Quote Originally Posted by russdm View Post
Season 2 Episode 9
The Measure Of A Man
Stardate: 42523.7

[Rating]
5 - Excelent episode: Episode excels in most or all ways - major character development, good story and so on
&
1 - Bad episode: Multiple weaknesses (bad acting, bad story, disasterous effects, poor connection to lore) - For Reasons
I remember this episode quite distinctly -- I remember being frustrated with it almost the entire way through. Even though TNG was a tiny bit anti-bureaucracy or would feature unreasonable characters in power, they never went full-on in portraying Starfleet as broadly incompetent, capricious, or unfair. So it was hard to entertain the premise that Data's personhood was in any danger, for even a moment of runtime, and as a result I mostly just wanted them to get on with the story without all of the legal posturing.

I do agree there were some great speeches, and it was a very interesting opportunity to show Data's character through things like his possessions, like you mentioned.

Just for fun (not really a judgment on the episode's quality one way or the other), there's a very entertaining video from Legal Eagle on YouTube about this episode, analyzing whether the actual court scenes were accurate (spoiler: not very).

Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
Lore was unavailable for any of this sort of thing,
My brain misfired here and I thought you were saying Lore's actor was unavailable...it took me a moment of confusion to actually parse your statement correctly!