Synopsis: Lt. Commander Data is ordered to deceive the crew of the Enterprise in order to save them.
In “Clues” the crew becomes increasingly distrustful of the one individual on board that they feel they can count on, the android second officer, Lt. Commander Data. They trust him because they know that he has been programmed to be truthful and obey orders at all costs. This is similar to how individuals learn to rely on their dominant psychological function type in order to make sense in the world.
Carl (C. G.) Jung originally wrote about his typological theories in Psychological Types in 1921. This work was expanded upon by Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myer to become the Myers Briggs Type Instrument, or MBTI, which can help each of us understand how we experience the world and process information. Jung was very clear that no type was better or preferred over the others, but merely that we were all different, and if we could understand that each of us has a unique point of view from which to view things, and equally important, that others had just as valid but different ways of perceiving, then it would go a long way to promoting understanding of ourselves and others. Of course, in writing this, it sounds almost as utopian as the ideals that are fostered in the Star Trek multiverse.
In any case, Data’s dominant function is thinking, but in order to protect the Enterprise he also needs to use some Trickster function, in order to cover up the events of the past day as Captain Jean-Luc Picard had ordered him to do in order to prevent the Enterprise from exposing the existence of an extremely xenophobic race that wanted to destroy them. This wasn’t entirely successful, and Picard and the crew figured out the truth that Data had been trying to conceal. However, in the end, after a trial run, Data was able to combine his thinking function and a bit of a Trickster mentality, to convince Picard the next time around, not to go near the planet.
Original post created 8 September 2021
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