3x22 The Most Toys

[7.4/10] I enjoyed Isaac Asimov’s robot novels when I was a kid. His stories famously featured three laws of robotics, each centered on protecting humans from robots somehow gone wrong. But those stories also found their sparks (if you’ll pardon the expression) when those rules would come into conflict with one another. Grappling with how Asimov’s androids grappled with moral conundrums allowed the author to speak to the way we do the same, with a layer of abstraction that makes it easier to connect with.

“The Most Toys” makes hay out of the same idea. Data is kidnapped by Fajo, a trader and, more notably, a collector of rare items. He wants Data for his collection of unique treasures (an unbelievable number of which are from Earth’s Western civilization) and ignores the android’s demands to be returned to the Enterprise. What follows is a series of escalations, in how far Fajo will go to force Data to comply with his selfish wants and how far Data will go to resist.

At first, I thought this was going to be one of those “Random person thinks Data is just a machine, but he proves that he’s a real person” episodes. And in a way, it is. But Fajo’s problem isn’t that he denies Data’s autonomy because he’s made of circuit boards and biopolymers. He announces Data as the galaxy’s “only sentient android” to a friend and rival. Maybe he’s just puffing up his latest find to a competitor -- he does seem to treat Data like a dog when they first meet -- but I don’t think Fajo’s problem is that he fails to recognize Data as a person.

It’s that he doesn’t care about anyone else’s needs, up to an including their need for freedom and to keep living, beyond his own. He treats his servants no better than he does Data, as disposable vessels for his amusement. In that, he’s the antithesis of all that the Federation represents: a respect for life, a recognition of the needs of others, altruism and self-improvement over hedonism and the accumulation of material things. Fajo may not be Star Trek’s scariest villain, but he’s the one whose existence and way of life is the most in conflict with the very soul of the Federation.

You can see it in the difference between how the rest of the crew of the Enterprise treats Data’s absence versus how Fajo treats him in his presence. There’s a mournfulness aboard the Federation flagship when they believe that Data’s perished. Everywhere they find signs of the connections that Data forged with his crewmates, the impact he’s left on them.

Picard reads a conveniently-bookmarked passage from Hamlet, a tribute both to Data’s unique humanity and the time they spent together exploring the arts. Wesley and Geordi uncover the memorial to Tasha and Starfleet medals that helped affirm those connections in “The Measure of a Man.” Troi explores Worf’s awkwardness and sense of honor at once again replacing a crewmate who died. The show lays it on a little thick here, Riker’s commentary especially, but it’s still striking how much this supposed appliance, this object of Fajo’s amusement, meant to those who believe they’ve lost him for good.

Geordi isn’t one of those people though. He’s closer to Data than anybody, but he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong about the way his friend “died.” There’s not much dramatic tension here, since obviously the audience knows Data’s still alive. But these scenes still work both to dramatize Geordi’s devotion to his friend and dogged determination to find him if he’s still out there, while also showing how well he knows Data -- discerning that something hinky is going on based solely on Data’s log entries before the shuttle explosion that allegedly killed him.

The sense of loss on the Enterprise is the more interesting part of that half of the episode, but the show still goes through its good problem-solving paces when having Geordi and company solve the mystery. They gather evidence and put the pieces together to figure out how Fajo staged the whole “natural disaster” that led the Enterprise to him and gave him the opportunity to nab Data. “The Most Toys” makes space both for Picard and his crew to mourn their comrade and for them to believably unravel the villain’s scheme.

That scheme comes down to faking Data’s death and persuading him, with either carrot or stick, to be a good boy for his master and entertain Fajo as part of his collection. Data is understandably resistant to all of this, and it creates a fine sort of moral chess game between them.

Data asks to be returned to his ship. Fajo refuses. Data tries to escape. Fajo’s reinforced the door and made them only respond to his touch. Data tries to use physical force to create contact between Fajo and the door, but Fajo has a personal repelling device that prevents it. Fajo tries to sweet talk Data a bit, telling him about the wonders of the universe they could explore together free from Starfleet’s constricting moral precepts, but Data circles the wagons around his programming and principles, refusing to comply or otherwise play along with his captor.

This setup makes for some creative problem-solving for Data, but also gives the audience the chance to see the depths of Fajo’s amoral, self-centered worldview. Guest star Saul Rubinek (whose quality performances run the gamut from Frasier to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to Coen Bros. movies) hams it up here as Fajo, and I’m a little mixed on the approach. His Fajo is memorable, but a little too goofy in places, in a way that undercuts the severity of the situation and moral questions at play, even as he embraces a huckster-y approach that’s recognized in the script.

To be frank, there’s a lot of cheesiness aboard Fajo’s ship. His collection of rare items that would be known to 20th century American audiences is a necessary allowance. But the costuming, outsized vibe to most of his scenes, and the clunky setup and performance for his servant, Varria, bring the episode down a bit.

Still, I was invested in the ethical back and forth that Varria eventually becomes entangled in. When Fajo tries to show Data off to a frenemy, Data resorts to passive resistance, remaining mute and lifeless to deny his kidnapper the satisfaction. To get Data to play ball, Fajo points an experimental “torturous” disruptor at Varria, correctly assuming that Data’s vaunted respect for life will prompt him to comply with Fajo’s demands rather than let a (relatively) innocent person come to harm. It’s a nice escalation of their conflict, resorting to the old “How do you get to an invulnerable hero like Superman? Put someone he cares about in danger” trope in a natural way.
It’s enough to convince Varria to help Data escape, so long as she can come with, adding a nice dose of character to the events that help free our favorite android. Of course, they run into trouble, and as part of the escape attempt, Fajo kills Varria with the disruptor, blaming Data for her death rather than accepting any responsibility, having already claimed that he can live with any accusations of immorality at the same time he evades taking the blame while seeming shell-shocked over having taken a life.

That momentary disorientation is enough for Data to grab the disruptor himself and train it on his captor. Fajo shrugs it off, declaring that however upset he is, Data won’t shoot him because he can’t. He’s never done it before. It’s not in his programming. Instead, Fajo announces his plans to perpetuate this arrangement, to kill whomever he has to without compunction to keep Data in line. The Enterprise arrives just in time to beam Data out before anything more happens, but Chief O’Brien reports that the disruptor was in the process of being discharged, something Data attributes to the transporter.

It’s a unique outcome to save the least. It’s unlike Data to bend the truth, let alone attempt to take the life of another humanoid and then practically taunt him over it in the episode’s final scene. But rather than chalk it up to inconsistency, I’d like to think of it as another evolution in Data’s development as a person.

He believes in the sanctity of life, of avoiding using lethal force wherever possible. But even when he’s not strictly acting in self-defense against Fajo, he’s forced to bring those principles to bear against more abstracted harms. How do you balance a desire to do no harm with a person whose craven selfishness only adds more harm to the world? Fajo is a net negative to the galaxy, a bastion of thievery and cruelty that the world would be better off without. When Data pulls that trigger, you can practically see Asimov’s laws (or their Star Trek equivalents) being turned over in his positronic mind, weighing whether one act of violence could be justified through stopping such evil from being perpetuated any further.

“The Most Toys” chickens out a bit by conveniently avoiding Data actually killing the man who stole him away, but the point stands. Morality is not mechanical. It’s too complex for that. Reevaluating yourself and what you feel you must do when your principles run aground on the real world isn’t just a natural part of growing up; it is profoundly human.