I was pleasantly surprised by this episode. I don't think I'd seen it since it originally aired. There are flaws in it, especially how they test for sentience, but I don't remember the story being this compelling. There are so few instances of Riker having good leadership moments in later seasons that this one where he knuckles down ends up being one of the better ones?
Should the exocomps have come back? What if they're sentient, but non-sapient? With neither a drive to reproduce nor aspirational intelligence? Is it moral to create beings strictly for labor, even if it's labor they enjoy? What happens when the particle fountain is completed? Do you ship them across known space for another project despite the fact that it's less efficient than creating new exocomps locally and painlessly switching the old ones off?
How mentally undeveloped do your synthetic slaves have to be before it's moral to create and use them for your own ends? It's a deep question that's worth asking if your Star Trek series is almost entirely premised on it.
The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.
