The Insurmountable Elementary

I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation season two lately. Although Netflix seems to have a lousy selection of movies these days it still seems to have all the best old TV shows. Most people wouldn't consider the first two seasons of TNG great television, though. I still can't get through a rewatch of season one but I am kind of enjoying season two. I think I've even come to prefer Doctor Pulaski to Doctor Crusher, season two's notorious temporary replacement. She was clearly made with Dr. McCoy in mind, meant to be the folksy foil to the invariably logical member of the crew. In this case that means Data.

Somehow Pulaski seems crueller than McCoy. Maybe it's because she seems supremely confident in her superiority and Data seems more childlike than Spock, especially at this point in the series when Brent Spiner's idea of emotionlessness included wide-eyed smiles. On the other hand, AI can do a decent job now of imitating human emotion, why shouldn't Data?

The best episode of season two so far in my rewatch is "Elementary, Dear Data", the one where a Sherlock Holmes themed holodeck excursion inevitably goes wrong. I hadn't seen the episode since I was a kid and now that I'm much more familiar with the Sherlock Holmes stories I can appreciate just how clearly the writers of this episode knew their stuff. References to The Bruce Partington Plans and The Speckled Band come fast and without much explanation so the episode really is a treat for the true Holmes fan.

The main dilemma the characters face in the episode is of Professor Moriarty obtaining a form of sentience, a popular plot element that ensured the character's return in season six and even again in the new Picard series.

I found it really interesting contemplating the character, watching his emotional reactions carefully. Presumably the holodeck AI would still be behind Data's so his emotions would be even more of a pretense. Troi can sense something there so there must be. But how much of it is represented in the person we see? Where does the mask end and the soul begin?

Pulaski's challenge to Data at the beginning of the episode oddly reminded me of teaching in Japan. She accuses Data's impersonation of Holmes as only being rote memorisation, that he would fail to solve a new Holmes puzzle because he lacks the necessary instinct and empathy. This resembles the main criticism of Japanese English education, that it focuses too much on grammar and vocabulary memorisation and neglects instinct. As I've come to understand the forces of traditional belief and social pride that pinion the prospective English learner in Japan, the barrier between students and true language learning may be even bigger than the one between Data and his attaining deductive powers on the level of Sherlock Holmes, though the question of whether or not he can is of course left unresolved by the episode.