YouTube suggested this video for me today for some inscrutable…
YouTube suggested this video for me today for some inscrutable reason of its own.
It’s from “Redemption, Part II”, the ST:TNG season 5 premiere, which first aired September 23, 1991. I vaguely remember seeing the episode when it aired, but I didn’t remember the side plot excerpted here, in which Data is given his first command and faces pushback from a first officer who doesn’t think androids should be captains. It seemed like a fitting thing to watch on a day when I’m thinking about discrimination.
Something else I didn’t remember, but which jumped out at me while rewatching the episode today, is that the starship Data commands is the USS Sutherland. The HMS Sutherland was the 74-gun ship Horatio Hornblower commanded in A Ship of the Line, my favorite Hornblower novel.
The fate of the Sutherland in Forester’s novel was very much on my mind as I re-watched this video, and the parallels between Data’s decision-making in the episode and Hornblower’s in Rosas Bay make me think Ronald D. Moore’s script for “Redemption” was intentionally referencing A Ship of the Line.
Reading up on Moore, he attended college on a Navy ROTC scholarship and served for a month aboard the modern antisubmarine frigate USS W. S. Sims. So I don’t think it’s stretching things to imagine that he was aware of the Hornblower connection.
There’s also this, from memory-alpha.org:
According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia, “the Sutherland was named for Horatio Hornblower’s flagship in the classic C.S. Forester novels that served as one of Gene Roddenberry’s original inspirations for Star Trek.”
When I first came across the Tumblr Hornblower fandom, they were discussing the shipping of actual ships. HMS Sutherland, though described by Hornblower as the ugliest ship of the line in the Royal Navy, is the vessel I immediately thought of. I have a lot of feelings for the Sutherland.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/46427679113.
Tags: star trek: the next generation, horatio hornblower, redemption, sutherland, ronald d. moore.
