Star Trek Arcs V: Data/Lore

This arc is the first one to play out deliberately within a single Star Trek series (and beyond).

It’s all the more incredible, since the first season of The Next Generation is seldom considered to be the origin point of a lot of good things, other than the second act of the franchise itself. 

In “Datalore,” we get the secret origin of Data himself, as well as the fact that he has an “evil twin,” Lore, created just before him by Noonien Soong. Lore, it seems, was too mischievous, too unpredictable, so Data himself was conceived as a more innocent being.

This had the unintended effect of causing Lore, once discovered, to double up on his mischief, and for Data ever to yearn for more. In “Brothers,” the dying Soong intends to bequeath Data with a component that would help him achieve that goal, an emotion chip, but like Jacob and Esau, Lore tricks Soong into giving the chip to him instead.

In the two-part “Descent,” Lore uses the chip to manipulate Data, who’s unable to process emotions and so becomes easily controlled, for a time, but by the end he’s permanently deactivated Lore. For an android who has had to fight for his own right to exist, and that of his “daughter,” even, this is a surprisingly little-considered decision.

In Generations he finally installs the emotion chip into his positronic net, and again he exhibits great difficulty reconciling his new abilities. Eventually he figures them out, and in later movies even has the ability to switch them off or have the chip easily removed.

In Nemesis we meet a third Soong android of the same appearance, B-4, a prototype that predates Lore, less sophisticated than either previously encountered. Data again chooses to deactivate a troublesome sibling, although since he himself dies at the end of the movie, B-4 is subsequently reactivated, left to wrestle with the downloaded experiences of his brother.

In Picard we meet Dahj and Soji, who are so sophisticated they aren’t even aware they’re androids, much less directly associated with Data. The dilemma Lore forces Data into in “Descent” plays out a little differently between these sisters, who find themselves as the unlikely heart of a dark controversy.