September 20th, 1993, "Descent Part Two"
Fiver by Zeke
The Episode
LORE: What do you think of my followers, Picard? Impressive, aren't they?
PICARD: I'm not particularly impressed. All you've done is teach them to enjoy killing.
DATA: You are wrong, Captain. My brother and I serve a much higher purpose.
And that purpose is...what? Gradually conquer the galaxy using a small number of Borg drones and one ship? We really did need more exposition on this point.
DATA: Yes. My brother has made that possible.
PICARD: He gave you the chip. The one Doctor Soong made for you.
LORE: No, no, no, no, no. I still have the emotional programme my father designed. I wouldn't want to give it up.
Oh, here we go. They really needed to exposit more about the emotion chip. Soong made it clear that this thing was just a program. It wasn't some key that would unlock Data's potential (if it was it would be useless to Lore), and Lore acts like he can't just duplicate the program. If this thing contains hardware that was omitted from Data's design on purpose, once again it would be useless to Lore.
Lore says that he's broadcasting emotions into Data in order to control him. I'm not sure how this is possible, since Data would've had access to all of Lore's schematics back in "Datalore" and would know how to block any transmission that Lore was able to output. There's no way Soong would've built into the chip an override command to allow it to push emotions onto any other Soong-type android in range.
So we are forced to conclude that Lore modified this chip to gain this transmitting ability. I'd think it would be simpler to install the thing into Data after modifying the programming and adding a receiver to allow him remote access to it.
Furthermore, what is Lore trying to accomplish here? Data isn't going to admit that he's inferior to Lore unless Lore pushes said thought onto him. And victory by brainwashing hardly seems like a real victory.
LORE: They're no longer simply mindless automatons. They're passionate. Alive.
Let's put aside the revelations from Voyager and First Contact about how the Borg work. The basic fact is that Lore wouldn't
want these drones to be alive (or rather sentient, which is what Lore really means). That would interfere with his plan. The only explanation is that he's put failsafe programming into each one of them. So he's going to spend his time sending programmed orders to the drones, which will control humanity like sheep. And to what end?
TROI: Are you saying that you caused them to become individuals?
LORE: No, you did that. You and your friends. All I did was clean up the mess you made when that Borg you befriended returned to his ship.
DATA: Hugh interfaced with the others and transferred his sense of individuality to them. It nearly destroyed them.
You'd think Borg would be programmed to reject corrupting programming and restore to an earlier version in situations like this. Or that the programming conflict triggered their self-destructs. I just can't see "let them work through their problem" as a viable Borg solution to situations like this.
LORE: What's important is what I've done here. How I found my calling. I know now why I was created. No one can ever take that away from me. Without me, they would have perished. When I stumbled on their ship, they were lost, disoriented, they had no idea how to function as individuals. They couldn't even navigate their own vessel. They had lost their sense of purpose. I gave them their purpose. And they gave me mine.
DATA: The Borg aspire to the perfection my Brother and I represent. Fully artificial life forms. We are their future.
Again, we'll skip scenes in Voyager showing how disconnected Borg react to their situation. If the Borg were interested in shedding their organic components they would've figured out a way eons ago. Furthermore, I fail to see how androids are "perfect" by Borg standards. Especially since they're the antithesis of what they want: perfection via absorbing what makes other species special. At best assimilating Data and Lore would be a stepping stone to their ultimate goal.
CRUSHER: Well, Taitt, I'll bet you never thought you'd be serving as Tactical Officer after only six weeks.
TAITT: No, sir, I sure didn't.
Ugh. They know the Borg could be around here somewhere, Worf has no business being on the planet. And even if Picard wanted Worf on the planet, he would have an assistant who can instantly take over at Tactical when Worf is off the ship. The idea that Crusher is the only officer on board with any real world experience is ludicrous.
PICARD: Data, you must realise that something has happened to you. The Data I know would never have agreed to be a willing party to Lore's plan.
DATA: I now realise that my life aboard the Enterprise was a waste. My quest to become human was misguided. An evolutionary step in the wrong direction.
I'm still confused about how much Lore can influence Data. This seems more like genuine reprogramming, not simply influence. And Lore couldn't hack into Data and control all movements and speech remotely, what would be the point anyway?
LAFORGE: Data, just because you haven't experienced certain emotions doesn't mean they don't exist. Lore is only feeding you the negative ones.
DATA: Counsellor Troi told me herself that feelings are not negative or positive. It is how we act on them that makes them good or bad.
Yeah, she screwed up last episode. I'll skip this screed, but suffice to say there are 100% bad emotions. Racism for example.
CRUSHER: I'm not leaving those people stranded back there. An emergency buoy can transmit a copy of our log entries to Starfleet just as easily as we can. Ensign, prepare a buoy and launch it when ready.
Emergency buoy? I think you mean "probe", Beverly. Buoys aren't generally known for moving very fast (or at all).
DATA: All the Borg you have experimented on so far have suffered extensive brain damage.
LORE: Using the humans to perfect the procedure will allow us to prevent any further Borg deaths.
The logic here is as twisted as Lore's mind. My question is how Lore can influence Data this much without direct control.
LAFORGE: Lore must have told Data to take my visor because he realised I could see a carrier wave that was radiating from him.
PICARD: A carrier wave? Is that how he's manipulating Data?
LAFORGE: I think what's happening is that Lore is tapping into the chip he stole from Doctor Soong and somehow he's found a way to transmit part of that emotional programme to Data.
I've already covered the technical aspects of this plan, I'll just mention how amazing it is that people in 1993 could predict the full potential of wifi. At the time wireless networks were still in its infancy.
HUGH: You don't know the condition we were in when he found us. Before my experience on the Enterprise, the Borg were a single-minded Collective. The voices in our heads were smooth and flowing. But after I returned, those voices began to change. They became uneven, discordant. For the first time, individual Borg had differing ideas about how to proceed. We couldn't function. Some Borg fought each other. Others simply shut themselves down. Many starved to death.
We're led to believe that only one ship was tainted by Hugh, but that doesn't make sense if you consider what we know about the Borg, even at this early stage.
It's the "starved to death" that I find most intriguing. Surely the regeneration alcoves would work on a very primitive program, at least when it comes to basic power transfer and organic component maintenance. It occurs to me that the drones would be stuck in their alcoves, their bodies being maintained but their minds/programming stuck in logic loops. I don't see why a drone would be allowed to disengage from their alcove before the programming conflict was resolved.
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