#TNGWatch #S02E21 #PeakPerformance

Sirna Kolrami and wargames! Whee!!!!

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The TOS whistle on Riker’s 80-year-old ship is ❤ Also, I forgot how sassy Sirna Kolrami was! Yas, Queen!

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"It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose. That is not weakness; that is life." - Picard

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This was a very fun episode! Riker and Picard have to wargame against each other because Starfleet said so (Picard is super against it because Starfleet is not a military institution, but he understands Starfleet has to be ready as they now know about the Borg and the threat they represent [first mention of the Borg since their first appearance earlier in the season]), but while Picard gets the Enterprise, Riker gets the 80-year-old Hathaway, complete with TOS bells and whistles (literally). Sirna Kolrami, a Stratagema grandmaster and all-around tactical genius is aboard the Enterprise to observe, and oh man is he one sassy sumbitch. He’s like a meaner Tim Gunn with the same amount of amazing skill to back up his trash talk.

Riker and his hand-picked crew (including Worf, La Forge, and The Boy) have to resort to trickery and outright cheating to even have a chance of beating the Enterprise, but then the Ferengi attack (I almost forgot about you guys!). Because of the wargames, neither ship has any offensive weaponry, but being tactical geniuses in their own right, Picard and Riker band together and beat the Ferengi by tricking them as well.

The subplot of this episode concerned Data losing to Sirna Kolrami in a game of Stratagema, and then having an internal crisis because he thought he’d made a mistake, which meant that there was some internal problem that his diagnostics weren’t picking up. Both Troi and Pulaski try to cheer him up, but they treat Data like a human, which doesn’t work. Then Picard shows up and gives him that awesome quote and Data is back on the horse! At the end, he has a rematch with Sirna Kolrami in which he decides to go for a stalemate instead of winning, which infuriates Sirna Kolrami until he quits in disgust.

I love this episode! It’s so good! I want to be Sirna Kolrami when I grow up! But I do have questions about Data and the continued insistence that he doesn’t have emotions. He very clearly does. He feels satisfaction and dissatisfaction, he feels assuredness and confusion, he feels some sense of camaraderie, and he feels loss; these are all very real emotions. They are not the big, showy emotions of anger, sadness, or joy, perhaps, but they are facets of them. In fact, I think Data would be better described as on the spectrum. He feels emotions, he just maybe doesn’t process them as well as humans do, and in turn humans don’t know how to interpret the emotions he does show. Data might actually be an early example of autism on TV, even if nobody ever called it that.