Halfway through season 4 with a friend right now, taking her through it for the first time. My fiancee left the room for this episode. She claims it's one of her favorites, but couldn't watch it lol
It won't be a whole chapter. He'll probably get a sentence that might not even mention his name, as the former leader of the defunct minority party that did nothing to slow the tide of fascism
Data is the ND character. Star Trek, and sci-fi and fantasy in general, use characters that are visibly others, to represent diverse human experiences. Check out season 1 episode 16 of the Original Series, the Galileo Seven, in which Spock is in command of an away mission that crashes on a planet's surface, and his Vulcan logic is tested, dealing with the emotions of his crew. To me, it was clearly a portrayal of neurodivergence.
Spock is literally neurodivergent. His genes are hybrid, human and Vulcan, and so, therefore, is his brain. Data and his positronic brain fill that same role in the Next Generation.
Boimler gets associated with the ND characters in the show too, like Data and Spock. The crew of the Carlsbad expected him to be a hovering cube. I think it's definitely intentional
It's clear you don't have the necessary context to understand the plot. Data's character arc spans the entire show. The emotion chip is experimental, and something his original creator specifically didn't install at the time of his creation, because it wasn't ready. There's a prototype of Data as well, called Lore, who does have emotions, but become a violent psychopath. They can't just "make it work," and doing so would defeat the point of it as a plot device.
Halfway through season 4 with a friend right now, taking her through it for the first time. My fiancee left the room for this episode. She claims it's one of her favorites, but couldn't watch it lol