Capt. Jonathan: Stardate: [It has been ruled that this Stardate is sentient; therefore, he refuses to be simply a mere number.] If TREK had a LAW & ORDER episode, it would pretty much be this one. But it’s better than that. It’s an intimate story of Data’s right to be sentient, even though he is an android.

A brief recap: So Cmdr. Bruce Maddox approaches Data to inform him that he, Maddox, has the right to disassemble Data for experimentation, and that he intends to do so because: the future.

Maddox believes he can do this because Data has basically got the same amount of rights as the Starfleet breakroom Keurig.

So this all goes to trial, with resident JAG officer Capt. Phillipa Louvois, whose name not only sounds kind of like Blanche DuBois, but is also Picard’s old flame/prosecutor for his loss of the Stargazer. It’s a complicated relationship.

Louvois makes Picard defend Data and Riker prosecute him, because, apparently, when you’re the head JAG officer, you can kind of fuck with people.

Ultimately, it is found that Data is a person, and is free to do people stuff like steal Netflix, make jokes that only other androids can laugh at, and chose whether or not he wants Cmdr. Asshat to kill him.

Capt. Tracy: But let’s not forget: the episode begins with a poker game, and gambling becomes an organizing conceit throughout. It would be a monumental gamble for Data to allow himself to be experimented on by a robotics expert, but one who seems to be only slightly more qualified to perform said experiment than those people in Florida who do plastic surgery out of their garages.

It’s a gamble Data declines to accept, and we’re off to the legal races. The episode interrogates human rights, the history of human trafficking, and the ethical obligations of a posthuman future. Did I mention this all happens in forty minutes?

By the way, I am writing as a person who is devoted to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. I have presented at 3 Slayage conferences and watched the entire series 4 times. I. Love. Buffy.

Having said that, “The Measure of a Man” managed to provide a more metaphysically rigorous, insightful, and satisfying investigation of the concept of “the soul” in forty minutes than Buffy achieved in 145 episodes.

Capt. Jonathan: I’m just glad this episode was only speaking about the future, where it might be helpful, or at least *fun*, to envision a conundrum like this. Thankfully, human history has never had to confront the problem of certain people somehow not exactly being 100% *people*, and only ever might toy with the idea in this fictional world of Androids and spacemen.

But as if addressing one social ill wasn’t enough, the episode also features one of TNG’s strongest female guest star characters, Louvois, and was written by a prolific woman sci-fi writer, Melinda M. Snodgrass.

Capt. Tracy: The ruling offered by Judge Cooler Than Judy is also a gamble–she admits that she doesn’t know what Data is, but that she also doesn’t really know what it means to be human.

She doesn’t know if he has a soul, but she doesn’t know if she has one either. Thus, she’s going to gamble that he, and any others like him, does. That philosophical move–using ontological uncertainty as a reason to be just rather that a reason to dominate or degrade–is an elegant solution to the problem of a soul.

I wish Buffy had gotten *there* instead of wallowing in epistemological anxiety about the vampire soul and dithering around with Spike for a season and a half. But I digress.

Speaking of digression, some tangential thoughts on the title of the episode–I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a direct allusion to Martin Luther King’s book The Measures of Man, but my mind went in a slightly different direction anyway. There’s great importance placed on the use of the pronoun “he” and “him” for Data rather than “it” for obvious reasons. But it made me think about Data’s gendered identity. How does he understand/perform masculinity? Was that programmed into him, or does he learn how to be a man from JLP and Commander Crotch (God forfend) just like he learns how to play poker and to “be wise”?

Capt. Jonathan: It’s funny, because there are a number of references in the title alone. I think first of the Thomas Babington Macaulay quote, “The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.” Data has a history of knowing he’d “probably never be found out,” and performed quite admirably under those circumstances. The problem with the quote, though, is that Macaulay was kind of a Space Douche.

He believed in a binary world where people were either civilized (read: British) or uncivilized (read: everyone else), so, if anything, Macaulay would have been more in-line with Maddox (Bruce Maddox, Babington Macaulay = getting close with the initials, there…), but his remark could be read as supportive of Data’s awesome sauce.

And now, a little Q & A:

Capt. Tracy: Q: What’s the best way to prove to your partner that you’re a sentient being?

A: Explain that you’re aware that you ate the last of the frosted animal crackers, and you feel bad about it. [Capt. Jonathan Edit: Okay so you proved self-awareness and conscience, but how have you shown intelligence, exactly? YOU ATE THE LAST ANIMAL CRACKER! Geez. We need to talk off-blog.]

Capt. Jonathan: [Capt. Tracy Edit: Q: Can we talk about it now?]

Capt. Jonathan: A: No – God no. I am not getting into an Animal Cracker debate with you on a TREK blog! What do you think this is? Slate?

[Capt. Tracy: Well maybe if this were Slate we’d actually have readers!]

Capt. Jonathan: A: That’s not even a question!

[Capt. Tracy: Fine. “Do you know how big of a dick you are?”]

Capt. Jonathan: A: …

[Capt. Tracy: “A: A BIG ONE.” Or would you prefer I put in some random-ass picture with a snarky caption?]

Capt. Jonathan: A: I’m so glad we had this talk, honey.

[Capt. Tracy:

]

Capt. Jonathan: Great. Fantastic. This is all very classy.