Tuesday, August 7, 2012

A Few Final Fragments of Shakespeare in Star Trek: Data Quotes Sherlock Holmes Quoting Shakespeare

“Elementary, Dear Data.” By Brian Alan Lane. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Diana Muldaur, and Brent Spiner. Dir. Rob Bowman. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 2, episode 3. Syndicated television. 3 December 1988. DVD. Paramount, 2002.

Completing my collection of Shakespeare references in Star Trek (for which, q.v.) has proven more difficult than I thought it would be. This week, I'll be adding a few small moments that I overlooked—even though I wonder if some of them count.

For example, is it Shakespeare when the person being quoted is clearly Sherlock Holmes—even if Sherlock Holmes is quoting from Shakespeare? In this clip, Data has taken on the role of Holmes, and he concludes his deductions with "The game's afoot" (Henry V, III.i.32).


Data does extend Shakespeare's original contraction to "The game is afoot," but he doesn't extend "afoot" to "a foot," which would create an interesting image.

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the complete series from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

No comments:

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest