jotaro-kuujo: nyotas:Star Trek: The Next Generation 2.09 | The Measure of a Man I feel like old-scho

jotaro-kuujo: nyotas:Star Trek: The Next Generation 2.09 | The Measure of a Man I feel like old-school trek had a lot of jank that was just the result of budget issues for a tv show like this or special effects of the time or maybe differences in how acting was done on tv back then but I think without a doubt one of the greatest things TNG accomplished was the way Data made you FEEL because the combination of all of the things that led to how the show was produced and presented essentially left us with a human guy in some make-up like literally the rest of the entire cast, be they human or alien characters they were almost always just a person in some make-up unless they were a CG energy being or something.So here we’ve got Data who is played by a human pretending to be a robot, but the fact that his character is a robot learning to be human sort of flips the suspension of disbelief issues behind the fact that a man can’t PERFECTLY play a robot because there WILL be emotion in the performance and there WILL be little micromovements that androids wouldn’t need to make because at the end of the day the ACTOR is human. And so we get these moments like this episode where you almost forgot Data WASN’T a human being until someone started treating him like a machine and you’re like “OH FUCK NO YOU DON’T, YOU’LL HAVE TO TAKE HIM FROM MY CORPSE YOU RAT” and the rest of the characters do the same! It’s genius, really because what most people probably see as a limitation of the show, to have to just slap some make-up on a guy and call him an android and have him try his best against human nature to give a performance that feels like a machine instead of a person as opposed to using some filmmaking tricks to make him feel more still and rigid or giving him a computerized voice or something, actually ends up being so damn compelling because of the choice to make his character aim to be more human, and it leaves this sort of ambiguity where the text is like “no, Data doesn’t feel… or does he?” and you’re like “FUCK YEAH HE FEELS LOOK AT HIM I WOULD DIE FOR DATA”Data is without a doubt my favourite character in all of Star Trek because of this. For as many limitations as a production like this has on how you could do something as difficult as having a human portray an android convincingly, the writing makes it work and allowed Brent Spiner to KILL this role. This episode is a great example of how this concept can make the entire cast AND AUDIENCE get legitimately emotional over Data. This whole episode is still one of the most emotionally compelling episodes of a tv show I’ve seen in a while, and people would dismiss it as having come from a cheesy sci-fi show full of technobabble and actors shuffling around to pretend their space ship got hit by something.It’s the kind of show people would accuse of being mere spectacle and nonsense, that it’s so unrealistic it couldn’t possibly have emotional depth, and then episodes like this come around and kick you in the teeth. -- source link
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