I imagine this is closer to what fans were looking forward to when the Picard show was first announced. I still massively cringe to the memory of Han Data flying the Millennium Enterprise through the Borg structure, but otherwise I like it.
Haha yes. I was accepting of it because it felt like Data’s retrospective in-universe fan fiction, especially in the new Data-Lore form. Like he started to wonder how far he could push the Enterprise D, and given that they had nothing to lose, he was basically like “fuck it, let’s see what happens”.
And honestly, from a “technical” stand point, it made a lot of sense that only Data could do that, which I wish they’d made a tad more clear with a line or two about what the actual challenge of that would have been. Obviously he’d have to be making all sorts of calculations ahead of time, reading in output from the console faster than any human could and hitting the controls similarly fast. Maybe a line about the margin of error for swinging the ship’s momentum around being stupidly slight but Data’s precision being up to the challenge and that he’d actually been modelling the problem of maximising the ship’s agility for years without telling anyone … cuz he’s Data and can literally do that.
I also like that Data is alive again, because I didn’t like either of his deaths personally. He’s my favorite character in the franchise and was my favorite character of all time as a kid so it’s just a nice touch IMO.
Yea some found it inconsistent that he wanted to die in S1 and was happy to live in S3. First, his dying in S1, while wonderful in its own way, wasn’t the tightest or most obvious character point. I head-canon-ed it as being specific to that particular recreation of data and his experience as a prototyped recreation stuck in a machine.
But also, being stuck with Lore is a completely different experience and the way it played out made a lot of sense in the broader arc of Data’s journey. You can imagine Noonian Soong loving that his two children ended up this way.
I guess the problem I had with his death in season 1 is he didn’t really live that long to want to die. That and in TNG they had him confused as to why anyone would commit suicide, stuff like that.