Data's Day has been one of my favourite TNG episodes for over 30 years for one very particular reason and it's to do with a peculiar quality that TNG holds above all other shows-the desire it creates within the minds of its audience to "be there". Many of us who grew up on the revamped version of the original series watched and rewatched these episodes (one 5pm episode a day repeated at 11pm if you were watching it on Sky) right throughout our late childhood and early adolescence. In that regard, the series occupies a very special part of our memories, one couched in a sense of comfort and easy living (who else gets to watch tv at 5pm but someone who has little else to worry about?) of having the family buzzing about the house, of well rounded contentment. Complementing this was something that TNG rarely gets credit for but every fan cherished-the set design and decor. Far from the gloomy dark sets of modern tv, TNG was warmly lit in a palette of late 80's/early 90's creams and beiges, filled with spatial rooms and corridors, tidy and clean with soft carpets and long awning windows and featuring an array of facilities we would get to visit and revisit again and again. To the kids who grew up with it, the Enterprise of this series was a plush and safe space and most importantly familiar. We longed to be there and now as adults revisiting it all for the first time in decades, the nostalgia for that sense of safe comfort is palpable.
It is this strange power which Data's Day taps into. As the titular character recounts his daily business both personal and official in a letter to Commander Maddox (he of Measure of a Man), the set-up requires us to follow the oft comical android around the ship. In doing so, the episode sends us closer to our coveted destination amid the stars of our mind than any other, filling the gaps in our own private mental maps of the ship. We visit nearly all of the secondary sets and even see a few new ones such as the hairdressers and the gift replicators. We see the main characters doing a little bit of what they do on their free time and get a sense of what it really was like to live aboard the Galaxy Class flag ship of Star Fleet. If that wasn't enough, and it could have been, threaded into the mix is a delicious b-plot that serves the primary drama brilliantly in that it justifies the retrospective narrative of Data's letter to Maddox as well as Data's wandering while adding a sense of excitement to the proceedings. (Of course, the convenient absence of Troi and her empathic sense from this b-story could count as a plot-hole of sorts and is the reason this episode rates a 9 and not a 10.)
Though such a premise could have leant itself to being nothing more than a tedious season filler, Data's Day instead seemed to bring the best out in cast and crew alike. The interactions between Spiner and Burton, the great Meaney and Chao, Sirtris and McFadden are fantastic and director Robert Wiemer assists them greatly with some inspired staging. It results in some of the funniest interchanges in the entire series with Spiner at the center of it all. Whether it be Data's delivery of the "good news" to the chief or the slow turning reveal of his fixed dancing smile, this show will have you howling with laughter no matter how many times you've seen it. In between will be the type of smiles that only the contentment of being in one of your favourite places can bring.
