This episode has religious overtones in the way Data explores the hallucination he experience when his sensors get overloaded by the plasma beam: It makes him have a LSD like dreamstate experience where he first, with sinister overtones watches a blacksmith hammering on something, forging out something out of metal.
It turns out the blacksmiths face is Data himself, or his creator Dr. Soong, as a young man.
Data first try to imterprent his vision through artwork, 26 images of very elaborate styles and variations of his experience. It does not give definite answers, so Data wants to go back into this "state of mind" again. So they recreate the same plasma overload and off Data drift into a deeper state than the first.
This time Data experience meeting Dr. Soong and he get to talk to his creator. Explaining that the wing he hammered out was the moment when he created Data out of circuits and programming. That Data is the bird and his experiences up until that moment was him becoming the bird, but no longer a model, but alive. He tells him to spread his wings into the dream and fly off. We watch Data as he soars through Enterprise and outside into space, witness remarkable sights.
I almost cried when I watched this story as it contain so much of the very same information we humans have asked ourselves since we began to think and become self aware. Who are we, who made us?
As Data, we have a creator, be it a scientist or maybe we created ourselves, but in order to experience the creation we made we had to become it and evolve - up to the point where we acknowledge that we are the creators of the music and the dreams.
We are the music makers and we are the makers of the dream; "The soldier, the king, and the peasant. Are working together in one".
It's poetic and serves as one of Data's most profound moments in the whole of Star Trek Lore.
And of course there is the anti-Data: Lore. The Evil Twin. The Doppelganger. The one creature we have to meet on the threshold, he looks up at us from the Abyss, calling our name. "You are me and I am you". As the old saying goes by the brave people: If you can not meet with perfect balance in your heart, Lore will consume you and you become a "Black Brother", but in perfect union the veil is drawn aside and you may pass on into the City of the Pyramids, beyond space and time.
Nothing more, nothing less... just infinite and beyond!
It turns out the blacksmiths face is Data himself, or his creator Dr. Soong, as a young man.
Data first try to imterprent his vision through artwork, 26 images of very elaborate styles and variations of his experience. It does not give definite answers, so Data wants to go back into this "state of mind" again. So they recreate the same plasma overload and off Data drift into a deeper state than the first.
This time Data experience meeting Dr. Soong and he get to talk to his creator. Explaining that the wing he hammered out was the moment when he created Data out of circuits and programming. That Data is the bird and his experiences up until that moment was him becoming the bird, but no longer a model, but alive. He tells him to spread his wings into the dream and fly off. We watch Data as he soars through Enterprise and outside into space, witness remarkable sights.
I almost cried when I watched this story as it contain so much of the very same information we humans have asked ourselves since we began to think and become self aware. Who are we, who made us?
As Data, we have a creator, be it a scientist or maybe we created ourselves, but in order to experience the creation we made we had to become it and evolve - up to the point where we acknowledge that we are the creators of the music and the dreams.
We are the music makers and we are the makers of the dream; "The soldier, the king, and the peasant. Are working together in one".
It's poetic and serves as one of Data's most profound moments in the whole of Star Trek Lore.
And of course there is the anti-Data: Lore. The Evil Twin. The Doppelganger. The one creature we have to meet on the threshold, he looks up at us from the Abyss, calling our name. "You are me and I am you". As the old saying goes by the brave people: If you can not meet with perfect balance in your heart, Lore will consume you and you become a "Black Brother", but in perfect union the veil is drawn aside and you may pass on into the City of the Pyramids, beyond space and time.
Nothing more, nothing less... just infinite and beyond!