Brothers by: Rick Berman and directed by: Rob Bowman

 

“Brothers” is written by: Rick Berman and is directed by: Rob Bowman.  It was produced under production code 177, was the 3^rd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 77^th episode overall, and was broadcast on October 8, 1990.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation is Brent Spiner’s world and we are just observing it from the outside.  “Brothers” is Season 4’s first Data focused episode and the first episode written by Rick Berman, the executive producer who would be responsible for Star Trek as a franchise after Gene Roddenberry until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005.  Berman is a controversial figure, believing Star Trek needed to be fully adherent to the vision of Gene Roddenberry, that is through the lens of the things that Gene Roddenberry put on-screen during the original series and the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation when he was alive, not necessarily the philosophy behind many of those decisions.  That is largely a discussion for other episodes when he is more in charge fully, but “Brothers” is an episode that shows Berman isn’t incompetent when it comes to telling a story.  “Brothers” is an episode that asks Brent Spiner to play a triple role: Data is taken over by a signal bringing him to the hideaway of his creator, Dr. Noonian Soong with his brother Lore following soon after, all to explore essentially a family dynamic between two brothers at odds while an oblivious and almost selfish father who sees his creations as objects.

 

Soong fits the stereotypical mad scientist: he’s an old man with frizzy white hair stuck in a home that is also a laboratory.  He’s been hiding on this planet for years and the episode very much positions him as this absent father who does not really care for his creations.  He cannot see either Data or Lore’s perspectives on life: early on in their conversations he expected Data to follow in his own footsteps and become a scientist instead of entering Starfleet and wasn’t even aware Lore was “active”.  By the end of the episode, Soong doesn’t actually learn the error of his ways or anything, he brought Data back to give him emotions and essentially complete his life’s work which is thwarted by Lore taking the emotion chip for himself.  That twist is particularly fantastic because narratively it is Lore acting out, almost rightfully, to trick a father who does not actually care about him.  He cares about Data, even asks Data to reconcile with Lore on his own deathbed seeing an error at the very last minute of his life, not properly, and the episode is aware of this because Spiner as Data gets the final shot contemplating his brother silently which is genuinely fantastic.  Spiner as Soong, really playing up the madness of a man who cares about one of his children and almost nothing else.  Spiner as Lore is also picking up right where the performance in “Datalore” left off, and because there isn’t actually a big scheme to take over the Enterprise or anything here, just eventually get that chip.  Berman’s script is one that is reliant on dialogue to communicate the story and obviously the performance of one actor.  Rob Bowman is in the director’s chair and his dynamic sense of blocking guides the heavy dialogue sequences while juggling the triple role.  There is a tendency in drama to employ a technique called backacting where you will have two actors having a dialogue scene with their faces towards the camera.  Because of the triple role, Bowman cannot rely on that, instead often times we’ll keep Data or Lore in shadows while the focus is on Soong before setting up reverse shots with Soong completely out of frame.  This is likely because of the different makeup job on Soong being more difficult to recreate with a stand in since it’s a new makeup, while the Data makeup is for the team been distilled down to a science.  Visually this does make the episode surprisingly dynamic, especially with Bowman also having the camera move through scenes with several walk and talks to keep the dialogue moving even on a smaller set.

 

The important plot point here is that both Data and Lore were summoned by Soong against their wills, the first act of the story is this horrific sequence of Data outside of his control performing a mutiny on the Enterprise.  This mutiny is quiet, starting by making life support fail with the pretense of an accident so the rest of the crew abandons the bridge and then locks the rest of the crew out of the controls.  He does this silently, Spiner not being allowed to change his face enough but the minute expressions just add to the uncanny valley of the character and the danger of the situation.  The script also adds this secondary tension of a child on the Enterprise in quarantine because of a prank of his brother’s, an obvious parallel to the Data/Lore relationship, This is the B-plot of the episode and the real shame is that these brothers are dropped largely after the first act, only to come back at the very end, because there isn’t actually a whole lot of drama there, but it really should be resolved before we get into the meat of the Soong plot.  It’s actually quite nice to see Dr. Crusher be a doctor and it once again allows Gates McFadden material to be a full character, even if the role of doctor bleeds slightly into role of mother as well.  The tension is that the sick child could die if the Enterprise doesn’t get to the nearest Starbase because of a parasite acquired from eating a plant cultivated on the ship after a prank gone wrong.  It’s an effective B-plot, made more so by Michael Piller’s inclusion of Lore in the plot as that wasn’t in Berman’s original script, reflecting that Berman is a producer over a writer.

 

Overall, “Brothers” is less an examination of brothers, but of the issues a father can create in their children from the viewpoint of being absent, an added layer that writer Rick Berman likely wasn’t entirely intending to be there.  What’s elevating a good script is Brent Spiner’s ability to play three parts at once and carry the entire episode on his back.  8/10.