Ten-Forward Crew: Diane Moser, Hayne Bayle, Maria Leone, and James G. Becker
Lal as Robot: Leonard John Crowfoot
Data sparks another legal row over the status of androids when he innocently sets out to further his creator’s work. He builds a “child” whom he names Lal ­ Hindi for “beloved.”
Troi and the others are delighted when Lal chooses a human female form; her personality soon blooms, despite growing pains. But Picard is not so pleased that she was developed in secret, and has a hard time calling her Data’s “child” even though the elder android duplicated his own neural nets for Lal’s.
Still, the captain becomes a firm ally of the androids when Admiral Haftel of Starfleet Research insists that Lal should develop in a lab rather than aboard a ship. Despite the protests of Picard, Data, and Lal herself, Haftel perseveres ­ especially after he finds the new android in Ten-Forward, where Guinan and Data thought she could best study humans.
But then Lal, who shows she can go beyond Data’s programming by using contractions, grows too quickly when the stress of the fight over her future leads her to develop emotions ­ a new trait she finds she physically can’t handle.
Haftel and Data unite to repair the damage to her system, but it is too great. Data, the supposedly unemotional android, bids his dying child good-bye and then tells his grieving shipmates that Lal will always live on in their memories.
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Hallie Todd, who played Joe’s daughter on the Showtime series Brothers, is the real-life daughter of Ann Morgan Gilbert who played next-door neighbor Millie Helper on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. She turned in a charming and poignant performance as Lal, the spark that aided Frakes’s long-sought turn in the director’s chair and made viewers forget that android rights had been addressed only a year earlier in “The Measure of a Man”.
After producer Rick Berman told him he’d “have to go to school” before directing a show, Frakes spent over three hundred hours observing editors, watching other directors, going to the dubbing stage, attending seminars, and reading. “I think the producers were hoping I’d lose interest, but I didn’t,” he once said, and judging by his subsequent directing assignments (“Reunion”, “The Drumhead”, “Ethics”) their reaction to his initial turn in the director’s chair must have been positive. This script was the first TNG sale for Echevarria, who joined the writing staff to season five.
Daytime viewers may recognize Nicolas Coster from his current role on Santa Barbara. Leonard John Crowfoot, in an uncredited role as the robot Lal, endured much less anonymity and special makeup during an earlier guest turn on TNG (“Angel One”). Once again the Daystrom Institute (“The Measure of a Man”) pops up; Haftel is mentioned as working at a Daystrom annex on Galor IV.
Rob Legato used a rare motion-control camera onstage for the sequence in which the robot Lal is picking holographic self-facade options. This scene includes the first appearance of an Andorian on the series.
