Dammit. I so, so want to love this episode. Parts of it are really good, and I do absolutely love what it is trying to do. If only it didn’t go wildly off the rails in a few key scenes! It has some other weaknesses as well, but for the most part this is an atypical three-star episode: not middle of the road so much as alternately wonderful and awful (somewhat after the fashion of season three’s “The Offspring”—another Data story, actually, although the two cases are otherwise quite different).
“Data experiments with romance” was a story idea begging to be made into an episode, and could have made for a true classic that would be high on my personal favorites list. And indeed, even as is, I love a great deal about “In Theory.” Weirdly, TNG manages here, for once, to depict the beginnings of a romantic relationship in a way that I actually find engaging! There’s both good and bad in the writing choice to introduce Jenna D’Sora as someone with whom Data (but not the audience) is already acquainted at the start of the episode. It helps to make the development of their romantic relationship not feel rushed in the way that so many one-episode romances do, but it also feels like a missed opportunity. Particularly because this is Data, I feel like it would have been so cool if we could have seen the two of them developing the friendly relationship that the episode asks us to accept that they already have at its start. On a more serialized show, this could have been simmering in the background of other episodes for some while prior to coming to a head in this one, for example. Still, on balance (and given TNG’s episodic structure), I think not starting them from zero here was absolutely the right choice. Jenna is a likable character and she has a sweet connection to Data from the outset, and this gets things off to a solid start. That the writers give her an actual bit of backstory concerning a previous unhappy relationship also helps to make her feel like a real person, and to make her attraction to Data feel believable. Of course, stepping outside of the immediacy of these early scenes “feeling right,” it goes without saying that Data and Jenna are wildly incompatible as potential long-term romantic partners…but the episode knows this, so it’s fine.
The section of the episode in which Data seeks advice on romance from the various other regular characters is a bit of a mixed bag, but honestly, I’m inclined to view it pretty indulgently. Troi is the only one who offers him anything particularly helpful, and her scene with him is accordingly the best out of this series of scenes. (Riker and Worf are both totally useless, yet also entertainingly themselves; as for Picard, I find the writers’ jokey take a bit disappointing, and Picard’s word choice—implying not merely that he lacks insights about romance, but that he doesn’t understand women—irritatingly sexist.) I appreciate that Troi actually does the responsible thing by emphasizing to Data that he’s dealing with a person, whose feelings can be hurt. I also like that she tells him that Jenna will like him for who he is, not for his ability to play the role of a romantic partner based on his study of romantic relationships in literature. Alas, to both his and the episode’s detriment, Data will seemingly ignore this bit of advice. But in the meantime, as Data takes in his various friends’ advice, he is his usual even-keel, ego-less, delightful self, and the scenes are just fun to watch.
In some ways, the thread about Data consulting literary sources to learn about romance is both brilliant and also the episode’s downfall. Data is venturing into uncharted territory for him, and isn’t clear on “the rules,” or on what’s expected of him in this kind of relationship—and in this way, he stands in for anyone who has ever struggled with the uncertainties of dating. The exchange that I’m about to cite comes from a cringe-inducingly awful scene, but when Jenna observes that Data’s behavior seems “forced and artificial” and not his “real” self, and Data replies that when it comes to dating, there is no “real him” to be, so all he has to go on are external scripts that he doesn’t fully understand…well, let’s just say that I can relate! But the episode succeeds in dramatizing this effectively (and entertainingly) only about half the time. On the successful side, there’s the fun scene in which Jenna shows up at Data’s quarters with a gift for him. Everything about this scene works for me. Data is just being Data, behaving rationally but, in context, cluelessly, because he doesn’t understand human emotions or relationships—doesn’t “know the rules.” Jenna, realizing this, sets aside her initial disappointment and takes it upon herself to educate him. She sees him making a genuine effort and is touched by this, and it’s very sweet (and also funny, particularly when she tells him a second time to go back to painting and he hesitates, wary of doing the wrong thing again). But the later scene, in which Data first starts cheesily play-acting the role of lover and then, when Jenna is nonplussed by this, pivots into a “lover’s quarrel,” is just awful. For one thing, Spiner hams it up in a way that feels totally wrong; suddenly he’s no longer the Data we’ve come to know, but some kind of cross between the goofy-ass early incarnation of the character from season one and an especially cheesy turn from Lore. I don’t like the way this scene was written, either, but I could at least somewhat accept Data’s lines here if they were delivered in a believably Data-ish way! I find watching Data attempt to have a romantic relationship gripping, but I have exactly zero interest in watching Brent Spiner ham it up as a cheesy amorous android.
Here’s the thing: Despite my enthusiasm for “Data tries romance” as a story idea, Data and a human woman trying to have a romantic relationship is obviously a terrible idea in-universe. As they discuss in the final scene, Jenna can never matter to Data, who can do no more than merely fake it for her. The episode even has Jenna realizing, in the end, that she has followed up her previous unsatisfying relationship with a man whom she found insufficiently emotional by getting involved with a “man” who lacks emotions altogether. This comes across as psychologically real and as a nice moment of insight for her, and it was all that the episode actually needed in the way of illustrating why their relationship can’t really work. It’s a problem that genuinely comes from who Data is. We definitely did not need Data implausibly emulating some ridiculously dated and cliched lothario-esque role model to get us to this—but even more fundamentally, we didn’t need for his mistake to be the too-human one of falling back on “playing a role” at all. Humans do this because of their insecurities, and because of gendered socialization, and these things don’t apply to Data. More mistakes like not knowing the “right” way to respond when she showed up with a gift, and Jenna gradually coming to grips with the reality of what his inability to feel for her really means, would have worked so much better. I mean, to some extent, engaging in the relationship at all means playing a role for Data (“she’s showing romantic interest in me, so I’ll play along with that”)…but there are effective and ineffective ways to illustrate that he doesn’t know how to play this role.
This is kind of a minor aside, but having just mentioned annoying gender norms, I have to pause to talk about the early scene in ten-forward featuring Data, Jenna, Miles, and Keiko. As ever, the latter pair are depicted in a painfully stereotypical way: the long-suffering wife putting up, in good humor, with her slob of a husband, who seems largely indifferent to her frustration. This is every bit as irritating as it always is, but at least here it’s balanced by Jenna and Data displaying a contrasting dynamic, in which she is the slob and he (naturally!) the tidy one. It doesn’t actually redeem anything about how Miles and Keiko are portrayed, but at least it’s something.
Anyway… The other thing about “In Theory” is that it kind of stands out in my mind as marking the point in TNG’s run when the “character-focused A story against the backdrop of a sci-fi B story” episode structure starts to falter. Frankly, the plot concerning the dark matter nebula and the pockets of subspace distortion that phase out parts of the ship is kind of pointless, and contributes very little to the episode. Sure, it yields one fun comical little scene, when Picard calls Worf into his ready room to investigate the mystery of how his work station ended up on the floor. (“You did not–” “No, I did not.” And then the captain quipping about the possibility of a poltergeist, to Worf’s disapproval. Good stuff.) But otherwise, it’s basically just filler. Also, I don’t at all get the point of the captain insisting on being the one to pilot the shuttle that will fly ahead of the ship to guide it out of the nebula. Why? He offers no compelling reason (and Riker just backs down anyway)…and other episodes establish that Riker is the more skilled pilot. It also serves no clear story purpose. It’s just…there. Kind of like the whole of the nebula plot.
So “In Theory” gets lots of points for effort, and significant portions of it are really good…but one major scene is also really, really bad, and in ways that undermine what the episode could and should have been, while still other parts (the B plot) just seem boring and irrelevant. It’s so clear to me that this could have been a really great episode with just a bit of tweaking that its failings bug me more than those of many other episodes. But even so, I like enough of it that it’s easily a (flawed) keeper.