4x25 In Theory

[7.7/10] In Thomas Nagel’s seminal paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, the philosopher argues that even if we knew every conceivable fact about our nocturnal friends, even if we imagined life through its point of view, there would still be something missing from our understanding. We would be lacking in the experience of what it’s like to actually be a bat, to encounter the world the way it does. There is, on Nagel’s account, a gap in consciousness that cannot be accounted for through external means.

Maybe the same is true for love. Data researches the concept. He mixes and applies different styles of romance. He attends to his girlfriend’s needs, gives her support, embraces the rhythms that a relationship is supposed to have. He even looks forward to the time they share together. But he doesn’t feel anything. He can have the facts. He can dutifully go through the motions. But there’s something else missing, something he cannot quite reach despite so earnestly trying, given his limitations.

Star Trek spurred my interest and eventual education in philosophy, and it’s through episodes founded on fascinating thought experiments like this one. When the episode begins, Data has struck up a friendship with a young lieutenant named Jenna who’s just gotten out of a bad relationship. It becomes immediately apparent that, despite Data’s feelings-free makeup, Jenna has been leaning on him for emotional support. After kicking herself for always dating the wrong guy, and realizing that Data’s the man in her life who’s been there for her, she tries to strike up a romance with our favorite android.

That’s honestly all you need for an episode. My biggest gripe with “In Theory” is that it shoe horns in a mystery plot involving some dark nebula and various peculiar, poltergeist-like happenings aboard the ship. The solution turns out to be little dark matter clusters threatening the vessel, requiring Picard to pilot a shuttle and help steer the Enterprise away from danger. It’s a perfectly fine, replacement level crisis plot for TNG, but it has nothing to do with the A-story and feels out of place. It’s an unfortunate result of a rule from everyone’s favorite Star Trek writer, Rick Berman, that each episode needs to have some kind of threat or plot obstacle, lest it become a “scrapbook.”

The catch is that the question of whether a robot can love, low-stakes though it may be, is a thousand times more interesting than the fiftieth strange spatial anomaly. We’ve seen Data receive a kiss from a smitten ally in “The Ensigns of Command”. His encounter with Tasha not only confirmed that he is “fully functional” but demonstrated, in his later reactions, that he’s capable of having attachments to people. In “Data’s Day”, we even heard him express a desire to get married one day, or at least hold onto the possibility. So his attempt at being in a real relationship here feels like a natural extension of his early steps to this point, and a natural part of the human experience for him to attempt.

What I like about “In Theory” is that it examines all sides of that experience. For one thing, it’s a damn funny episode. There’s something about Data stiffly opening his arms for a hug, or telling Jenna he considers himself the “most fortunate sentient in this sector of the galaxy”, or cheesily grumbling that she’s “not his mother” which draws humor from the android’s awkward attempts to replicate romantic or intimate gestures. There’s a lot of laughs to be had from these well-intentioned stumbles, and writers Ronald D. Moore and Joe Menosky make good on them here.

Granted, “In Theory” came out in 1991, so there’s still a certain strain of gags that feel a little dated. Picard telling his second officer that he’d be pleased to share any advice he has on understanding women “when he has some” is a good chuckle, but a little cliché. Likewise, Jenna telling Data not to stop what he’s doing, while secretly hoping he will, and having to explain the intimated meaning when he doesn’t get it plays as rooted in some hoary ideas about relationships between men and women.

And yet, even these moments get to the heart of the episode. Data studies everything he can and consults all of his confidantes on how to do these things. He listens to Jenna and tries to adjust to meet her needs. But human interactions, particularly of the romantic variety, aren’t so simple. They’re a panoply of subtle cues and gestures and ways of understanding what a person means and needs, with a level of complexity and thorniness that most human beings have trouble with, let alone emotionally-limited androids.

Why wouldn’t Data go to his friends to try to find answers on whether it’s worth embarking on so daunting an experience. Geordi offers a sympathetic ear, but admits he’s no authority. Guinan tells him first love is something people need to figure out on their own. Worf admits that human dating is very different than Klingon “conquests”, but gives Data a comical “If you hurt her!” speech. All of them, even Picard’s questionable one-liner, feel true to the characters and reflect the kind of lived-in character writing you get with regular staff writers penning the episode.

But my favorite responses come from, oddly enough, Riker and Troi. Riker says what you’d expect, basically “Go for it! It’s fun!” More than that, though, he tells Data that romance is rewarding, invigorating even, that Jenna is an adult who knows what Data is and can decide for herself what she wants, and that all relationships involve some risk of heartbreak. On the other end, Troi warns Data that, true to the episode’s title, love is not something one can easily translate from theory to practice and, more to the point, that Jenna is a person whose needs and vulnerabilities should be prioritized, not just an emotional experiment for Data to engage in. As in the best Trek stories, “In Theory” looks at all sides of the complicated idea it’s exploring.

I particularly like how the focus isn’t just on Data and his experiences here. Jenna is a new character, but we quickly come to get her perspective. She’s been in a string of bad relationships. She’s ready to try something new, especially when Data is clearly making an effort and being attentive to her needs. And arguably most of all, she’s doing some projecting here, or what she wants to see in her android counterpart, whether or not it’s really there.

Jenna’s path through all this is understandable. She’s not exactly Geordi falling in love with a hologram. She’s someone who’s aspiring to a better and more fulfilling relationship and looking for one with someone who can provide the notes while never quite being able to whistle the tune. It’s a very human response, to look for an alternative, to see the good in someone and hope it’ll be enough, and to overlook those gaps that can make it difficult (here, arguably impossible) for two people to truly connect.

I don’t know if what Data’s offering Jenna is love, if it could ever be enough to erase that sort of gap. He’s made a special subroutine just for her. He strives to meet her needs even if the nuances of relationships don’t come naturally to her. He attempts to suavely woo her and provide the trappings of romance, the things he’s studied as expected parts of human courtship. So much of Data’s journeys on The Next Generation come down to whether there is something ineffable that truly separates the human experience from something that can be expressed in ones and zeroes, or if Data’s life and bonds are merely the same thing in an unfamiliar form.

“In Theory” zeroes in on a key difference though -- Data doesn’t feel anything. When he kisses Jenna, she asks him what he was thinking about, and he gives her a litany of disconnected bits, none of which reflect any emotion or affection. When they break up, he matter of factly declares that he’ll go ahead and delete his courtship subroutine, seemingly no more broken up about it than deleting a file about nacelle maintenance. What dooms the two of them to fail, despite noble and well-intentioned (albeit a bit misguided) efforts on both sides, is that absence of feeling, something Data can’t quite make up for no matter how many treatises he reads on the subject.

My wife once told me that love is more than a series of inputs and outputs. Care and devotion for another person are necessary but not sufficient. Loving another person undoubtedly requires living out that love in your choices and actions, but it’s also inexorably connected to how you feel about them. Maybe love can exist without that feeling. “Love” is a small word with a large array of meanings. But I’d like to think it calls for something a little spiritual, a little undefinable, a little worthy of keeping the word “soul” in “soulmate.”

Data can do all of the little things. He can provide comfort to his partner. He can meet every expectation for a new boyfriend. But he’ll still never know what it’s like to be in love. There are places where theory falls short, areas where a precocious android still reaches his limits in his aspirations toward humanity. Matters of the heart are slippery and fraught for the best of us. They’re even more elusive for those who can claim to understand love in some general, theoretical sense, -- with all its enervating highs and crestfallen lows -- but never truly experience it.