Hello all, this is the personnel file where we look into the history and personality of Star
Trek’s characters with a focus on their Starfleet career, and this time we are looking into the file
of Data. The synthetic officer and one of the most advanced androids encountered by the Federation
and made for a hell of an officer. Their will be spoilers for most Trek Series, including Picard
and I will be using other licensed works to flesh out some blank spaces in his career providing they
do not contradict with what is seen on screen. In 2335, the Soong family’s work into artificial
lifeforms was reaching is most successful points with the creation of Data, the 5th android in a
line that was modelled on its creator, Noonien Soong. Data was built following Lore, and the
prototypes B4 and 2 others with the help of Juliana O’Donnell, then married to Noonien Soong.
This was being conduced on the colony Omicron Theta where Soong had
retreated to work in private after being discredited by his peers in cybernetics.
Data’s early life was a series of tests and learning opportunities as his Positronic
brain adapted and grew as he experienced more. In 2336, his mind was wiped and he was given a reset,
installed with the memories and logs of the colonists. In 2338, Lore, in an act of
malevolence and spite contacted the Crystalline Entity with the location of the hidden colonists
of Omicron Theta and the being returned to feed off the planet’s energy, wiping most of them out.
Before the creature arrived, Lore and Data were deactivated where they remained offline until the
USS Tripoli NCC-19386 arrived following a distress call. The landing party eventually detected a
locator device that led them to the offline Data. For a while, he had to continue to learn
and develop his neural pathways, even risking damage during his mental growth.
By 2341 and with few memories of his own, Data made the choice to emulate his finders
in finding direction for his life and applied to Starfleet Academy. In order to enter however,
as a special case, he required sponsorship to apply and met with Admiral Nechayev.
She concluded there was no point in him taking the entry exam as he could easily regurgitate
all the information required to pass and was therefore accepted into Starfleet Academy.
He studied multiple subjects, centred around engineering, operations, sciences and philosophy.
He failed Ethics and Moral Principles because his programming did not allow him to play devil’s
advocate in debates concerning the value of life. This was not the only issue he had at the Academy,
as he was unable to take the Priam IV test, a simulation that cadets believed was real and
presented them with Prime Directive scenarios over the course of days. Data could not be fooled into
believing it was real and Starfleet programmers created a digital version for him to download
and live out in his memories instead. He excelled in all other courses however
and completed his engineering course in 2343 where he was assigned the Utopia Planetia-Earth shuttle
run and also worked on the LCARS computer system and memory cores, going some way to optimise both.
In 2345, he graduated with honours in many courses, including exobiology,
Probability Mechanics and several engineering courses. He was promoted to Ensign. His first
assignment was as a Starfleet Education representative where he did educational
tours to different schools and campuses. In 2348, he was promoted to Lieutenant Jr. Grade.
In 2360, Lieutenant Data was assigned to the USS Trieste.
Also, in 2360, he first met with Picard who advised him to be a little more “ambitious”
in his career if he wanted to excel, by doing more than was required, not just the task that he was
issued. He was assigned as science officer to the USS Portia under command of Captain Picard.
He was later Promoted to Lieutenant commander. Over his post academy career, he was awarded
the Star Cross, Legion of Honor, Medal of Honor and Command Decoration for Gallentry.
In 2364, he was assigned to the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D as Operations Officer
and 2nd Officer. He also often functioned as Chief Science Officer, although that position
was often vacant in 24th century vessels, which is something I did not notice until writing this.
In 2365, a milestone for him was passed when Bruce Maddox requisitioned him to continue Soong’s work,
but Data did not wish to be dismantled. A hearing was called in which Data,
and at this time, only Data was granted all the rights of a sentient individual. He and Maddox
remained in contact for the rest of his life. In 2366, he was presumed dead, then missing when
he was kidnapped by Kivas Fajo. Data’s programming was tested once more when he eventually fired
on Fajo to prevent further violence. In 2366, Data created his ‘daughter’ Lal,
based on his own understanding of the Soong-type android, but she eventually developed the same
complex neural net issues he had, but they proved too much for her and she was shut down.
in 2367, a homing beacon causes Data to enact a successful takeover of the Enterprise D and
return to Noonein Soong in the Terlina system. In 2368, a time travel incident involving the
Devidians took Data back to 1893 where his head was separated from his body in the past and
reconnected back in 2368. That same year he was assigned command of the USS Sutherland NCC-72015
In 2369, Data reached a level of development that triggered a dream subroutine,
set to activate when his mind had advanced enough to be able to handle the creativity required.
In 2370, Data suffers a memory loss and crashes on the pre-warp planet Barkon IV.
In 2371, Data installed the Emotion Chip, believing his personal growth to have come to an
impasse. Later that year, Data, was assigned as the Second Officer and chief of operations aboard
the Sovereign Class USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E. Prior to 2372, the ruling the Data was to be
considered sentient was expanded to cover all Soong-type androids, possibly spurred on by Data
showing the ability to create offspring and the uncovering of Juliana Tainer as another.
In 2373, Data was held captive by Borg during the First Contact time travel incident and had organic
material grafted onto his frame, through which he could perceive senses as an organic creature,
although these were subsequently removed. During the Dominion War, the Enterprise E was
assigned to diplomatic and stabalisation missions such as meeting with the Gorn Hegemony in 2374.
At the close of the war, in 2375, Data was requested to serve on a Starfleet observation post
on the Ba’Ku world in the Briar patch alongside the Son’a. He was damaged
when he uncovered a Federation made holodeck ship and stole a scout vessel, defaulting to
simple moral programming until he was repaired. In 2378, he was assigned to the USS Sovereign
NCC-73811 to the Vesuvi Dust cloud and further intelligence gathering missions involving the
Kessok. Later that year, Commander Riker was promoted to Captain and assigned a new command
to be transferred in 2379. With the Executive Officer position opening up on the Enterprise E,
Lieutenant Commander Data was selected to replace him. Before this could be enacted
however, B4 was recovered by the crew and had Data’s memories and matrix copied into it.
Then the Shinzon incident occurred at the Battle of Bassen rift and Data rescued Captain Picard
before destroying the Scimitar, saving the crews of the Enterprise and a disabled Romulan warbird.
In 2379, he was officially listed as KIA. B4 was sent to the Daystrom institute under
the care of its Division of Advanced Synthetic Research and Chairman of Robotics, Bruce Maddox.
Here his Matrix was the subject of much research, but the hardware of B4 was not advanced enough to
support Data’s mind and it began to degrade. In 2382, Maddox created the A500 Synth work
unit the used Soong-style tech, but lacked the advanced mind of a truly sentient AI. These
would go on to be used in an attack by the Tal Shair/Zhat Vash against Utopia Planetia in 2385.
This led Maddox to team up with Altan Soong and take Data’s Matrix to Coppelius to continue his
work in secret. The Matrix was stabilised and used as the fractal clone basis
for a new generation of Soong androids, some of which even had biological frames.
These were discovered in 2399 by a retired Admiral Picard, and the Federation marked Coppelius as
a protected world. Picard eventually met with Data’s mind one last time when his consciousness
was uploaded to its storage where Data asked to be taken offline. Picard complied with the request.
Because of his rapid rate of comprehension, Data was not bound by the limitations of most other
organic crewmembers and he was often asked by Starfleet to serve short terms away from his
primary assignment on the Enterprise, which he mostly accepted and as such a unique lifeform,
he gained a reputation among the fleet. It is no secret that Data’s long-term
goal in life was to be able to emulate humanity, or more generally, humanoid lifeforms
to learn what it was to be alive. This led him to take on many hobbies and the like,
but because of his artificial nature, he often mastered these tasks through observation and
mimicry. The hobbies that he stuck with however were the ones that required a level of creativity
and personal expression such as musical composition and painting, probably because
the act of true creativity was a challenge for his programing and brought him closer to his goal. He
also adopted a pet cat called Spot, which I have no reason to mention, except it feels bad not to.
Because of his rapid rate of learning, he was able to absorb great amounts of information
at the speed of a computer and store the memories indefinitely, the only limiting factor being the
seconds it would take him to recall it. He also showed a preference for performance and frequently
donned the role of Sherlock Holmes in Holodeck recreations of the Arthur Conan Doyle stores,
possibly because he identified with the work of fiction. Although he adopted numerous other roles
with the intent to mimic and again, emulate the emotional nuances required for such roles. Again,
this ties into his desire to tackle tasks that would challenge him, and therefore promote growth.
His positronic mind was capable of learning and developing new pathways, and he admitted to having
a preference for heuristic pathways, the absence of which he would miss. Data was very much bound
by his programming, but his programming was adaptive and could evolve and he had a strong
degree of personal choice, for example, he was capable of using contractions like can’t instead
of cannot, but opted not to because he did not know when to use them naturally. With this sort
of setup, it could be argued that he was more creative and closer to his own form of emotional
understanding than he thought, certainly those who knew him would say that he had personality
and even displayed emotion, despite his claims to the contrary. His level of growth was something he
very much maintained control over, putting off use of the Emotion Chip for 2 years after reacquiring
it from Lore and shunned the short-cut advancement offered to him by the Borg. After all, with his
efforts to learn what it was to be human, the whole point is the journey, not the destination.
He had difficulty with certain human-esc aspects, such as understanding humour, which he confessed
to finding a singularly human emotion, and love, both of which are difficult to quantify, probably
leading to his difficulty. After the emotion chip was installed and he successfully recovered from
a neural net collapse and learned to cope with his new feelings, he actually remained
rather unchanged in terms of personality. Of course, he could eventually deactivate it at will,
but overall, Data managed to establish a strong sense of individuality and understanding of
emotion without experiencing it himself, instead observing and emulating those around him. By the
time the chip was introduced, I woudld argue he was already a complete individual in his own way,
and I think those who called him friend would have agreed, so emotional clarity just served to
enrich what was already there. From 2385 to 99, Data existed
in a state of Limbo as purely a program in a matrix, he originally described such as state
years prior as lacking substance, flavour and all the qualities of experience. Although his
mind was cloned successfully to create a whole new colony of androids, each with his ‘essence’,
he himself came to the conclusion that he wished to be terminated in order to give his
experiences meaning and that his continued existence in this state was a reminder
that he was not truly alive. The bittersweet truth is, being organic means being mortal and
finding meaning in that brief time, something Data understood and ultimately embraced with dignity.
Some Data-centric episodes of course include the “Measure of a Man” where
Data’s rights as an individual are brought into question and just an all-round great episode,
“The Most Toys” for his morality being truly tested against his programing
and, “The Offspring” for his creation of Lal, his daughter. I think these episodes will not
be a surprise to most Data fans out there, and Data often has subplots bound throughout
other episodes of Trek that focus on an aspect of his journey to understand humanity.
So what would you add to this pile? I am thinking of doing an apocryphal breakdown of Data’s life
too, as in several alternate futures and other official media he is revived or
never died to begin with, but there is quite a few of them to sift through that also all contradict.
Until the next video however, thank you for watching this breakdown of one of the most
beloved characters of Star Trek, at least from my observation and until next one,
thank you again I have been Ric, and goodbye!