Sambeg Raj Subedi
ENGL 21007-S
Prof. Jesse Rice-Evans
Weekly Assign#6
03/11/2019 

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3 Episode 16, “The Offspring” was one of the best episodes I had watched so far. This episode was mainly about Lal, daughter of Data. Data, who itself was an android created a robot which was identical to him in term of memory, capacity, and power. Data considered himself as a father of Lal. He allowed Lal to choose her sexuality, where Lal chooses to be a girl. Though Lal had a positronic brain, she was curious to know about everything just like the human baby. Data really did a good job in guiding her to get socialized and learn new things. She was kept in a bar as a waiter so that she could understand human behaviors and habits. Captain Picard was initially unhappy with the Data’s experiment, but later Data was able to convince him. Admiral from Star Fleet wanted to take her away so that she could get more exposure, but Data strongly refused his proposal. As a result, Admiral decided to meet them in person and evaluating her progress, he would make a final decision. He was initially not that impressed but at the end, seeing the bond between Data and Lal, he got emotional and felt sorry for his action. Lal, knowing that she will be separated from his father gets an emotion of fear. This created a permanent neural disorder in her system which was almost impossible to fix. So, she had to be deactivated. It was so heartbreaking for everyone in a starship.
In this episode, we can see that Data created Lal to continue his species in the Star ship. I don’t think allowing robots to recreate their own species is a good decision. Robots are made to ease the human activities. So, these creatures should be totally under human control because they are more accurate and powerful than humans. If they are allowed to make their own decision, then we cannot say that one day they won’t use the same tool to rule over humans. Being specific to my field of study, the computer plays a vital role. I cannot imagine my work without a computer because all of designing, creating and editing works are done in computers but it does not mean that I should be replaced by a computer. Use of Computers/ Technology should be bounded under certain limits.