Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Inheritance"

"Inheritance." Star Trek: The Next Generation. Week of 21 Nov. 1993. Robert Scheerer, dir. Dan Koeppel and René Echevarria, script, from a story by Koeppel.

Mr. Data meets his "mother," who turns out to be an android copy of the wife of Dr. Soong, a woman who was as much Data's mother as Dr. Soong was his father. The plot centers on Data's inference that his self-claimed mother is an andoid robot (of a more advanced design than he) and Data's having to decide whether or not to withhold the truth from her that she is an artificial person and not human. He withholds the truth from her, so cf. and definitely contrast "The Lie" in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902). See "Inheritance" for background on Data's "childhood" and for some important themes: the value of biological humans vs. the aritificial, human intelligence and AI, reason and emotions, and, most importantly, the theme of male procreation, including a revision of the tale of Data's birth as the sole work of Dr. Soong, a man creating artificial life and personality without the help of a woman. Cited, summarized, and commented upon in Cinefantastique 25.5 & 6 (Dec. 1994): 60.