“Descent: Part 2” (first aired 9/18/93)
Or The One Where Data Is His Brother’s Keeper
Here we are with the seventh season première of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the final season premiere for the entire run of the show—and, well, it’s not looking quite as solid as I’d like, really. We’ve got two of the series most familiar villains, who respectively serve as polar opposite representations of humans’ inherent fear of technology: the Borg, as the impersonal machine that renders all our individuality moot; and Lore, as unchecked aggression with inhuman strength and persistence. And bridging the gap between those two we’ve got Data, the fan-favorite android whose benevolent quest to be a real live boy has been seemingly perverted into rage for his former friends on the Enterprise. Picard, Troi, and Geordi have been taken captive by Lore and his followers, while Beverly’s captaining the Enterprise and Riker and Worf are running into Hugh, the individualized Borg drone who (through no fault of his own) started this whole mess. It’s a very busy episode, no doubt about it, and it has a few exciting moments; Captain Crusher’s attempts to out-maneuver the Borg ship have the hallmarks of a good TNG episode, with smart people making risky choices, and it’s fun to have all that “metaphasic shielding” stuff from “Suspicions” pay off in an unexpected context.
So why don’t I love this? My knee-jerk response is to say that “Descent: Part 2,” even more than “Part 1,” doesn’t really feel like TNG, but I’ve used that criticism before, and it’s not a particularly effective one. It doesn’t say anything specific. So digging deeper, I’d say the failing of this episode, and of the two-parter as a whole, is that it doesn’t go much beyond the obvious. The biggest idea the writers had on this one was “Lore takes advantage of the Borg,” and while that’s not a bad idea at all (and a fairly clever way to bring Lore back, really), “Descent” never goes beyond it, not really. Apart from Hugh, the Borg are little more than mobile props—there are occasional nods to the turmoil they must be experiencing after being severed from the Collective, but once the episode has established that Lore is the real threat, the Borg operate like any other manipulated race. They listen to the master, they obey, right up until it becomes dramatically effective for them to stop obeying, at which point they start fighting amongst themselves. They used to be the show’s boogeymen, but here, they are presented almost entirely as victims. In a better episode, this could’ve been effective. We could’ve gotten into the ethics of the situation: In a way, Lore is more evil than the Borg because he actually recognizes that his behavior causes harm, whereas the Borg simply see themselves as obeying a natural, and ultimately beneficial, prerogative. But even Lore was programmed, which makes you wonder how much to blame for all of this he really is—or, at least, that’s what I would have wondered, if the episode had any interest in that sort of question.
Instead, we get what is a half-hearted deflation of a potentially devastating threat, and a betrayal of one of TNG’s most consistently compelling characters. This is an episode that can only survive if you don’t think about it, if you spend most of the running time taking the most shallow possible interpretation of events. And that’s a problem, because this show has trained us by now to always think things through. “Descent” is far from TNG’s worst episode, and it’s easy to be moderately entertained while watching it, but for all its seemingly epic scope, it’s essentially hollow, raising big issues only to drop them without much consideration.
So, it turns out I was basically dead on when I guessed that Lore was using some sort of emotion emitter to manipulate the Borg and Data—and I don’t mention this to brag (Haha—I correctly predicted the plot of a show that aired almost 20 years ago), but because… okay, I did sort of mention it to brag. But come on, how weak is this? Lore is using the emotion chip he stole in “Brothers” to send a carrier wave that overwhelms artificial life forms with feelings they can’t understand, making them vulnerable to his machinations. At least, I think he has to be using this chip on the Borg as well as Data, since we definitely see angry Borg or worried Borg at various points throughout the episode. Plus, Data caught the wave during the Borg encounter that started this whole mess. But we never see Lore actively controlling how much “feeling” the Borg get, like we see him doing for Data. Does he have it set to some kind of low-level aggression? Does he only activate it when he needs the group to attack? And none of the Borg we see are addicted to emotion like Data clearly is. Lore’s control over the group is shaky at best, given how easily Hugh is able to infiltrate them and then throw everyone into a riot when the narrative requires an easy resolution. In concept, Lore taking over as leader of a small group of Borg who’ve been thrown into confusion by Hugh’s individuality makes sense; Lore is one of the only other artificial life forms around, and he’s comfortable with being his own man (so to speak). But how did Lore find the rogue Borg? And why haven’t other Borg tracked down these rebels and eliminated them? Surely this dissolution would be a greater threat to the Collective than, well, just about anything. At times, it feels like we’ve jumped into a story past the most interesting part, and while I realize there’s no way that TNG in its current form could’ve shown us Lore and the rogue Borg’s initial connection, the episode could’ve been substantially improved if it gave off the impression that anyone had given any thought at all to the back-story.
Then there’s poor Data. Last episode had him confronting the fact that not all emotions are easy to handle—this one has him as a brainwashed junkie willing to betray his closest friends and the entire human race for a quick fix of… pleasure, I guess? I dunno. Look, there are ways this could have worked. (I’m beginning to sense a theme here.) Data’s quest for humanity has been arguably the most persistent character objective in the run of the series, and it’s led to some great episodes. And even the episodes that weren’t great were interesting, primarily because Data is at once instantly likeable and utterly alien. He is polite, non-confrontational, never takes offense or gets angry, and, because of his inability to consistently comprehend the behavior of even his closet friends, he’s set slightly apart from the rest of normal society—something which just about everyone can relate to. But he’s also a machine, and invulnerable to the weaknesses and indiscretions that plague seemingly every other sentient being on the show. He mimics empathy, but is incapable of experiencing it; his mercy is the mercy of subroutines, logic, and facts. Which, up until now, has served him and his co-workers very well, but what if he finally got what he thought he wanted—what would happen next? Imagine an adult whose spent his entire life emotion-free suddenly waking up lustful, sad, impassioned and delighted all at the same time. It would render him, at least for the moment, incapable of making rational decisions, because he would have no frame of reference for what “rational” meant in this new context. Data’s in roughly the same position, he's been fixed his whole existence to strive for emotion. So how do his priorities shift once the new emotion hits? We saw he was willing to risk the lives of two of his closest friends for the sake of a sentient vacuum cleaner last season. Who knows what he’d risk if his goal was in sight.
That’s not really what we get, though. We get brainwashed Data, who needs to be reminded of his friends and separated from the tech that’s making him be all evil and stuff. There’s no subtlety in Data’s performance in “Part 2.” He sneers at Picard, Troi, and Geordi like a second-rate hoodlum, and we never get a sense of him transitioning from the generally normal Data of the first part of this story to the willing-to-torture-Geordi Data we see here. The only real way to read this is that everything that happens once Data escaped the Enterprise with Crosis happened because Data was under Lore’s control. Despite the conversations with Troi last time about “negative” emotions (which, frustratingly, gets raised again here and then immediately dropped; does that mean Troi was wrong, and there are negative emotions, not just negative actions? Because it certainly doesn’t seem like Data has a choice in his actions), this has nothing to do with Data’s quest, nothing to do with him becoming more human. If it did, I doubt Picard and the others would be so comfortable at letting the android off the hook after everything that happens. The final scene of the episode has Data nearly destroying the emotion chip, because it made him do things he’s not proud of. Then Geordi stops him and has him put it aside until he’s ready to use it, or something. How does that work? When will Data know he’s ready to install a chip that, earlier, made him turn traitor and engage in a campaign, however briefly, to destroy all non-artificial intelligent life? This could’ve been a profound, even tragic moment, but given how muddled and lazy his episode arc is, feels like too little, too late.
Again, this isn’t terrible. I enjoyed Beverly kicking ass and taking names on the bridge of the Enterprise, although I’m not sure how necessary it was; the problem with big two-parters like this is that writers assume they need to shoehorn storylines for every character, and that means that the most compelling parts of the story (here, the Borg/Lore problem and how that relates to Hugh) have to share time with not necessarily awful but still less than essential threads. Worf and Riker seem to get forgotten for large chunks of the episode—they run into another group of rogue Borg on the planet, they meet up with Hugh again and find out he’s less than happy with the role the Enterprise played in his life, and they disappear until the last 15 minutes or so, when they convince Hugh to help them get into the compound, just in time for Hugh to stop Lore from shooting Data. I’m not sure why Hugh would be all that compelled to save Data; they didn’t hang out much at all during “I, Borg” (Hugh’s closest relationship there was with Geordi, who’s off busy being unconscious during the climax), but I guess it’s just assumed that, hey, he’s a nice guy and everything, why not. Then we get a great scene in which Picard installs Hugh as the ruler of his band of merry, murdering Borg, and the heroes ride off into the sunset with the pleasure of a job well done. So while it’s not terrible, it doesn’t really hold up. This is the last we see of Lore, a character who was always more interesting in concept than practice, and it’s the last we see of the Borg on this show, and neither goodbye is particularly satisfying.