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Popular Culture Review
something the other lacks. It is understated in the episode itself, and does not
seem to have been explored in any of the little scholarship that exists—but the
holographic Moriarty is endowed with more than mere consciousness via the
computer’s act of creation—he can also feel. The holograph possesses the
emotions Data will grapple with (often due to their absence) throughout the rest
of the series, whereas Data himself possesses the physicality—the “realness,”
and the ability to leave the holodeck without ceasing to exist—which the
hologram so desperately desires.
Because he possesses emotions, the holograph suffers in a way Data cannot.
Locked away in the ship’s memory bank, Moriarty experiences moments of
consciousness; frustrated with his condition, and with the realization that no
apparent progress has been made upon resolving it, he returns in the season six
episode “Ship in a Bottle,” in which he puts the Enterprise in mortal peril as a
means of motivating the crew to find a way of safely exporting himself—as well
as his newly created lover—from the holodeck. Going mad from boredom,
Moriarty becomes desperate to escape his unfair confinement. Portrayed as
perhaps never before, he is no longer, as he explains at the end of the first
episode in which he appears, the nefarious criminal he was originally
programmed to be; moreover, he acts not out of any desire to rule, to conquer, or
to profit, but instead, out of the mere desire for basic human freedoms.
In her article, “Holmes is Where the Heart Is: The Achievement of Granada
Television’s Sherlock Holmes Films,” Elizabeth A. Trembley invokes a
hallucination alluded to in “The Devil’s Foot;” un-described by Conan Doyle,
Granada carefully scripted the event, creating a sequence which Trembley
applauds for its faithfulness to not only canonical details but to the essence of
the characters. In elucidating the hallucination sequence, which reveals Holmes’
own greatest fears, she explains that for him—as for many of us—insanity holds
a much greater terror than does physical death (24). If, as she suggests, it is true
that this unconscious fear underlies the Holmes canon, it might help to explain
why insanity, or its lingering threat, recurs in so many modem representations of
Moriarty, for what scares Holmes, will most typically either scare him as well,
or instead prove to be what he succumbs to. Thankfully however, “Ship in a
Bottle” is resolved without its incarnation of Moriarty being driven mad.
Through the combined insight of Data and Captain Picard, they are able to
bring the escapade to a suitable conclusion. As Lehman asserts in discussing the
double, “...the detective story relies on deliberate and artful repetition. Notice
how Dupin in ‘The Purloined Letter’ foils his foil” (99); in other words, Dupin
outwits his opponent by—without alerting him to the fact he is on to him—using
the opponent’s own scheme against him. This is precisely what Picard and Data
do to Moriarty; but, because theirs is a benevolent universe, this turns out to be
for the best. Since they cannot give the holograph the physical escape he desires,
they instead provide him with the illusion of such an escape, locking him in a
data storage device filled with enough active memory to keep both he and his
lover occupied for the rest of their lives. The episode concludes with a meta