by far my favorite for many reasons. It opposes the idea of people as property. It establishes Data as more than a quirky idea and firmly grounds him as a character. Also,something that I think is often avoided in discussions of this episode is that it shows Riker has an immense amount of loyalty and respect for Picard. He is willing to literally disassemble his friend in order to carry out his duty (even though it visibly upsets him). Even though a lot of the dialogue is poor (let’s be honest here that is 90% of Trek), the overall writing is brilliant.
My girlfriend is just about at that episode. I genuinely cannot wait to see her reaction to it and talk about that episode with her.
She is still very bummed about Yar though.
I’m still bummed about Yar and it’s been 30 years.
That’s understandable.
Starfleet was founded to seek out new life; well, there it sits!
That line always give me chills. It’s gotta be in my top ten favorite quotes in all of trek
Starfleet is not an organization that ignores its own regulations when they become inconvenient.
My Bachelor’s thesis in philosophy was on whether a sufficiently sophisticated AI should be given human rights. I spent over a year laboring on that thing.
Then several years later I’m watching TNG and this episode comes on and Picard had the exact same arguments as me. It made me regret not getting into Star Trek back in uni.
Best courtroom episode:
But also:
spoiler
Not at all a courtroom episode. Also, hurry up and read this. We rented this thread for a half-day and we’re running out of time.
The SNW courtroom episode made me cry so hard, I loved it.
And then they followed it up in the LD crossover episode, of all things!
Has she never been to Kansas?
They’d get old fast probably.
But Astra per Aspera is a banger
I don’t think the suggestion is endless courtroom episodes, only that the ones they do are very good, especially since they tend to focus on the values that the Federation stands for, values that many of us fans, maybe even most of us fans, agree with.
We would get tired of Q showing up if it happened more frequently too. What makes Q episodes so special is because it’s a treat when he shows up.
When it’s both 😀
To be honest I’m not impressed by CGI episodes and I find courtroom episodes mostly very boring.
First contact episodes featuring for us weird societies are the episodes for me!!
ad astra per aspera!
Honest question: Would a sci-fi show with the same premise of NCIS or JAG actually work? Do these courtroom Trek episodes work because we have many more episodes with other things going on?
Lary Niven was written some good scifi detective stories but the difficulty is that the mystery has to be solvable for it to be a good detective piece and it has to be leaning on things that don’t exist in our world for it to be scifi. To make a mystery solvable and not feel like the answer is pulled out of nowhere the “rules” of the scifi part have to be clear and firm and we’ll established. Unfortunately this is very difficult to pull off; Lary Niven is a top of the line scifi author but even he only managed to make about half of his scifi detective stories really work. It would be a moments undertaking to squeeze enough creative juice out for even a handful of scifi mysteries in a series I think. It would be fucking awesome though.
Yes, though the fact that Trek is already a very well-established world with very well-defined rules probably makes that at least a little bit easier.
I see what you mean.
Possibly the worst part of a bad detective story is relying on information not knowable to the reader until the big reveal at the end. I, for one, love stories that are puzzle-boxes that are solvable by the reader (in a way). Remove all familiarity to the story’s setting, as you do in sci-fi, and you now have to thread world-building alongside the mystery while not giving the whole plot away. And therein lies the temptation to toss out the puzzle-box premise and just drag the reader passively along for a ride; it sounds really hard to do. I’d give full credit to Mr. Niven: a 50% success rate sounds impressive, all things considered.
I’m glad to see that my point was so well understood! You and I are on the exact same page. I think Lary Niven did very well all things considered and I hope that the next generation of great writers will do even better.
I’ve thought more than a few episodes of Babylon 5 were basically “JAG in space,” so yeah. It could work.
I love both
Star Trek fans when they get a star wars crossover v when they get a phoenix wright crossover
I love any bottle episode. They tend to be more character driven and give a lot more room for standout performances.
I’ll rock the boat, and say that I equally love the scifi of the spaceships, and seeing them fly around and pewpew also gets me going.
Seeing the Defiant in combat was always one of my favorite parts of DS9.
It’s not exactly a happy moment but watching all the hundreds of Starfleet ships warp in at the end of Prodigy was awesome
Gotta have both, makes the courtroom eps all the better! Something something frank lloyd wright compression/release equivalent something something
I like the space battles… That’s why Voyager is one of my favorite series. It has the best action. 🥹
