Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard Season 3, Episode 6 – “The Bounty”The resurrection of Data (Brent Spiner) in Star Trek: Picard season 3, episode 6, “The Bounty,” tragically reversed what the android achieved in his best Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. A new hybrid version of Data, Lore, B-4, Lal (Hallie Todd), and Dr. Altan Inigo Soong is revealed to be the hyper-intelligent A.I. responsible for securing Starfleet’s highly classified Daystrom Station. When viewers last saw Data in Picard‘s season 1 finale, he requested to experience death, but in being resurrected, it appears that Starfleet has ignored that wish.
Worse still, in installing this new synthetic hybrid of Soong’s androids and their descendants in Star Trek: Picard‘s Daystrom Station, Starfleet and Section 31 have finally got what they wanted from Soong’s work. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Offspring”, Data constructed his own daughter, Lal (Hallie Todd). When Starfleet Research learned of Lal’s existence, they dispatched Vice Admiral Haftel (Nicolas Coster) to take the android back to the Daystrom Institute. The stress caused by the conflict between Data and Haftel over Lal’s future led to a fatal cascade failure in her neural net. By including aspects of Lal’s character in the new Data hybrid, Altan Soong has finally handed Data’s daughter over to Daystrom. He has also reversed the rights that Data attained in one of his best-ever TNG episodes.
Data’s Rights In TNG Are Taken Away In Picard Season 3
In Star Trek: The Next Generation season 2, episode 9, “The Measure of a Man”, Commander Bruce Maddox (Brian Brophy) lobbied Starfleet to allow him to disassemble Data to learn more about Noonian Soong’s work. In a court case that pitted Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in conflict with Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Data’s rights for self-determination as a sentient being was officially recognized by Starfleet. This ruling gave Data the independence and freedoms that have been taken away from him in Star Trek: Picard season 3, episode 6.
The new hybridized version of Data was in servitude to Daystrom Station, acting as their hyper-intelligent security system, and stripped of his agency. In a haunting scene toward the end of the episode, Data parrots the words “Jean-Luc Picard” when asked what the Changelings stole from the facility. It’s the android reduced to his base computer programming, which is everything that Picard and Data wished to avoid in “The Measure of a Man”. It’s clear from his recorded speech that Altan Inigo Soong never intended for Data to be used in this way, but his work was appropriated by Section 31 after his death, stripping Data of his hard-fought rights.
Picard Season 1 Changed How Androids Are Treated By The Federation
It’s troubling that Section 31 is treating Data as property, given what happened on First Contact Day in 2285. The android uprising by workers at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards in 2385 proved that Data was the exception rather than the rule. Despite all they had learned from Data’s case, Starfleet was still treating androids as property, using them as a workforce to construct new starships. This workforce was manipulated to rise up against their organic masters and inflicted a devastating attack on Mars that left over 90,000 people dead.
In the months that followed, the Federation banned all synthetic life, disassembling androids like B-4 and halting research into synthetic life beyond the theoretical. When Admiral Picard revealed the attack on Mars was actually masterminded by Commodore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita), an undercover Romulan Zhat Vash operative, the synth ban was reversed. Synthetic rights continued to be debated in Star Trek: Picard season 2, with Soji Asha (Isa Briones) performing a key role in the debates. Unfortunately, the fate of Data proves that there is still much work to be done in getting the Federation to see synthetic lifeforms as individuals.
Star Trek: Picard Season 3 streams Thursdays on Paramount+
