“Shut up, Wesley!” Picard and others shout this episode.
Even once Wesley is proved right—at the end of the episode for the other characters, from the get-go for us viewers—he gets to return to duty, but gets no “thanks,” or “sorry we didn’t listen to you” comments. Sure, you would not expect them from the Captain, who does not have to explain himself to a mere boy, but you’d expect his mother to say something …
But let us back up.
Picard & Co. visit the planet where Data was found about 26 years earlier. Nothing lives there. They find a secret door, find a disassembled android that looks like Data, take the parts back to the Enterprise, and decide to put the other android together.
Oh, and some sort of crystal entity once visited the planet and scared everybody … the drawings on the wall prove it! Not that this will be important later, will it?
The new android is called Lore and claims he is Data’s younger and better brother. He fools Riker & Co. by hiding his intelligence and while nobody is foolish enough to actually trust Lore, they will trust who or whatever wears Data’s uniform, and they’ll give Lore free run of the ship. Not that this could cause any problems, could it?
Soon Lore reveals his dastardly plan, furthermore that he was the first and it was his ‘perfection’ (and arrogance and evil?) that led him to being shut down, resulting in a more humble but less human Data being created. Oh, and he’s working with the Crystal Entity. Of course Data a) relates that he’ll have to report this to Picard and b) he turns his back on Lore, c) resulting in Lore defeating him and stealing his identity … damn Lore and his poisoned champagne! Wait, poisoning an android?
With his mother’s help Wesley, relieved of duty for being an obnoxious know-it-all, finds the real data and they track down Lore and, at the last minute (second!) avert danger by beaming said evil android from the ship.
The end.
I’ve skipped a few things … like Data never mastering contractions in language (whereas Lore uses them with ease), Lore’s facial tick/twitch, Data’s on-off switch, and so on … but these are the supposed plot details that allow us (and Wesley) to figure out the truth. Were this a proper who-done-it or myster or thriller or whatever, we wouldn’t know whether Lore was ‘bad’ or whether he had swapped with Data, we could’t or wouldn’t easily know how to tell them apart, and only through remembering the carefully-laid crumbs from earlier in the episode would we piece things together just in time, perhaps in synchronicity with our audience surrogate (Wesley?) in the show, perhaps a bit before or after him or her … in the case of “before” we could have had a more ‘tragic’ outcome, as our hero would figure things out only too late to avert disaster.
But that’s not the show or episode we actually watched.
And let’s not even talk about how in order to beam a tree off the ship the shields would go down just long enough for the Crystal Entity to attack the ship, but when Lore is beamed from the ship to save the day, said Entity supposedly does not have enough time to attack and kill everybody …
… just sayin’.
Alas, now that we have Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher we not longer get fabulous new sweaters episode to episode; instead we get a still very 80s but somehow depressing grey-ish top with rainbow stripes. Week after week, or, as Susie and I watch these episodes, day after day.
Brent Spiner must have had fun here and all his Lore is missing is a mustache to twirl. While the “technology” to put both Data and Lore in a single shot is rather direct (if tedious pre-extensive-cgi-and-digital-compositing, etc.), it is well-done here … three cheers for the production values! This episode had a low Picard-quotient, and when he does show up he’s pretty cardboardy … his only worthwhile exchange might have been with Yar about trusting Data … and it’s a sad day when Yar, even with her “I’m a good puppy and here to please” smile, comes out of that exchange looking as good or better than the captain.
But like “Where No One Has Gone Before” (which, like this episode, has a high Wesley-quotient), “Datalore” feels properly like a TNG rather than TOS episode, and despite all the good things in, say, “The Big Goodbye,” it’s arguably one of the first good TNG episodes. It also helps, I think, that this is basically a one-story episode. Sure, there are nods to continuity and such, but this is all about Data and Lore, and even the Crystal Entity is part of that … we have no “A story and B story” to develop.
On the “Shut up, Wesley!” bit …
… arguably (but this ignores how most of the crew are otherwise behaving) everyone is telling Wesley to shut up because they already know that ‘Data’ is ‘Lore’ (or Lore is Data … parse as you will) and they were trying to lure Lore into a trap of sorts.
This, of course, does not actually seem to fit with everything that has occurred up to this point, and does not mesh with Picard telling Yar that he trusts Data. In a better show or better episode, we might ‘tell’ the story from Wesley’s perspective so that we, along with him, think we’re the only ones who know what is going on, with a later reveal to the contrary … but this is not that show.