6x08 A Fistful of Datas

[5.7/10] “A Fistful of Datas” is a missed opportunity for Star Trek; The Next Generation. Westerns have, ironically, been fertile ground for the futuristic franchise. “Spectre of the Gun” was one of the better outings in The Original Series’ third season, and even Enterprise made a decent showing with “North Star”. Maybe it’s the “Wagon Train to the Stars” pitch, but there’s something almost natural about melding the final frontier with the American frontier.

Only, this episode spoils the mix. I complimented the last episode as a perfect blend of comedy and more serious elements. “A Fistful of Datas” is almost the exact opposite. Sometimes it wants to be a wacky tale with a Klingon sheriff dropped into Deadwood, South Dakota and the broad comedy of Data gone wild and western. Sometimes it wants to be a serious tale of a dangerous holodeck malfunction where Alexander’s safety and maybe even Worf’s life hangs in the balance. And the episode just never gets the combination of those two tones and modes right.

The best you can say about this one is that it’s a nice father and son story, or at least tries to be. For all of Worf’s reluctance to use his shore leave to pal around on the holodeck with Alexander, he gamely plays along while things go right, and goes to great lengths to save his child when things go wrong. His reassurance to Alexander that even though their adventure turned into a misadventure, this frontier town hasn’t seen the last of Sheriff Worf and his deputy is wholesome as all hell. And Worf admiring himself in the mirror in the cowboy hat he grimaced at earlier in the story, even sporting the rare smile, is a warm moment as well. The execution may be off, but The Next Generation’s heart is in the right place here, and that counts for a lot.

It’s just not much of a story in the meantime. Most of the events set on the holodeck’s wild west simulation occupy a strange middle ground. The attempts at humor there, like Miss Annie’s come-ons to and jilted anger at Worf, is too broad to be funny. While the actual outlaw-battling is too cheesy to be cool or convincing, but not exaggerated enough to be fun or amusing. The result is a weird tonal blandness, where it’s not clear how TNG wants the audience to react on a scene-to-scene basis to the events in the holodeck.

But the only things less effective are the scenes set on the rest of the Enterprise. This is the worst kind of Next Generation mystery -- where the audience already knows the answer from the word go, and so the crew figuring it out just feels tedious. It’s obvious from the moment that Data has a weird malfunction whilst connected to the ship’s computer that it’s the cause of the holodeck’s Data-replicating glitches, and he’s the cause of the Data-related bugs causing problems in the real world.

So we spend most of the runtime dealing with dull and obvious examples on both sides while the officers struggle to uncover something the audience has known about more or less from the minute it happens. There’s no tension or excitement to that, and there’s very little comedy from Riker reading Data’s poem rather than the prose of his play, or Picard listening to the wrong classical music recording. (Honestly, I wish we’d gotten to see random crewmembers ordering, say, mozzarella sticks and instead getting Spot’s cat food).

It’s not like the resolution there is clever either. Data just...figures it out and they do a memory purge for both him and the ship’s computer. An obvious source of the mystery isn’t the worst thing in the world if the writers can come up with a smart way to solve the problem and have the characters focus on that. But “A Fistful of Datas” has nothing. All we get is extended scenes of Brent Spiner speaking in an overblown Western accent.

I tend to love Spiner’s performance on the show, but he’s a real mixed bag here. I think he does what the script asks of him, hamming it up when called for, but it doesn’t really work, whether he’s the young Eli Hollander or, god help me, cross dressing as Miss Annie in the episode’s embarrassing closing gag. But the weird thing is, he’s legitimately frightening and menacing as the taciturn, cold-as-ice Papa Hollander. It’s a sign that when restrained, Spiner can do great work, which makes it all the more of a waste that the show leaves him to chew scenery rather than lean into the chill of a cold killer version of our favorite android.

At least the Western half of the episode has a semi-clever resolution. Worf realizing he can’t outdraw a foe with Data’s reflexes, and so using the combination of his combadge and a telegraph to make a rickety force field, works as a unique threat and fix. It requires some serious handwaves and willing suspension of disbelief, but it’s at least a distinctively science fiction-y spin on the traditional “stand-off at high noon” set piece. And I like that Troi is a fan of the genre who helps out in key moments.

That’s my biggest frustration with “A Fistful of Datas”. There are some TNG episodes that are just doomed from conception. It’s hard to imagine a version of “Man of the People” that could really work no matter how you did it. But it’s not that hard to envision a better version of this episode, one that picks a tone, plays a little more coy about what’s happening, and otherwise makes good on the promise of our futuristic space heroes feeling like fish out of water in the “Ancient West.”

Maybe that would mean going full comedy with everything that happens on the holodeck. Maybe it would mean taking the holodeck malfunction threat more seriously a la past (and, spoiler alert, future) adventures with Moriarty. Maybe it would mean giving more daylight to the growing relationship between Worf and Alexander as father and son and showing us why this adventure means so much to them. The greatest sin of “A Fistful of Datas” isn’t the places where it stumbles; it’s the unrealized potential and the better episode that could have been.