Pointy ears and androids

I enjoyed The Next Generation series as much as the first Star Trek, although I never quite warmed up to Jean Luc Picard. Nice accent, though.

What is it with British accents, by the way? If we Americans like the bloody things so much, why didn’t we keep them?

But I digress. Patrick Stewart got top billing for TNG, as William Shatner did for the original Star Trek. In both cases, however, another cast member—Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and Brent Spiner as Data—got at least as much attention from fans.

Why those two? Data was Spock, I suspect; i.e., a character intended to fill Spock’s role in the crew dynamic, an android in place of the half-Vulcan. Both of them were logical, ultra-intelligent—and very strong. Physically strong. Apparently we don’t want our smart guys to be whimps.

Spiner has said that some of his fan mail was romantic in nature—and that it was primarily addressed not to him, but to Data. Data was, in fact, more accessible than Spock, more vulnerable. He seemed younger than Spock, and his relationship with Picard very different from that of Spock to Kirk.

Data also has one of the best lines in a Star Trek movie (Insurrection), when he states that in the case of a water landing he was designed “to serve as an emergency flotation device.”

But in the end, the fun is over and our strong, smart guys have to die: Spock sacrifices himself for the Enterprise crew in the second movie (Wrath of Khan), Data in the ninth (Nemesis). I’m sure somebody, somewhere, has written a thesis about this. I’ll restrain myself, mostly, but it sure does seem like what we really want, down deep, is somebody else--Vulcan, android, whatever--to step in and save our sorry, collective, human butts.