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ooooo ooooo .oooooo. oooooooooooo HOE E'ZINE RELEASE #818
`888' `888' d8P' `Y8b `888' `8
888 888 888 888 888 "Data's Decision and the Decadence
888ooooo888 888 888 888oooo8 of the Modern (and Future) World"
888 888 888 888 888 " by Rhea
888 888 `88b d88' 888 o 9/1/99
o888o o888o `Y8bood8P' o888ooooood8
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When I was younger, my brother used to watch "Star-Trek: The Next
Generation" a lot and sometimes I would watch it with him. So my mind, the
dazzling machine that it is, was able to identify the show the other night
when I happened to come across it while aimlessly flipping channels. I had
just been thinking about how much I hated TV, and of course at the same time
loving the hypocrisy of that thought. (You see, at first, the incredible
amount of hypocrisy I find in myself disgusted me, but recently I realized
that if I let it bother me, I'd die of self-loathing. And so now I just
observe my hypocrisies with a mild amusement, bordering on apathy. And now
I'm just perfectly peachy-keen. Wee.)
But that thought quickly disappeared as soon as I said to my dog,
"Whoah, is that Star Trek? All right!" and I immediately began wasting
precious moments of my life watching the show.
It was an episode where Data met his "mother" for the first time. In
this episode, there were many touching scenes where Data's mommy burst into
heart-wrenching emotional monologues about the creation of Data, her love
for her husband, and the "bad android" - Data's older brother- whom she had
to destroy. There was also some other thing going on at the time.. a planet
was about to be destroyed and the Enterprise had to save it, or something.
I didn't pay attention to that part - I never liked the technical parts to
the show anyway. They were more my brother's thing. But anyway, Data's
mother had something to do with saving the planet, and she and Data were
down on the planet with their computers saving the day when something went
wrong, and she and Data had to jump off a cliff to save themselves. At the
bottom of the jump, Mommy was unconscious on the ground, and Data rushed to
her and saw-- (drum roll, please) wires poking out of her arm! That's
right! Data's *mother* was an android, too! She had fooled everyone!
Data took her back to the Enterprise and fiddled around with her
microchips and whatnot and found a programmed "message" in her, which he
played. It was from his father, saying that his mother (who had once been
human) had been killed in an accident, and the father was so devastated that
he quickly made an android that looked just like her and downloaded all the
mother's thoughts and memories into the android's brain. When the android
woke up, she was exactly like the mother had been, and the father never
told her anything about her technical reincarnation -- she believed she was
still as human as can be!
Data, after receiving the message, found himself faced with a
terrible dilemma. Once he revived his android mother, should he tell her
about her true nature, or let her keep on believing she was a normal human?
He consulted with all his star-trek friends, saying he wanted to do the
"right thing" and make the right decision. Finally, the episode peaked with
the mother opening her eyes. The moment had come. I was sure what Data
would do.
And then, to my surprise, he lied to her! He told her she had just
hit her head and that she was fine now! He didn't tell her the truth about
herself! And she went away, happy as can be, never suspecting that she was
an android!
I was outraged. I still can't believe he chose that. Data, the
scientific unemotional android, should value truth above all else. Sure,
his mother was more comfortable not having to adjust to any shocking facts
about herself, but that's simply no excuse for keeping the truth from her.
Choosing comfort over truth is the lazy way out, and shouldn't a
civilization so far advanced in the future have realized that by then?
If *I* were an android, I would want to know. It would be a shock at
first, but soon after realizing that I still had all my emotions and
memories and thoughts I would be ecstatic about having escaped death
permanently. And imagine all the new things I could do with access to my
android brain - complicated math problems, etc.
Data had absolutely no right to keep the truth from her. Truth,
knowledge, liberty -- these should be the things people strive to achieve
throughout their lives. Choosing comfort over these values is a terrible
terrible thing to do, and it's a horrible tragedy that this is the choice
most people in our world today make. It should not be this way! Data should
have known that! He should have told her the truth! Who cares if it would
have made the episode much longer and if the commercials would have had to
be cut-out to fit into the hour time-slot and if the show wouldn't have made
any money at all without those disgusting commercials! That's not
important! Money is not as important as truth! Doesn't Data *know* that?
I'm very disappointed, and I will never watch that show again. I
mean it. It has turned out to be nothing but complete propaganda to control
the numb-minded TV-watching comfortable middle-class citizens of the
country. "Be comfortable, people," says the show to all the unsuspecting
brain-dead viewers, "Keep watching your Star-Trek! Who cares about truth
anyway... the word itself barely has meaning! Comfort above all else.. what
else is there?"
(Meanwhile I'm sitting in my chair in front of the computer doing
nothing at all, living an ordinary comfortable life of an angsty
middle-class girl. Hmm... Did I mention I was hypocritical? *sigh*)
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[ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS! HOE #818 - WRITTEN BY: RHEA - 9/1/99 ]