This submit accommodates main spoilers for season two, episode seven of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’

Artificial intelligence has been baked into the Star Trek universe for the reason that unique collection. Kirk and his crew sometimes confronted off in opposition to computer systems gone amok, together with Nomad, Landru and the M-5. The solely technique to defeat these digital villains was to outwit them utilizing logic, which brought about them to self-destruct. But in The Next Generation, the franchise turned extra focused on exploring the personhood of synthetic beings like Data and his family, Voyager’s holographic doctor or the exocomps. This week, Lower Decks dredges up the old-style megalomaniacal AI and asks, are you actually certain about these rights?

The USS Cerritos is as soon as extra known as upon to assist out a civilization enslaved by an evil laptop, this one known as Agimus (voiced by long-time Trek actor Jeffrey Combs). Disconnected from his community of drones, he’s really fairly pathetic, desperately begging the natural beings round him to only hook him as much as a pc. All that’s left for Starfleet to do is to drop him off on the Daystrom Institute, which isn’t probably the most glamorous of jobs, so in fact Beckett Mariner and Bradward Boimler find yourself on this specific babysitting gig.

A gravimetric shear complicates issues for the pair, forcing their shuttle to crash on a barren world with solely the pleading voice of Agimus to maintain them firm. The laptop makes use of this chance to pit the 2 in opposition to one another, persevering with a plot thread that we thought had been settled two episodes in the past. Beckett nonetheless doesn’t belief Brad’s talents regardless of all they’ve been by means of. It appears like a regression or maybe even a mis-scheduled episode, besides that we the viewers nonetheless see his development whereas his supposed greatest good friend doubts him. It’s a plot line unlikely to go away after a couple of episodes, reaffirming this present’s dedication to character-driven storytelling.

However, that breadth of characterization doesn’t actually apply to Agimus. He’s actually simply… form of a jerk, and he doesn’t have the flexibility to immediately affect something as a result of his lack of legs and arms. Boimler and Mariner spend your entire episode lugging his field round: a sentient MacGuffin. If you’re not conversant in that time period, it means an merchandise (or particular person) that strikes the plot ahead and motivates the characters, however will not be really essential in itself. With Agimus’s reign over, he actually simply serves right here to get Mariner and Boimler at one another’s throats.

His standing as a sentient being is rarely in query, however the issue of what to do with him as his conduct worsens goes in instructions that will by no means come up for an natural particular person. Mariner suggests burying him, a suggestion turned down by Boimler as a result of he’s a sentient being and that’s not what Starfleet does. So it appears now we have made some progress from the ol’ “destroy them with their own logic” days of TOS. But then the 2 ensigns find yourself burying him anyway, whereas Agamus protests that “he has rights!”

And but Star Trek has all the time been a bit sketchy about what these rights are. While episodes like “The Measure of a Man” and “The Offspring” have reaffirmed Data’s humanity, it’s been contradicted since by occasions on Voyager and Picard. The Doctor asserted his authorial rights to a holonovel he created and won, however wasn’t really acknowledged as an individual. The query remained unanswered almost 20 years afterward Picard, with us solely being proven holograms of restricted capabilities, or these based mostly on the personalities of different sentient beings (Rios’ crew). And absolutely artificial beings like Data, ones with brains and our bodies, had been unlawful after the assault on Mars.

Lower Decks takes place a mere yr after the top of Voyager, so it’s free to choose up and discover a few of these plot threads with out that later baggage. But with out a artificial crew member on the USS Cerritos it will possibly solely look off the topic. Agamus is dumped in a storage facility as simply one other “self-aware megalomaniacal computer,” not too dissimilar from the warehouse the place the Ark of the Covenant is dumped on the finish of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is it a jail? Did he get a trial? Are he and the opposite computer systems simply going to take a seat there till the top of the Federation? From an moral perspective it isn’t nice, but it surely’s unlikely to ever be absolutely addressed, as a result of who in Starfleet is actually going to combat for the personhood of a computerized fascist dictator?