Star Trek Reviews

Return to season list

Star Trek TNG - Season 7 - Episode 10

Star Trek TNG - 7x10 - Inheritance

Originally Aired: 1993-11-22

Synopsis:
Data meets a woman who claims to be his mother. [DVD]

My Rating - 5

Fan Rating Average - 5.04

Rate episode?

Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 28 5 4 4 14 18 31 24 16 11 6

Problems
- Geordi can see clear differences between humans and Androids as evidenced by TNG: Heart of Glory. Geordi should have instantly recognized Juliana was an android.

Factoids
- This episode establishes that there were 3 more androids before Lore, one of which is featured in Star Trek X: Nemesis.

Remarkable Scenes
- Data describing Lal to Juliana. Good continuity there.
- I like the music scenes in this episode.
- Seeing Juliana an android.
- Data describing the reasons he suspected Juliana was an android before.

My Review
This is one of the better "Data's past" episodes. Juliana was essentially the perfect android Soong set out to create, despite the ironic circumstances surrounding her creation. She fooled everybody, even herself. But the episode is severely lacking in overall plot. It's nice to get info about Data's past, but it literally dominated this episode. In the end it feels like a big stretched out waste of time, even if a nicely done one.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Orion Pimpdaddy on 2006-06-17 at 9:43pm:
    Season 7 seems to concentrate on fully developing the background of the TNG crew. Inheritance accomplishes by filling in more detailed information about his past.

    But that is all this episode is, a chronicle of Data. It is only average when compared to the other Data episodes. I give it a 5.
  • From Orion Pimpdaddy on 2006-06-17 at 9:46pm:
    Problem:
    How can Juliana live her whole life without knowing she was an android? You would think she would set off metal detectors, get an X-ray done, or accidentally open up the maintenance hatch that is on her head.
  • From Paul on 2010-08-17 at 5:16pm:
    Geordi would be unable to detect her as an android since she was designed to give off human vital signs etc.
  • From John on 2011-02-05 at 12:02pm:
    This episode is ok, though to be honest I've found myself skipping it when re-watching the series. I enjoyed when I saw it for the first time but, like others have said, it really doesn't have much of a plot.

    It fits into a sort of sub-category of trek episodes that I find generally annoying: the "charming woman with a secret" episodes. Typically these episodes feature a talented guest actress as a woman who charms one or more of the crew, but who has some hidden agenda or other secret thing about them which eventually becomes the focus of the plot. In many cases, this gets old quick. In the case where the audience actually likes the mystery woman it's just as bad, because they are never referred to again.

    I give this one a 4 myself, because it's nothing new, and not all that interesting either.
  • From Robert Koenn on 2011-07-05 at 2:59pm:
    I rated this episode a 5. I found it quite interesting and definitely a good Data episode. The story was fairly well done although there are always those plot lines that are written to carry the story as ridiculous as always. Whenever there is something questionable happening or to explain there is either a well it happened this way or a new technology is involved, not something logical. However my biggest gripe is that it would be ridiculous to think an android, no matter how advanced, would not realize it wasn't flesh and blood. That is totally absurd. It never got sick, it never cut itself, it never figured out that the food it ate was not normally processed as a biological being would be, and on and on. Soong could simply not have made everything so human that a thinking machine would not determine it was a machine.
  • From Mike Chambers on 2021-10-16 at 12:25am:
    I love how the holographic Dr. Soong tells Data that he designed the android Juliana to shut down in the event that she learns she's an android, yet in the next scene, they are discussing whether or not Data should tell her and this fact is never even mentioned. It seems like an important consideration?

Prove to me that you are a real person and not a spam robot by typing in the text of this image:

Return to season list