Data's Laboratory (Deck 38 — USS Enterprise‑D)
Detailed Involvements
Events with rich location context
Data's laboratory is the primary stage for the unveiling and technical explanation. It functions as a clandestine workshop-turned-birthing-chamber where scientific apparatus, diagnostic rigs, and synthetic parts frame Lal's creation and where the institutional breach becomes visible.
Clinical, tense, quietly reverent — a mixture of scientific curiosity and moral discomfort.
Demonstration site for Lal's creation and the immediate arena for the command-creator confrontation.
Represents the locus of secret experimentation and the moral isolation of a creator making life beyond institutional oversight.
Restricted research bay; occupied by senior technical and command personnel in this moment, not open to general crew.
Data's laboratory is the stage for the revelation and confrontation: a confined, tool-lit workspace where creation occurred and where technical proof and parental claims collide. Its clinical clutter and evidence of assembly heighten the sense that something private and experimental has become public and ethically charged.
Clinically focused and tension-filled, mixing scientific wonder with suppressed conflict.
Meeting place for discovery and the scene of initial institutional-versus-personal rupture.
Represents secrecy, creative autonomy, and the private origins of an emergent life — the literal workshop of parenthood and scientific hubris.
Practically limited to engineering and senior staff; not a public space — entry implies involvement in the experiment.
Data's laboratory is the stage for the demonstration and the ensuing custody argument. It functions as both a technical workspace where the transfer device is shown and a private 'birthplace' whose confined space intensifies the clash between parental claim and institutional intervention.
Tension-filled and clinical: humming machinery, quiet authority, and an edge of moral urgency undercut polite protocol.
Meeting place for the demonstration and the ethical/authoritative confrontation over Lal's custody and care.
The lab symbolizes the site of creation and parental attachment, and becomes the battleground between intimate responsibility and impersonal institutional control.
Functionally restricted to senior officers and authorized personnel; the demonstration setting implies limited, controlled access.
Data's laboratory is the stage where a technical demonstration shifts into an ethical and custodial confrontation. The room's clinical tools and intimate workbench clutter underscore the tension between clandestine creation and institutional scrutiny, making it both cradle and courtroom.
Taut, clinical, and confrontational — a small, focused space charged with protective tenderness and bureaucratic threat.
Meeting place and battleground for custody and ethical debate over Lal's future.
Embodies the collision of private creation and public institution — a 'birthplace' turned tribunal where parental claim confronts bureaucratic power.
Restricted research area (Deck 38 lab) — primarily accessible to senior officers and authorized personnel; not a public space.
Data's laboratory functions as the emergency operating space where Lal reverts and where the reinitialization will occur. Its clinical equipment, diagnostic consoles, and history as Lal's birthplace concentrate technical urgency and intimate paternal care into a single, high-stakes setting.
Clinical urgency suffused with tense tenderness; tool-lit shadows and humming consoles make a small, tense stage for a life-or-death technical intervention.
Medical/emergency operating area and site of immediate triage and technical intervention.
A clandestine birthplace of artificial life now doubles as the possible scene of erasure — the lab embodies both creation and the threat of destruction.
Effectively restricted to senior officers and technical personnel; privacy granted for medical procedure and sensitive research.
Data's laboratory is the scene of the emergency: Lal arrives here in a regressed state and Data declares the need for reinitialization. The lab becomes both operating theater and contested ground where private parental rescue is converted into institutional procedure.
Clinically tense and focused—quiet urgency with tools and consoles waiting; emotional undercurrents of grief and fierce protection run beneath technical calm.
Operating site for diagnosis and imminent technical intervention; staging ground for the conflict between personal care and institutional procedure.
Embodies the intersection of creation and control—Data's private workshop turned into a zone of institutional authority and potential erasure of nascent personhood.
Implicitly restricted by Admiral Haftel's assertion that only Data and he should remain to 'operate'; effectively limited to technical/senior staff in this moment.
Events at This Location
Everything that happens here
In the ship's lab Data unveils Lal, an emergent android whose positronic brain was created using a new submicron matrix-transfer process. Data calmly explains he transferred neural structures from his …
In the laboratory Picard confronts the quiet, startling fact of Lal's existence: Data has used a new transfer technology to create an android with a positronic brain derived from his …
In the laboratory, Data reveals that Lal contains the sum of his programming but, crucially, exhibits a linguistic anomaly: she uses contractions. Admiral Haftel immediately treats that small humanizing slip …
In a crystalline confrontation inside the lab, Data states that Lal carries the sum of his programming and reveals an unexpected difference—she uses contractions—turning a technical demonstration into a moral …
During a climactic custody confrontation Lal suddenly collapses into a catastrophic neural regression: motor control and comprehension recede until she resembles the inert mannequin of her earliest state. Troi reports …
Lal regresses to a near-mannequin state after a fleeting burst of emotion, collapsing into a clinical emergency. Troi reports the brief, extraordinary emotional surge; Data confirms Lal’s programmed instinct to …