How One Star Trek Tearjerker Created Some Tricky Canon
Do androids dream of making other androids?
Before artificial intelligence became a buzzword for a kind of souped-up autocomplete function on your phone, science fiction dealt with questions of self-aware AI within somewhat limited frameworks. This might sound counterintuitive since 20th-century sci-fi is lousy with robots, but the reality is mainstream sci-fi of the past basically only had two modes: Either droids were commonplace enough to be innocuous (Star Wars) or artificial life was dangerous, and often, deadly (2001, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica). While some sci-fi dodged AI by sticking it in a backstory (Dune), the strangest approach to future-tense AI oddly came from the Star Trek franchise in which the basic conceit throughout the canon is that sentient AI is almost always treated as rare. Or, at the very least, within one given episode or film, the audience is convinced of the scarcity of sentient AI because the situation is unique to that story.
Thirty-five years ago, during the week of March 12, 1990, Star Trek: The Next Generation dropped an iconic episode in which the basic conflict revolved around Trek’s unwillingness to imagine omnipresent intelligent robots in large amounts. Today, “The Offspring” remains a brilliant and touching story, but it also created a canon precedent that complicates the franchise to this day. Spoilers ahead.
Lal and her father, Data.
Like the Season 2 banger “The Measure of a Man,” the story of “The Offspring” focuses on whether or not resident android Data (Brent Spiner) has basic “human” rights. In the previous season, the answer was yes. But, in “The Offspring,” when Data (Brent Spiner) decides to build an android child, the answer is maybe not. Even Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) is initially upset with Data for not telling him about the new android, Lal (Hallie Todd). This reaction is interesting because it smartly highlights that even Picard — who literally went to the mat in the previous season to fight for Data’s rights — still doesn’t entirely consider Data an equal. Was Picard prejudiced against Data or, did he just never think Data would be nuts enough to build another android? In the episode Picard points out that android rights “have been defined; I helped define them!” But whether or not Data is allowed to keep Lal isn’t really the true conflict of the episode.
The basic rub of “The Offspring” isn’t necessarily that Starfleet is going to come to take Lal away. Yes, some Starfleet stooge named Admiral Haftel (Nicolas Coster) shows up and claims he’ll do just that. But writer René Echevarria was playing a slightly different, and savvy game here. This was 1990, and though The Next Generation was acknowledging its own continuity, the truth was, there was zero chance that the show would have allowed Data to have a daughter for an entire season, or possibly, the rest of the show. Yes, Worf’s son Alexander came to live on the Enterprise at some point, as countless memes mercilessly point out, but Worf sent Alexander away to Earth as much as possible to make the format of the show work.
So, the brilliance of “The Offspring” isn’t just that it's one of those great Next Generation episodes that really makes you think about the nature of life and the definitions of parenthood, it’s also an episode with a ticking clock, counting down to the inevitable moment when Lal will perish. Data says early in the episode that he’s the last of his kind, partly because he doesn’t know if Lore is still alive, and he’s unaware of a few other secret androids that will show up in future episodes and movies. And that’s because, again, Star Trek was (and still is) obsessed with making sure androids and similar intelligent robots are rare. We’re told often that the technology makes Data’s positronic brain so delicate that it’s nearly impossible to duplicate. This very specific breakthrough remains elusive, which is why, by the end of the episode, Lal malfunctions and passes away.
Lal’s final moments in “The Offspring.”
The idea that Data is unique is such a crucial part of the TNG mythos that the idea of other androids like him became the entire basis for Picard Season 1. In those episodes, a few decades after TNG, androids were eventually mass-produced, but then, all went rogue and were banned by the Federation. By the end of Picard Season 1, Jean-Luc himself had his brain placed into a synthetic body, making him effectively an artificial lifeform with a human mind. Unsurprisingly, we’re told in both Picard and later, in Discovery Season 4, that this tech is — surprise, surprise — rare and unreliable. When it comes to functioning robot bodies in Star Trek, only the main characters are allowed to have them, otherwise, it’s no fun. Even Data’s other “daughter” from Picard, Soji (Isa Briones) was relegated to a much smaller role in Season 2, and entirely absent in Season 3. Quite simply, even though Picard didn’t show Soji passing away like Lal, another Synth in the cast was just too inconvenient. One robot per show!
The idea that intelligent Blade Runner-esque Replicants would be rare and prone to easy malfunction isn’t even something The Next Generation invented. In The Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” we meet all sorts of androids created by mad scientist Roger Korby (Michael Strong). In that episode, it's revealed that the technology Korby used to create his robots (and his own robot duplicate) comes from him cribbing off of a long-gone alien species that created the robots in the first place. Again, the notion of stable, organic-presenting androids is rendered as something really hard to pull off. (Interestingly, intelligent holograms in Voyager seem to have it way easier.)
The reasons for keeping androids a kind of endangered species in Star Trek are both totally understandable and strange in retrospect. While modern Star Trek has boldly suggested is that the differences between a synthetic body and a real one are negligible, and androids who were born androids are still scarce. Thirty-five years later, stories about Mr. Data are still appealing, mostly because he remains, forever, one-of-a-kind.
