The Measure of an Android

 Hello friends, it’s been a little while since the last Future Imperfect newsletter. In this one I want to pick up again on the theme of humanity, starting with the most famous half-human character in the Star Trek universe. I finished the last newsletter talking about The Search for Spock and how that film ends on the planet Vulcan so that Spock could be resurrected and returned to his crew and to us as fans. At the end of July, I also traveled to Vulcan but in Alberta, Canada.

 The town of Vulcan is a fascinating place - a small place with a very big Star Trek connection. By virtue of having the same name as Spock’s home world the town has become sort of a Star Trek mecca, particularly during the annual Star Trek convention called Vulcon, this year in its 31st edition.

 In 2010 Nimoy himself came to Vulcan for the convention, drawing a huge crowd and tripling the population of the town for a single day. He unveiled a bronze bust of Spock and visited with fans. A number of other Star Trek luminaries have visited Vulcan over the years. The entire town is a tribute to Star Trek with representations and monuments everywhere you look. Much of it is devoted to Spock and Nimoy.

 I was at Vulcon to sell my comic book, Star Trek: M33, which I make with cartoonist Cam Hayden. And there we encountered a different Spock. The celebrity guests for the convention included Jens Dombek, known popularly as The German Spock. I didn’t know what to expect or if we’d even see Dombek at the convention. But about halfway through the day he wandered into the vendor’s hall and straight up to our table.

 Dombek looks so much like Spock, he embodies his energy so completely, that his presence is weirdly hypnotizing. It truly does feel like you are in the presence of Spock when you meet him. You know of course that it’s not Nimoy but can’t convince yourself at the same that it isn’t Spock standing in front of you. Jens is a very warm and genuine guy and he posed for pictures with us and accepted some comics. It was an all-around cool experience meeting him and capped off a day in Vulcan in a very Vulcan way.

 To return to the question of humanity, Spock was half-human which allowed Star Trek to explore outsider perspectives on the meaning of humanity. Spock’s emotional control was easily contrasted with Captain Kirk’s passions and sometimes McCoy’s temper and irritations. It was a portrait of human rationality extrapolated into truly utopian proportions. In The Next Generation, Roddenberry went in a different direction by creating the character of Lieutenant Commander Data.

 Data was an android – a one-of-a-kind artificial life form serving aboard the Enterprise D. The otherness of the character was clearly inspired by Spock, but with a significant twist. Spock suppressed his humanity while Data aspired to become human. His fascination with humanity in part reflected Gene Roddenberry’s own endless wonder about the possibilities of human potential. This allowed an enormous number of stories exploring what it means to be human using Data as a storytelling device. I talked about “Encounter at Farpoint” putting humanity on trial, and this idea of assessing humanity was a recurring theme in The Next Generation. Data’s character development led him closer and closer to the goal of being human, with some significant and unfortunate detours along the way (including dying twice, capture by the Borg, and a lot of sibling rivalry.)

 Data’s quest for humanity said something about how Roddenberry and Star Trek writers understood human existence. It was established early that Data was superior to humans in nearly every respect. Stronger, more intelligent, endlessly capable in every situation. But he aspired to experience human flaws, human emotion, and ultimately, human fallibility and mortality.

Star Trek also often defined humanity by how it responded to difference. The commitment to diversity sometimes operated one way within the human family contrasted with non-humans. The episode about Data that tackled this head-on was the classic “Measure of a Man” from Season 2. It was written by the great Melinda Snodgrass, who would go on to be hired as an executive script consultant for The Next Generation. It became one of the most beloved episodes of Star Trek, helping to deepen and define Data’s character and the meaning of human and non-human life in the Star Trek universe. The precedents it set for storytelling about Androids would continue to define how Star Trek viewed artificial life for the next 30 years.

In the episode, Data is requisitioned by the scientist Bruce Maddox, a researcher in cybernetics who wishes to study and disassemble him. His ultimate goal is to create an entire workforce or army of androids who could serve Starfleet. Maddox’s position on Data establishes the stakes for the episode; he views him as an ‘it’ – a piece of machinery owned by Starfleet. Ordered to submit to Maddox for experimentation, Data refuses and when pressed, resigns his commission. The rest of the episode revolves around the question of whether Data has the same rights as other sentient beings aboard the Enterprise. Can he choose his fate like an autonomous individual, or is he the property of Starfleet to be used as its officers decide?

 The issue is settled before a Judge Advocate General aboard the Enterprise in a courtroom drama with Captain Picard acting as counsel for Commander Data while Commander Riker was ordered to act for Starfleet, arguing that Data is a machine and not a person. Essentially the court would decide if androids can have human rights. Would Data have the right to choose his own destiny?

 The episode is like a continuation of the trial set up by Q to judge humanity in the first season of The Next Generation. It’s another implicit indictment of how we treat beings who don’t meet our standards for rights – and how the law can be used to dehumanize such beings. The law is an important part of the episode and the message about rights it is trying to establish. Gene Roddenberry wasn’t sure about using an adversarial courtroom setting in this way. He believed that in the Star Trek utopia all human conflict and crime would be a thing of the past. Snodgrass discussed this on her blog: “As to the issue of law in Gene’s vision. He nearly killed ‘The Measure of a Man’ because according to Gene there were no lawyers in the 24th century because if people had criminal intensions, they ‘had their minds made right.’ I found that chilling. I also pointed out that you have contracts that have to be negotiated and conflicts of law between different legal systems, and divorces, etc. etc. There was no way there would be no lawyers in the future.” Roddenberry’s misguided view of criminal correction was one flaw of his utopianism. Snodgrass’ vision prevailed, giving us a classic Next Generation courtroom sequence and a dramatic discussion of the central issue of humanity and human rights before the law.

 Given the unenviable task of prosecuting Data, Commander Riker nonetheless presents a very strong case. He demonstrates viscerally that Data is a machine constructed by a man. He then dramatically states, “and now a man will shut it off” before physically deactivating Data before the courtroom. He concludes, “Pinocchio is broken. Its strings have been cut.” This is significant and devastating in part because it could hand Data over to Maddox, something that Riker does not want. Personally, it is also a reference to a famous moment when Riker first met Commander Data at the beginning of his service on the Enterprise. Astounded by Data, Riker says to him, “nice to meet you, Pinocchio!” The courtroom moment is a sad inversion of the metaphor given that Riker certainly understands Data’s similarities to the fictional puppet’s desire to become human. Riker’s prosecution makes the critical distinction that Data was merely made by a human, and cannot be considered as an analogous being to a human.

 Distraught by the direction of the hearing, Captain Picard seeks the counsel of Guinan. He acknowledges that he could lose the case and Guinan sympathizes that Picard has the harder argument to make. But then she says something that wakes up Picard to the deeper issues at stake in the decision about Data’s life. She raises the idea that if Maddox succeeds, Starfleet could well create an entire army of Androids like Data, “all very valuable.” She goes on, “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.”

 In this scene, Guinan plays the outside observer, very much like Q, intended to pierce Picard’s human arrogance. She wakes him up to his own human history. “You’re talking about slavery,” Picard realizes with horror. Guinan is an El-Aurian, not from Earth, but she is played by Whoopi Goldberg and the scene is invested with the deeper meaning of a Black woman needing to remind Picard that in Earth’s past, people like her were the disposable race.

 It’s interesting that Picard needs this history lesson from Guinan, as human starship captains in the 24th century are unusually well-read in Earth classical literature. “Measure of a Man” closely resembles several significant legal cases from history involving the Atlantic slave trade and the utopian movement toward abolition. Snodgrass was correct in insisting that these issues would need to be settled by 24th century law just as they were in the 17th and 18th centuries during the long campaign towards abolition.

 The most famous case in this history is Gregson v Gilbert in July 1783 which entailed the legal wrangling over the Zong Massacre. The Zong was a British slave ship owned by The William Gregson Slave-trading syndicate. In November 1781, the crew ran short on fresh water after running into navigation trouble en route to Jamaica. To conserve supplies, the crew threw 132 of their African captives into the ocean to die. When the ship arrived in Jamaica, the company made an insurance claim on the murdered captives. The insurers would not pay. The court held that the slave traders could legally murder their cargo, and the insurers must pay for the deceased property. The decision was overturned on appeal, but the true effect of it was to galvanize the abolitionist movement and bring public attention to both its cause and the absolute horrors of the slave trade and notorious middle-passage.

 There is some historiographical wrangling over what the true impact of the Zong case was on the abolitionist movement, but it has endured as a symbol of public revulsion towards chattel slavery – a shifting of the public mood. Historian Debbie Lee writes about how the Zong case brought the slave trade closer to home and implanted its horrors in the British consciousness. It personalized an abstract human travesty in an enduring way.

 The legal case itself was a question of insurance and property rooted in the world of finance rather than the gross immorality of the mass murder. I think this is the important link to the case in “Measure of a Man.” The question of whether Data is property or not runs to the heart of what the court must decide. Until Guinan shifts Picard’s perspective to the human history of slavery he cannot see the implications of what it will eventually mean if Data is considered the property of Starfleet. Picard wins because he makes this case and he does it by reversing Riker’s argument about Data’s inherently mechanical and man-made qualities.

 One of the great contributions that Snodgrass made with this episode is that she deepened Data’s inner world in the cross-examination scenes. Picard illustrates that Data has an inner life – his memories and experiences are meaningful to him. The most famous of these is his relationship with Tasha Yarr, one of two “girlfriends” Data has over the course of his time on the Enterprise. Snodgrass rescues this relationship from the ridicule it often receives because of the very campy and ridiculous episode it appears in (“The Naked Now” from Season 1.) It’s a very touching moment and was drawn upon again in the Picard episode where Data ultimately defeats his brother Lore by using the value of his personal experiences and meanings, one which still includes Tasha.

By demonstrating that Data has an inner world and his own ideas about the shape his life should take he became, in the eyes of the court, more than a machine. The utopian idea that everyone should have the right to choose their own destiny was finally granted to Data. And the larger lesson of the story Snodgrass is telling is that it is the human rights finally granted to Data that we must strive for from our present – not the technological marvels of his creation, but the inherent humanity sought by him.

 Even though the episode was written in 1990 it feels contemporary in what it has to say about debates around identity, liberty, and the right for all individuals to choose what and who they want to be. I don’t know if the Trans community has locked onto Data as something interesting and analogous to their struggle for liberation from the constraints of gender conformity imposed upon them. But the parallels between the two debates feel important to me. Data was insisting on his right to choose - not just to be liberated from the slavery of being considered the property of Starfleet, but to insist on who and what he was and have that accepted by his superiors and peers and in the face of an exceedingly narrow definition of what his identity and destiny might be.

 There’s a lot more to say about Data and humanity. It was one of the primary story and character arcs throughout the run of The Next Generation. Data would go on to experience parenthood, loss, happiness and anger, and finally death (before being happily reborn in a new body.) For now, I am at least trying to understand him as a parable about the utopian goals that humanity might yet achieve. These stories are about Data seeking humanity, but they are really about humanity itself trying to reach its utopian potential. Just like Data, the utopian project keeps us seeking and searching for it. Thanks for reading! LLAP.