Star Trek: The Next Generation/WMG

Q is a Time Lord
Think about it.
 * Shouldn't new WMG's be posted at the bottom? Anyway, I know that the Time Lord thing is kind of a meme on here, but Q is both able to regenerate (he's omnipotent in our universe) and is extremely both strong and durable (because he's omnipotent).

The Borg interest in assimilating people is cyclical.
In "Q Who," we're told that the Borg's raison d'etre is to capture technology by force to constantly improve themselves. If they just assimilated everyone, they would have problems with resources (regen energy shortages, equipment etc.) due to the law of diminishing marginal utility...but since they don't breed, when drones die en masse for whatever reason or need to be "phased out" they need a way to maintain the optimum number to keep things running and get further to their objective. It's possible that the 2370s were just a phase where they needed to increase their numbers. The converse is that when they encountered other species that they simply killed off (making them think they were only after tech, since they couldn't see the future), they were gaining technology in preparation for a major population expansion.
 * They can breed. That is, they show - multiple times, starting from their introduction - the usage of technology to artificially grow organics, who then are fully assimilated when they are physically old enough.
 * "Canonically" they can't breed, because Voyager said they can't in one of its weirder moments, and new canon supposedly overwrites old. In this case most fans ignore the ...revelation... because 1) it contradicts stuff that actually happened on screen and 2) it's ridiculous. (So yeah, they can breed.)
 * Assimilation is probably significantly more efficient than procreation because you get a mostly adult population that doesn't have to be kept in storage for years before it becomes useful. Presumably the Borg have access to assimilated cloning technology and the option of leaving the reproductive organs of their drones intact but elect not to because they consider it unnecessary
 * Given the Queen and her many incarnations, the Borg probably have the technology to replicate or clone adult body parts as required and do a full or partial mind transfer when the new body is ready (but it still sucks to be an unimportant drone who won't get a personality backup). Assimilation is going to be most useful when a very small Borg population (e.g. one drone) needs to take over an enemy vessel and hasn't got a huge stash of raw materials from which to create more drones from scratch.

At some point between TNG and Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg assimilated nanotechnology.
It completely changed the basis of their technology, re-assimilating drones and spacecraft from the ground up. All Borg technology became nanotechnology. It brought many advantages: instant assimilation, self-healing cubes, etc, but it also made their technology more exploitable by the Federation, who already had nanotechnology (indeed, developed it before the Borg did). Why? because nanotechnology is too versatile and too easy to reverse-engineer (it basically reverse-engineers itself). The crew of Voyager reverse-engineering Borg technology hastened their Villain Decay. Soon, the Borg were no longer the uber-advanced race they once were before they became dependent on nanotech. Instead they became just another Rubber Forehead Alien roughly on par with the Federation.

All of the Wesley episodes occur in the holodeck
He is just some regular kid, who uses the holodeck to make himself feel important and smart.
 * Alternatively, all of the Wesley episodes are based on real missions, but Wesley inserts himself into them using the holodeck to make himself feel important and smart.
 * He could even actually be a freaking genius kid and not a single bit of this theory would break.

One of the Enterprise-Ds in the episode Parallels comes from the future of the 2009 film
Obviously, this was one of the many alternate quantum realities Worf experienced.
 * This is almost certain. There has to be an Enterprise-D in that timeline, or else Star Trek: First Contact wouldn't happen the right way.
 * It was probably the one where the Borg had overtaken the Alpha quadrant, because the 2009 Film's universe in general is such a Crapsack World.
 * Crapsack as it may be, the Federation in the new timeline is also substantially more badass and capable.
 * But if the Borg overtook the Alpha Quadrant, there would be no Federation at all in the 2009 film's universe. No, the 2009 film's universe is definitely the last universe the "prime" Worf ended up in.
 * Except that you're ignoring the fact that the Borg only attacked Earth after meeting the Enterprise-D during the events of "Q Who." If there is no Enterprise-D in the alternate universe, there is no Enterprise-D for Q to send to the Borg, there is no reason for the Borg to seek out Earth for assimilation, and the events of First Contact never happen. Your proof is no longer self-sustaining.
 * Not true. The dying Borg in the Enterprise episode "Regeneration" sent directions on how to get to Earth deep in to the Delta Quadrant. We could still be attacked, it will just take a while.
 * Star Trek time behavior changes on a per-episode/plot basis, but the current idea is like that of Back to the Future pt 2 - that any changes cause a new temporal dimension to occur but do not undo the actual previous changes. This, for example, is how in DS 9 the Defiant crashlanded on a planet, created a minor civilization which then caused the defiant to NOT crashland. The grandfather paradox doesn't exist because time isn't cyclical. Thus, First Contact happened as depicted but Nero's jump to the past caused a new timeline which did not undo the previous time alterations. In this new timeline, there's every possibility that the Borg never will try to undo First contact in the first place. Anyways, Captain Braxton will somehow work it out.

Riker uses his Q powers quite often to solve the weekly problem.
This is why he doesn't want to leave the Enterprise; if he did, then they would have catastrophic failures.

Hey, once nigh-omnipotence is granted to someone, no one can forcibly take it away -- it has to be freely surrendered. And Riker is the sort of fellow who can beat androids and empaths at poker; he could easily bluff Q during the time he was one -- meaning that he could still be one....

It is possible that he is not 100% aware that he has Q-powers, making him a Haruhi-class Reality Warper. Once again, his poker instincts protect him from detection.

Q & Picard are lovers.
Between Q's entrance in "Deja Q" and the bedroom scene in "Tapestry", this is nearly obvious.
 * Well, it may not be canon, but Q is certainly... interested in Picard. One can only imagine what you could do with an Alternate Universe. (Say, one where he never met Janeway.)
 * DO NOT WANT
 * John de Lancie (for non-Trekkers, the actor who played Q) confirmed that Q was in love with Picard. The jury is still out on Picard's side.
 * Let's keep the Rule 34 to a minimum here. We're talking about Patrick Stewart, not Ian McKellen.
 * Who's bringing the actor's sexualities into it? John de Lancie didn't say anything about himself, just Q.
 * With Q, I'm not sure if "sexuality" is the right word for it, given that he's an Energy Being who could look like Marilyn Monroe just as easily as John de Lancie and be just as true to his own [lack of] appearance.
 * He even says in one episode he wished he had originally appeared as a women.

Picard and Dathon, in the holodeck.
Mirab, his sails unfurled. Shaka, when the walls fell.
 * Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean.
 * In Winter.
 * Uphill. Both ways.
 * That's what she said.
 * Their stomachs, contented.
 * Sharnak, in shadow.
 * The serpent, in the grass.
 * The knife, in blood.
 * In my pants.
 * Lunch, on the floor. Thanks ever so.
 * Professor Plum, in the conservatory, with the knife.
 * I did it, in the hall, with the revolver. Take them away, Chief. I'm gonna go home and sleep with my wife.
 * No tickee, no shirtee.
 * The Doctor. With Rose Tyler. In the Tardis.
 * Zinda, his face black, his eyes red!
 * Dovahkiin, her voice loud, her bowstring taut?

Tamarians are hardcore alien Tropers who have forgotten how to speak normally.
At some time in Tamarian history, the Tamarian people created the equivalent of the Tropes & Idioms Wiki. It became so popular that all the Tamarians ending up speaking in tropes. As generations passed, even the way their brains worked began to change. As a result, they now can only think in Tropese.
 * In that case, why no verbs?
 * Mirab, his grammar imperfect. Jalad, his tense horrific. Syn'ttaxx, in shadow.
 * All Blue Entry: Antiquated Linguistics. Adaptation Decay. All the Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary. Future Slang. No Backwards Compatibility in the Future.
 * "Star Trek: Frontiers", a Fan Fiction virtual post-TNG era series (now in hiatus + its server was, sadly, cancelled) indeed explicates explicated a similar theory. In one episode, the Enterprise-H crew encounters a detached Tamarian colony which came into contact with the 20th century American Live Action TV. They speak only in metaphors referring to those shows. Can you guess which metaphors the Enterprise crew immediately recognized?
 * Tamarians have warp drive. How coould that possibly happen? Professor Werner von Jalad explains his project to the Tamarian University grants comite "Mirab with his sails unfurled; only bigger, In Space." They might have a mythological word for "bigger", but they wont have a mythological word for "In Space".
 * Why not? we do.
 * "Icarus in the cool morning","Gunnar with no bowstring" OR "Munchausen and the underpants" "Grettir hidden by his hood". Professor Jalad wants to say In Space, but for Real. Myths about space flight + the literary format of The Icelandic Sagas (Gunnar and Grettir) is that they are historical records. Saga reference = Tamarian for "BUT real"
 * Hmm. So I guess that the episode, in our language, would be this: Dathon of the Tamarians does a Batman Gambit, with the intent of creating Fire-Forged Friends with Picard via Back-to-Back Badasses. Poor Communication Kills, and Dathon is Killed Off for Real after passing on his sword. Picard returns, and, after telling the Tamarian First Officer You Are in Command Now, makes the a note in his Captain's Log.

Deanna Troi has clairvoyance
In the novel Contamination, She supposedly had a nightmare of asphyxiating on some kind of yellow gas, after waking up someone had died the exact way. this leads to the fact that She can only use this when asleep.

B4 will eventually "evolve" into Data.
The ending of Star Trek: Nemesis makes it practically Word of God. It's possible he may undergo a physical change, so Return!Data can be played by another actor in further movies.
 * Amalgamation: The knowledge and experiences of Data combined with the base personality and experience (what little there is) of B4 will merge into a separate individual who is comprised of both Data and the original B4.
 * According to the site for the new Star Trek Online game, this is true in that continuity. Hooray for WMGs!
 * Hooray? Look, it's great to have Data back and all, but did it have to happen at the expense of who B4 might have become? Neither the writers nor the surviving characters considered the morality of overwriting one person's brain with another. That holds even if the first person was incapable of personal growth. (Please don't overwrite the Kenner autistics...) This is Star Trek! Morality has been one of its major themes from the beginning!
 * That's "Hooray, WMG got one right!" rather than "Hooray, Data crossed the Moral Event Horizon by stealing his brother's body."
 * B-4 pulled a Heroic Sacrifice by re-routing the "suicide" program that Data had written to overwrite his own engram out of B-4's memory banks so it would kill him instead of Data. B-4's last words to his brother? "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
 * Confirmed in the Star Trek Countdown comic.
 * Countdown is confirmed non-canon by its own writers.
 * But it has been officially declared canon by the guys behind the 2009 movie who wrote the story for it. Confused?
 * The hint at the end of Nemesis is that B-4 is humming a tune to himself that Data sang at the start of the film. There's an episode of Voyager where the holographic doctor gets rebooted and no one knows whether he'll get all his memory and personality developments back - then, as the episode ends, he's humming a tune to himself that he sang at the start of the episode. Of course, he's back to normal in time for the next episode. Data's chances are good.

Data had several cats.
Spot's gender and breed changed between episodes because it died. Data was still learning things like small talk and figures of speech, so he would probably be bad at taking care of pets.
 * He had a little friend once... but he don't move no more.

Spot's gender and breed changed between episodes because it wasn't a cat.

 * It was a changeling.
 * Specifically, the changeling equivalent to Ship.

Data got Spot out of his personal replicator.
It appears that replicators, the holodecks, and the transporters all work on the same principle -- they all assemble complex objects from base matter constituents. Transporters can create living creatures. So can holodecks for certain values of living -- ask Moriarty. Why can't a replicator?
 * Transporters create a living organism being transported as much as a car creates its driver. As in not at all. It just moves it, by turning it into energy and sending it at the speed of light to another location. Yes, it disassembles and reassembles but it's not creating anything new.
 * Ask Thomas Riker how he feels about your theory.
 * Legal restrictions and limitations in how complex things it can create.
 * Data would be able to hack the system and get around the Copy Protection. He's done it with things more sensitive than his personal replicator when the imperative was strong enough. And he starts keeping cats after the system has burned him and his "species." If Spot had appeared in Canon before Lal died, then the legal argument would have merit -- but the cats came after. Data wanted to be a parental figure, and the system denied him that. Thus, he keeps unlicensed cats, and the rest of the senior crew look the other way because he's usually one of the nicest people onboard.
 * According to the Next Generation Technical Manual, life forms can't be replicated because, to make data storage practical, the replicators work at a much lower resolution than the transporters do. This is fine for dead or nonliving materials, but "single-bit molecular errors could have severely detrimental effects on living DNA molecules and neural activity. Cumulative effects have been shown to closely resemble radiation-induced damage."
 * Life forms have been replicated in the transporter -- accidentally, but it happens. It happened to Riker...
 * Okay, replicator files are highly compressed, and transporter files are uncompressed. Still, the ship officially has exactly one independent computer -- two if you count Data. We know there's a lot of space in the ship computer. Data has been shown to hack the ship computer. As long as the living DNA stays living, damage to it isn't a big problem -- Data isn't breeding cats, just replicating them. And it only has to be done once per cat. He can arrange to have one high-quality file in his replicator.

Spot is a robot that changes its form a lot.
Hey, we only meet Spot after Lal dies. The Federation isn't interested in non-sentient, impractical machines. Of course, Spot is sentient, but no one needs to know that...
 * Have we all forgotten about the season 7 episode "Genesis", where some pesky virus causes everyone on the Enterprise to de-evolve? Riker turns into a caveman, Worf into a proto-Klingon bipedal crustacean, and Spot turns into... an iguana. Yeah.

Spot is a Pokémon.
Unfortunately s/he was exposed to a Missing No, and so s/he evolves into other things at random. Including iguanas.

At some point between "Phantasms" and "Genesis," the entire crew came down with a weird sort of alien sex-change virus.
Dr. Crusher was able to cure them without incident, but she didn't get around to curing Spot because s/he wasn't as important as the sentient crewmembers. We didn't get to see that episode because it's not the sort of thing that is suitable for a mainstream network television audience -- or even a mainstream syndicated television audience.

Cats in Star Trek regenerate the same way Time Lords do.
But unlike Time Lords, they can only do it eight times, so they literally have nine lives. Spot has seven left.
 * Seven of Nine, you say?
 * That would explain the catsuits.

Data and Lore are the same person.
...for most of the series, at least. This theory was explored in one of the Strange New Worlds endorsed Fan Fiction anthologies.

After being beamed into space in the episode Datalore, Lore was never seen again. Data continued to live on for centuries until long after the extinction of the human race and probably a few other species, too. He created an entire race of androids but was ultimately unable to recapture the essence of a world where the former extinct species had existed, leaving him disillusioned about this whole thing. This whole thing ends with a temporal jump which places him conveniently within reach of a Pakled trading ship (the ?fortunate encounter? Lore mentioned in "Brothers"). Data resigns himself to the unchangability of fate (as is his habit) and ?becomes? his own brother. This also explains why Soong couldn't tell that the "Data" he was giving an emotion chip to in Brothers was Lore in disguise: if it had been the real Lore from Datalore, wouldn't there already be an emotion chip in there?

Canon has pretty much Jossed this, what with Nemesis and all; but damn, that was a good story.
 * Since this theory involves Time Travel from the far future, Canon cannot joss this. Star Trek usually has ontological inertia.
 * Possible, given the WMG above talking about B4 "evolving" into Data.
 * 'Lore' didn't have an emotion chip already because he didn't need one, his positronic matrix was complex enough to allow for emotions on its own. Unfortunately it was also complex enough to allow psychotic tendencies to manifest.

All or most of The Next Generation (and possibly anything else with the same characters) is a Schrödinger's Butterfly effect from the Holodeck.
Any time the Holodeck generated real beings or did things like giving Moriarty consciousness, it was impossible - from the point of view of one in the real world. It makes perfect sense if Computer made a copy of the Enterprise and any places they had shore leave the first time anyone tried to exit the Holodeck. Someone's instructions just gave it too much free reign.

The interphase cloak never made it back to the Romulans
The cloaking device from "The Pegasus" worked fine, but we never see Romulans using them in later Deep Space Nine. Obviously, Pressman was right about having friends in Starfleet Command. They made sure the device was conveniently destroyed or replaced with a non-working replica.
 * Pressman wouldn't need specific friends. Do you think Section 31 would allow that technology to fall into Romulan hands? There was an entire episode about the Romulans working on a Phase Cloak (that failed); there's no way Section 31 is going to let them have one that does work.
 * But wasn't the episode's premise showing that it did NOT work? (assuming the 1701-D was just lucky at the end)
 * Even if it didn't, there is always the chance that the Federation version was a better prototype than what the Romulans had or could have shown them where they made mistakes.
 * It worked. Think what happened to Geordi and Ro in "The Next Phase"; that's what a Phased Cloaking Device is supposed to do to a ship. And only a working prototype could embed a ship inside solid rock the way the Pegasus was embedded - it just slipped back into normal space in the wrong place. Remember, they had to use the cloak to get the Pegasus back out!
 * The only reason it failed was that the majority of the crew who had mutinied against Pressman attempted to disable the phase-cloak device after Pressman and Riker were forced off the ship; they screwed up and didn't know how it worked - hence the accident.
 * So if they had successfully disabled the cloak where they were, they still would have rephased in solid rock. Dumbasses (the crew, not you guys). The cloak must have had a glitch/hiccup, or just failed.
 * Confirmed in the New Frontier continuity; Starfleet Special Operations (basically, Section 31) sends Mackensie Calhoun to destroy it.

The bluegills of "Conspiracy" are offshoots of the Trill symbionts.
This theory was advanced in the Post-Deep Space Nine novels. Instead of having a beneficial relationship with their hosts, the bluegills invade and take over.
 * At one point, Jadzia mentioned that Trill symbionts could overtake the mind of their hosts unless those were psychologically prepared in a specific way. And it darn near happened to Ezri when the Federation had her on a mission that required her to access a past life of Dax that had committed cold-blooded murder.
 * That also explains Riker being taken over, but does not explain why the lady was still the same person. The TNG trills must have also been an offshoot that prefers empty hosts.
 * We didn't really see enough of the final host to see what whether she'd been merged or just possessed. That would explain the makeup differences, though.

Bluegills are Goa'uld.
And Trill could be Goa'uld, too - remember, there was an offshoot of Goa'uld, the Tok'ra, who were truly symbiotic.

Bluegills are a scouting force for the Tyranids.
And they'll eventually fight the Borg.

Everything since "Brothers" is Data's delusion
A good eye and good freeze-frame will reveal that the password Data gives the computer when locking down the Enterprise is not what appears on the screen. The computer misheard Data for some reason, and Data is therefore unable to unlock it. They're still in orbit around Soong's planet to this day. The guilt of this (especially as it certainly lead to the death of the sick boy) drove Data into a positronic psychosis, and everything since then has been a timeline he's invented in his own mind as a better alternative. His final death in Nemesis is actually a psychological metaphor for Data's damaged positronic matrix finally collapsing under the strain.
 * While this doesn't address Data directly, the Enterprise crew would simply have to manually jettison an emergency beacon, wait for another starship to respond and tow them to a Starbase to have the computer system (including Data's lockout code) completely purged and the core software reloaded (similar to what the Defiant had to do in "For The Uniform").
 * Yes, but the help came too late to save the boy and thus, Data. The entire breakdown took only a short time outside his head, but seemed like years to him.
 * If that were the case, then how do you explain episodes like "The Inner Light," "Frame of Mind," "Eye of the Beholder," "Dark Page," "Tapestry," "All Good Things," etc., where Data is not only unaware of but also logically incapable of witnessing the episode's action? And there are many ways for the Enterprise crew to deal with this problem. The only logically consistent explanation (if we are assuming that everything we see on screen is exactly what happened) is that what was faulty was the computer's display routine.
 * Or maybe Data, being incredibly intelligent, careful and fully versed on all the Enterprise's systems, intentionally reprogrammed the computer to display incorrect characters, since due to the questionable wisdom of the original designers the code was displayed in clear text (Why...?), and Data was not taking the chance that the crew who was actively working to stop him by that point had not found a way to get a peek at the bridge. His code could even be coded again through reprogramming the computer so even if they had both the visual and verbal record, they still could not break in. With everything else he was doing to secure the ship being so thorough and his mind working a billion times faster than any human's, this isn't really a stretch.

The Borg are not trying to assimilate the Federation -- yet.
When they attack, they send only one ship destroy most of Starfleet's local defenses and then get Locutus to give the Enterprise a reasonable way to get victory at the last second. ("Sleep, Data. Sleep.") They're trying to get Starfleet to invent new technologies so, when they do assimilate the Federation, they'll have better stuff to take.
 * Man, that's one hell of a Xanatos Gambit! Maybe that's how the Borg generally deal with the uncreativity that results from their specific version of a Hive Mind: They not only assimilate the technologies of other species, but they push other species to invent new technologies so they don't have to do it by themselves!
 * One episode of Voyager involved a race the Borg were systematically harvesting in this way whenever they got to the default Star Trek tech level.

Q's warning against antagonizing the Borg comes from fear
It is implied that Guinan has the ability to resist Q. Perhaps others of her species share this ability. If that got shared amongst the Borg, then the Borg could use it to assimilate a Q. And that would be bad.
 * The question is, would they then assimilate everything or, having nigh-omnipotence dropped in their lap, would they have finally achieved the perfection they aim for?
 * And in obtaining that perfection, they will become the Q. Maybe when Q arranged the first contact, he was laughing inside that Picard can't win against them even when they were "primitives." The fear might be of destroying their own ancestors.
 * This wouldn't work, as the first iteration of that loop could never have happened. Who would they have assimilated before the Q existed? And the Borg only get more powerful by assimilation.
 * Um, Guinan's home planet was taken by the Borg shortly before the beginning of Star Trek Generations. (The only reason the Federation didn't learn about the Borg then was that those El-Aurians they retrieved were too shellshocked from exiting the Nexus to express it in a timely fashion.) So, if the Borg can gain the ability to assimilate Q that way, then they already have. Fortunately, the average Q can teleport.
 * Q warns his son not to provoke the Borg.
 * Well if a single Q were careless enough to get assimilated that would spell doom for the entire universe. One Q-Borg would transform the entire collective into Q-Borg, then overpower the Q Continuum and turn them into Q-Borg, then move onto assimilating everything in the Universe and turning that into Q-Borg.

Deanna Troi is not actually empathic
As a human-Betazoid hybrid, Deanna Troi doesn't have any telepathic/empathic powers. She just has a human-like knack for reading facial expressions, and on her homeworld this was mistaken for an ability to telepathically read emotions. Her human father tried to correct this notion, but he died while Deanna was just 7, and Deanna's overbearing mother refused to believe that her daughter lacked any Betazoid abilities. Other Betazoids might have suspected, but they chose not to say anything since Deanna's mother was a powerful aristocrat who held high office with the government.
 * But she can detect telepathic forces around her, like Q's and the genetically altered child in "Natural Selection", and the grief of the alien in "Encounter at Farpoint" drove her to her knees when she sensed it.
 * Is there any proof for this, or is this just a random guess? The events of The Loss show pretty clearly that she lacks the ability to read people's emotions just from conversation or their factial expressions. How do you reconcile that with this theory?

Betazoids do not have the skills in telepathy and empathy they claim to have
Think about it. Deanna states the obvious. Lwaxana is oblivious to how people feel about her. That guy who was obsessed with Tin Man could have been making it all up or could have been crazy -- or rather, crazier.

Add to that the inconsistency about whether Ferengi can be read and the sheer ridiculousness of mental waves traveling over subspace, and one gets the idea that the Betazoids are being humored, just like Vulcans are when they claim they don't lie.

We will note that Deanna Troi has a psychology degree. Even human psychologists are supposed to be able to read feelings and motives without having insider access into anyone else's mind. If Deanna is really "empathic", then her psychology degree is worth less than whatever it's written on.


 * The idea that an entire race is undergoing a mass delusion is an interesting one.
 * And How...
 * To say that Troi's degree would be useless if she were "really" empathic would be assuming that we know everything about how the human brain works, which has not happened even in the 24th century. (See "Shades of Grey.") Whenever Deanna is mistaken, it's usually because she's misreading, rather than not reading; she could be making exactly the same mistakes we do even with the extra information available to her. Her psychology degree gives her an advantage when it comes to understanding her own abilities. Being able to read a mind doesn't mean you understand what you're "seeing", and just because you get someone going "I feek angry" in your head, and can probably pinpoint the source of that anger, doesn't mean you're going to understand everything exactly. The human brain is a complicated thing, and many people aren't even AWARE of some of their own thoughts. See Post Repression of Memories -- there are episodes with Deanna and Lwaxana dealing with that.
 * There are several episodes that make a big deal out of the telepathy, and none of them are 100 percent convincing. Lawxana's repressed memories episode can be explained away by the similarity of Hedril to Kestra, which would be enough to freak any parent out, and a technology which allows people to get inside another's dreams, which exists in the Delta Quadrant and thus might get invented here as well. Tam Elbrun could have been faking the torture he had to live with everyday. That was one freaked-out guy, but he seemed to know exactly what was happening and why he was freaked out. As for Lwaxana... she's just teasing people.
 * Maybe Elbrun was the only Betazoid who really was telepathic, and was driven mad with irritation by everyone claiming they knew how he felt.
 * This also fits the rest of Trek. We don't see telepaths play a major role in any other series, and empathy is limited to Vulcan-level. It's just that the Betazoids all believe they're telepathic. Picard and Riker fell for it; most of Starfleet and the Federation (barring the woman in "The Drumhead") humour them. The Betazoid murderer in Voyager, Suder, is fittingly a Betazoid version of a Straw Atheist -- he says he's never had telepathy!
 * While it's true that most of the cases of Betazoid empathy could be chalked up to them just being really good at reading expressions and whatnot, there are a few episodes that might be hard to explain:
 * "The Survivors" - Kevin puts music in Troi's head so she can't sense what he is;
 * Troi's forewarning of Q's arrival in "Encounter at Farpoint" (not to mention an incident or two in the rest of the two-parter), of the explosives in "The Bonding," and of Roga Danar's... distress in "The Hunted"
 * The entire plots of "The Loss," "Eye of the Beholder," and to some extent "Night Terrors"
 * Also, Dr. Crusher in a couple episodes ("Dark Page" and "Eye of the Beholder" mentions the specific chemical used in Betazoid telepathy.

Deanna Troi's accent is from her mother, or at least her world.

 * This one is similar to the one concerning Sarek's two actors. Deanna is actually speaking English, as her second (at least) language, with an actual Betazoid accent. Her mother, on the other hand, uses a Universal Translator, and/or has taught herself to sound more like a native speaker over time, possibly even with the aid of translator output.

The USS Hera was taken by the Caretaker.

 * They never met Voyager because Captain LaForge decided to make for New Bajor rather than Earth, and take the Wormhole the rest of the way.
 * Too bad the writers didn't remember the loss of the Hera when they wrote the two-parter "Equinox". Oh well...

Everything since "Star Trek Generations" is a Nexus-generated figment of Jean-Luc Picard's imagination.
The Nexus is a ribbon of energy that lets beings that fall into it get their every wish. Picard's first, seemingly superficial, greatest wish is to be married with children of his own. He knows this is not real, so he offers up his next greatest wish: To prevent Soren from doing what he did. The Nexus offers him an ally and the back in time "exit". In reality, Picard remains trapped in the Nexus, and the Enterprise-D was lost with all hands during the destruction of the Veridian Star System. The series cut was approximately when Ben Sisko was promoted to Captain. Every Trek episode made since then, and all movies made since then, are products of the Nexus.
 * If the Nexus is supposed to bring only joy, why would it make Picard sit through Voyager, Enterprise, Insurrection and Nemesis? Ugh.
 * As long as Picard's experiencing joy, it doesn't matter. Picard wouldn't need to sit through Voyager, it wasn't his ship. He had a lovey-dovey relationship in Insurrection, so that was joy to him. Enterprise takes place pre-Kirk, so Picard doesn't need to sit through that either.
 * Enterprise was just a game that Riker was playing anyway.
 * Picard had deep-seated jealousy towards Data for remaining "fully functional" throughout his lifespan. That's why he sat through Data's death in Nemesis.
 * Or that he wasn't cast as Data... no, wait... what?

Alexander is half Q.
K'Ehleyr was actually the Lady Q. She pretended to be a klingon for a lifetime as a lark. Alexander got some of her powers. He is able to go from Worf's adopted parent's house to the Klingon Empire without explaination, aging as he does so. Is able to convince his father that the doesn't have to be a warrior, and in at least one alternate future was able to time travel. It's so obvious!

Wesley is Picard's illegitimate son.
This is an old one, but there is evidence for it throughout the three character arcs of Picard, Crusher, and Wesley. Picard admitted on several occasions that he had been in love with Beverly since before Jack was killed. Beverly in turn has implied that these feelings were not totally unrequited. Wesley has always displayed an extreme level of hero worship towards Picard since the premiere of the series that goes far beyond what is to be expected of a teenager meeting a respected authority figure.

Here's the theory:


 * Beverly has always known, probably discovering the fact through routine medical scans while she was carrying. Considering her profession and acknowledged level of competence, it is not unlikely that she performed these tests herself and therefore kept it to herself.
 * Wesley discovered the truth for himself at some before being going to the Enterprise, explaining his undue fixation on Picard.
 * Picard learned of it later on in the series from Beverly, thus causing his shift from seeing Wesley as an unavoidable annoyance to doing everything in his power to push Wesley toward a career in Starfleet.
 * Or Picard was just pushing him toward a career in Starfleet to get the Wesley off of his ship.
 * Related to this, some fans have speculated that Picard arranged for Jack to be killed. Word of God has tried to refute this, for obvious reasons.
 * That's pretty much what Evil!Picard did in the Mirror Universe novel ''Dark Mirror". Original!Picard was understandably horrified by ths.

The "virus" proposed to be given to Hugh wouldn't have worked.
Though this theory is mostly due the fact that I don't want to think that Picard inadvertently caused all of the deaths, assimilations, and other destruction caused by the Borg after the events of "I, Borg" by being soft-hearted. It is much easier to simply think that the Borg would have survived; though perhaps the virus would have taken out the cube sent to pick up Hugh, the collective would have realized the trick quickly and adapted to it. Additionally, they may have thought of the paradoxical shape as "an irrelevant waste of time" and deleted it along with all of the other memories Hugh had picked up throughout the course of the episode.
 * This makes more sense in retrospect, now that we (and the writers) know about the Borg Queen. Where a Collective might not have caught onto something like that, she would probably have been able to notice it as a problem and stop it before it got out of hand. This also helps explain why Hugh's individuality didn't cause the entire Collective to unravel.
 * Plus, even if the entire collective crashed trying to solve the paradox, they may have an automatic restarting system that restores the collective from a backup prior to acquiring the paradox file.
 * Also, don't forget, in two episodes of Voyager (Collective and Infinite Regress), the Borg will cut off/destroy drones and vessels with imperfections. Soon as they found that cube in Hugh, he'd have been gone quicker than you can say "Resistance is Futile".

Armus from "Skin of Evil" is a Founder from Deep Space Nine
I've had this theory for some time that Armus, that oil-slick looking thing that killed off Tasha Yar in "Skin of Evil" is a failed Founder from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When the Enterprise crew first encounters Armus, he describes himself as "a skin of evil, left here by a race of Titans who believed if they rid themselves of me, they would free the bonds of destructiveness." The Founders certainly thought of themselves as the most perfect lifeforms in the universe. And anything that did not fit their standards of perfection were cast aside. Armus, like the Founders, has a basic form that is puddle-like, although he cannot assume a humanoid form like the Founders, they seem similar enough to make this guess.
 * Odo had difficulty compared to the rest of the Founders assuming a humanoid form (he had trouble with facial characteristics) so this theory is valid. Perhaps Armus has more difficulty with the humanoid form.
 * Maybe Armus was one of the infant changelings sent out to explore the galaxy, only he remembered everything and resented what the Great Link did to him.
 * Odo did encounter a fellow infant changeling, Laas, with powers beyond what any of the Founders seemed to have, such as transforming into energy or flying though space at warp speeds.
 * Maybe he was a Founder criminal. Maybe he killed another Founder, and was severed from the Great Link, but instead of giving him humanoid form he was deformed and crippled, resulting in the oil-slick with rudimentary shapeshifting skills. His other powers developed over time.

Wesley was a Q.
This would explain all the reality warping and "always-right" crap, and how he froze time (or whatever) just before he left.

The Ferengi in season one are not members of the Ferengi Alliance.
They are a group of pirates or mercenaries exiled from Ferengenar for being idiots who jumped around like monkeys and not being cunning enough to turn a real profit, relying on petty theft instead. If really Ferengi were to make first contact with the Federation, they'd be trying to ingratiate themselves with powerful trade partners, not antagonizing them for no reason. Daimon Bok turned down potentially enormous opportunities for profit for the sake of revenge - this would be reason enough for a competent Grand Nagus to ban or exile him.
 * This troper heard somewhere that the Ferengi acted this way around humans as a trick. When the Grand Nagus learned that humans didn't use money or any kind of barter system, he thought that meant humans were, by Ferengi standards, insane. Ergo, the Ferengi were instructed to act just as insane around those crazy, non-money-using humans.

The Traveler is a Time Lord.
No, he never regenerates, nor do we see his TARDIS (its chameleon circuit is working fine). But he has a Time Lord-esque name, and he recruits Welsey as a companion to travel time and space. The Traveler is similar to the Doctor, but he obviously has much higher standards for companions, grooming Wesley over several years.

Soran from "The Outcast" was faking her brainwashing.
Riker and Worf planned to rescue Soran from the J'Naii's "psychotectic treatment," which was supposed to happen the next day. But when Riker gets to the planet it seems the "treatment" had already happened and Soran isn't "female" or in love with Riker anymore. Soran was faking this in order to protect Riker. She knew enough about the Federation that Riker was sacrificing his career in Starfleet by breaking the Prime Directive, and saw that as too big a sacrifice. Also, Soran probably didn't want to cause an "interplanetary incident" or too much trouble. Perhaps the other J'Naii saw her talk to Riker and assume Soran had come to "her" senses.

Troi's Captain Obvious-status is deliberate.
She is stating the obvious to indicate that person or persons in question are not just acting, which could be a rather important thing to know. If they are shown to be acting after that, that indicates they are special in some (generally mental) way, which, again, is important to know. After all, several of the times she states the obvious, she does so about someone not actually there in person, but rather on a viewscreen, which would make it easier to miss cues that something is off about how a person acts.
 * That or she was assigned to the Enterprise because Picard was terrible at telling how other people were feeling, and Troi was the empathic daughter of a somewhat annoying ambassador. Hmmm, how do we solve this problem?

Data's trouble with metaphors is due to a quirk in his programming.
Basically: He treats synonyms as synonymous. So, after replacing words with synonymous ones and realizing it doesn't work, he figures that the metaphor must have been something a person made up, rather than a well-known phrase. This still allows for people understanding--people make up figures of speech all the time that don't become common enough to be idioms. Were this quirk discovered and repaired, he would be able to learn metaphors the same way Vulcans do: one at a time. Until such a time, it's so much a part of him that no one really notices anymore.

Alternatively: It was intentionally put there to push Data out of the Uncanny Valley, as before his language skills were a little too good.

The PADDs are descended from the iPad.
Apple became a Starfleet contractor in the intervening 3 centuries (and chilled out on restricting independent app development).
 * And would Motorola have also become a Starfleet contractor? The Motorola logo looks an awful lot like the Starfleet logo...
 * The Motorola Logo at this point is inspired somewhat by the starfleet logo.

Picard speaks French, not Federation Standard.
The reason Picard sounds like he's from Yorkshire rather than France is because he speaks a dialect of French. The Universal Translators pick this up and add an equivalent dialect to his translated dialogue.
 * Possible. Northern France and Northern England are surprisingly similar places.
 * ...lots of countries have a North?
 * Patrick Stewart may be from Yorkshire, but Picard's accent certainly isn't. It's very proper RP English.
 * This would explain many things - Worf speaks Klingon which is properly translated, rather than English with a Russian accent because of his parents (he was adopted, Klingon is his first language). Troi has an accent while her mother doesn't because Troi actually learned English either through her father or as part of her Counselor training - her mother is simply speaking Betazoid. Etc.

There really were five lights.
Picard was brainwashed so thoroughly, they even managed to brainwash him into thinking he had defeated the brainwashing. Fortunately, the guy running the show fell out of favor at exactly the same time, so nothing came of it.

Dr. Pulaski's cold attitude toward Data stems from a more general technophobia
I was reading Pulaski's entry on The Scrappy page, and most of it had to do with this (including calling Data "it"). Think of it though...she also has transporter phobia, is a strong believer in more primitive medical practices (prescribing things like chicken soup for flu cases), and so on. Consider too that Data was an abnormality - completely human-like androids were still a rare thing. Her attitude might actually have been fair for its time. (And she did warm up to him more later in the season.)

Pulaski was sent to test Data.
Starfleet wanted to make sure that Data would not go maverick under any circumstances, so they sent the most abrasive bitch they could find to continually provoke him past the point that a human would bust her across the mouth. That explains why she didn't wind up in the 'fleet equivalent of Captain's Mast her first day, or any other day. Data passed.

The Tamarians have a Hive Mind.
This is why all members of their culture have an inherent understanding of the mythology behind their metaphoric language that lacks any easy way to communicate the myths themselves. As a result of the Hive Mind, young Tamarians are born knowing the myths, which would permit this sort of language to develop.
 * Or they learn the language the same way we do--how does a child learn what a rock is? Or success? Or failure? They dont, nor do they know the words that are normally used to define these words. They learn by observing how the words are used, and in what situation. So, Tamarrian kids learn the same way--and THEN are taught the myths themselves.
 * It's more likely that they use visual techniques of storytelling, rather than a verbal method. The Tamarrians learn everything visually, and each meaningful phrase is associated in their minds with the associated image - "Shaka, when the walls fell" evokes a mental image for them of that event in their mythology, which they only know as "Shaka, when the walls fell". Note that the spontaneous creation of a new phrase, "Picard and Dathon, at El-Adrel", suggests that they still retain the ability to construct new phrases and sentences, but that they are simply incapable of creating new mental images - as such, unless provided with a specific situation, such as Picard and Dathon being at El-Adrel during the episode, they are simply unable to create any meaningful mental image from a phrase. In short, they must learn the myths first, and then the phrases that refer to them.

The USS Bozeman, from "Cause and Effect", was NOT part of the Enterprise-D time loop.
In reality, the USS Bozeman got stuck in a time warp anomaly that sent them into the future. But they ended up emerging at the exact point and time that the Enterprise-D was located. Since that happened where the space-time continuum was in flux, the Enterprise-D was knocked into the time loop. Just because it was the cause of it, doesn't mean the Bozeman was actually PART of the time loop. It also explains why nobody on the Bozeman was aware of a time loop.

Sonya Gomez was kicked off the Enterprise shortly after that hot chocolate incident.
Totally not canon, but let's face it, that was a horrible first impression.

In all of Patrick Stewart's movies, his character is really Captain Picard messing around in the holodeck.
Same goes for the acting careers of the rest of the Next Generation cast. So Independence Day, for example, is just a holodeck adventure Data had one day.
 * This would explain so much about Gargoyles.

Hugh created the Borg Queen as we know her.
Initially, the Queens acted as a mere figurehead for the Collective, with no personality aside from what the Collective needed to express. Then, Hugh comes along and spreads individuality throughout the Collective. This effects the Queen, who uses her newfound personality to impose her control over the Collective, rather than the other way around. This lead to a radical restructuring of Borg activities, resulting in the Borg's in-universe Villain Decay.

Data has emotions.
They just aren't human emotions. In the episodes, it's clear that he reacts emotionally to the events around him, but his way of expressing those reactions is much more subtle or completely different than humans' way. He's been trying so hard to find human emotion that he hasn't taken the time to explore his own android-emotion.
 * This would explain how he develops interests and sets himself goals. He does enjoy working with people and actually misses Tasha Yar when she is gone. He just is not aware of his emotions. He probably has emotions, but lacks illogical reflexes and quirks normally attached with them, like laughter accompanies happiness. But he feels he is happier serving aboard the Enterprise than just apathetically lying down.
 * It also makes more sense to assume that having emotions is a normal consequence of Soong-type positronic brain design, since Lore,, etc. have them, while Data is a re-engineered version of Lore with the emotions removed. So he would probably have emotional undercurrents suppressed by whatever modifications were made to the Lore design (and later, filtered through the emotion chip in a safe way). It's also mentioned several times that the Soong-type android use an artificial neural network as the basis of their AI; in the real world, emotional behaviour of some kind (unlikely to be similar in any way to what humans experience) is a necessary consequence of this design since it builds decisions on past experiences.

Geordi identifies more with technology than with other people.
This is a direct result of growing up with cybernetic enhancements. It explains his engineering prowess, as well as why he has a much easier time interacting with androids, sapient holograms, and disconnected Borg drones than he does with, for example, Human females.

After the death of his brother and nephew in Star Trek: Generations, Picard has had extensive difficulty in coming to terms with said deaths, going through several stages of grief.
Even Kübler-Ross herself admitted that not everyone goes through the five stages the same way or even all of them, and the Picard of the movies experiences them thus:

Star Trek Generations - Despair. He is more visibly depressed in this movie than at any other point in the movies or in the series before it.

Star Trek: First Contact - Anger. Since his brother and nephew played a large part in his rehabilitation after being liberated from The Borg, encountering them again after the death of Robert and René brought forth anger over their death, perhaps subconsciously, and caused Picard to regress back into deep-seated resentment toward The Borg.

Star Trek: Insurrection - Bargaining. Picard encounters a race of immortal aliens, befriending an intelligent child, and becoming close to the mother of said child. Perhaps, again on a subconscious level, he had taken the place of his brother. When the truth of what the Son'a and Starfleet are up to comes to light, and after trying repeatedly to convince the Admiral to reconsider what they were doing to the planet and its people, he violates direct orders from a superior officer and the Federation Council. He acts not only in exactly the opposite manner to how he had acted during a similar incident years earlier, but the course of action he chooses to take is fairly similar to the actions of Wesley Crusher during that same incident. He had previously reprimanded Crusher for these actions rather severely. All of this, in addition to going directly against the idea of the needs of the many outweighing those of the few, leads to the possibility that Picard was rather zealously defending these two people who reminded him of his deceased brother's family situation, doing whatever he possibly could to ensure the safety of the stand-in family he had just located.

Star Trek: Nemesis - Denial. Picard starts trying, desperately, to stop reminding himself of his own misery and takes an interest in mid-life crisis-ish things like riding around in a dune buggy. He also clings to the idea that Shinzon might not be evil for way longer than any consideration Shinzon merited.

Naturally, at the end of each movie, some form of Acceptance begins to manifest, but by the next, Picard has regressed into another stage of grief.

At any rate, this is the best explanation I can come up with for Picard's extensive Character Derailment in the Star Trek TNG Movies...

Sela was a clone.
Sela looks exactly like Tasha Yar, and doesn't show signs of inheriting any genetic traits from her supposed father. Star Trek: Nemesis shows the Romulans had a program for cloning Starfleet officers for the purpose of replacing them. Her back story is that when Sela was 4 (too young to remember), her mother tried to escape Romulus, but Sela didn't want to leave her father or her home and cried out, getting Yar killed. In other words, she grew up being told betrayed her human mother for her Romulan father and home - a perfect story to instill loyalty. Sela was only allowed to make her existence known after Tasha Yar was killed, ruining the original plan of replacing her.

Data is using Obfuscating Stupidity
Data has an oddly variable intelligence level. While normally brilliant and with a perfect memory, he nevertheless:
 * Loses to Troi at chess. This would mean Data is less advanced than Deep Blue.
 * Loses to another humanoid at a game of strategy and reflexes, and in a rematch is only able to tie him.
 * Is consistently unable to understand metaphors. Apparently they no longer have slang dictionaries in the future. Note that other the Tamarians, a newly encountered race, the Universal Translator can handle metaphors.
 * Can never remember that Captain Picard doesn't want to know the time estimate to the nearest second.

On the other hand, there are occasions Data shows himself to be more capable than he usually acts when affected by an outside agency.
 * When affected by a subliminal message from a himself in a previous time loop (long story), Data demonstrates he is capable of tracking every card in a deck and shuffling them in such a way to producing any hands he wants. Data claims to be surprised by this. How he could have not known he could do this is not explained.
 * Perhaps it's not so much he didn't know he could, he didn't know he was doing it then. My theory - whever he plays his "Poker" subroutine specifically avoids checking his memory of previous deck states when he is shuffling and while the hand is being played. This means while he would know what cards were where, he would specifically ignore that information, rendering each card a mystery. This would allow for his subconscious to stack the deck as it would know what cards were where which it wouldn't if he was doing something similar to deleting his memory files for previous deck states. There's also the question of how, considering his eyesight, he wouldn't be able to pick up on small creases or folds of the cards and recognize them by their specific signature, similar to how Geordi can see the cards with his VISOR but chooses not to.
 * "Brothers": In response to a retrieval signal from his creator, Data commandeers the Enterprise, takes over the computers, and alters its course. The rest of the crew proves completely outmatched trying to stop him, and even hours after Data leaves the ship, the crew never manages to regain control of it until Data returns it to them.

Data used to suffer periodic bouts of Ace Lightning Syndrome.
You have to wonder why his restricts himself to Puny Earthlings level most of the time. Perhaps he used to have trouble not knocking doors loose or accidentally injuring people, so he stays Willfully Weak most of the time to avoid ever doing it again.

Pulaski went rogue.
Funny how the doctor who invented a memory-erasing technique vanished between seasons and was never mentioned again. Makes you wonder what Federation secrets disappeared with her.
 * Alternatively, she got recruited by Section 31.

Picard and Crusher slept together immediately before the last scene in "Attached".
Nothing in their closing conversation excludes this possibility, and at least one reference seems to support it. Crusher mentions having listened in on Picard's dreams, and previously we saw that their psychic link caused them pain when they got more than a dozen feet or so apart. Possibly that side effect vanished after they removed the psi implants but the psychic link faded more quickly, but it seems just as likely that they decided the only prudent decision would be to share a room. Thereupon the intimacy of the link got the better of them, and the finishing conversation is between two people who have impulsively consummated their passions and are now discussing whether to pursue a relationship or not.

In the Q's trial against humanity, Q is actually the human race's defense attourney
Q wants humanity to survive, as he can see how humanity has grown from savage race to something much better over a short time. Since the continuum has a trial against humanity, Q chose to "use" Picard and his crew to prove that humanity was worthy of life in space. Q acting like an antagonist is simply because he knows how to motivate the captain.
 * Watch 'All good things...' again. Q's final conversation with Picard is essentially Picard going 'The whole of these past SEVEN YEARS were the trial, and you were helping us along. Thank you.' with Q responding 'Yeah, but only because I thought you deserved the help. Now go explore.' Your WMG is almost made explicit truth!

Nagilum is a Q
Maybe not the Q we're used to, but he's still a Q. As explicitly stated in the final episode, the humanity has been on trial. Now add to what Nagilum tells Picard that he thinks of the people on the Enterprise. It's pretty much the same as what the Q's trial humanity for. Add to that, the ability to create a Negative Space Wedgie, and fuck with, well, reality and take any form it wishes.

The iPad is descended from the PADD.
Someone dropped their PADD on one of their jaunts to the early 21st century. Whoops.

The Q have a true form and real names that humans wouldn't comprehend,
The true form of a Q is a creature with a goat head, snake tail with puff of fluff at the end, long snake like body covered in eagle feathers, a Pegasus left wing, a bat right wing, a deer left leg, an alligator right leg, an eagle left arm, a lion right arm, a long neck with donkey or pony hair, a goat left horn, a right antler, a snake tongue, a large fang, and yellow eyes with different sized red pupils. Mere humans just wouldn't comprehend seeing a creature like this so they make themselves look like humans around them. Q had in the past ruled a world of ponies who couldn't comprehend his appearance so they took him as the most unredeemable evil thing ever, so two pony sisters turned him to stone with a spell so strong it takes over 1000 years for even a Q to escape(even though that's not a very long time for an immortal), and after he did he attempted to rule again before being turned back into stone, then sent back to the Continuum, and then messing with humans but this time appearing as one of them so the past doesn't repeat itself. Also each Q does have a real name, but is named after a feeling or concept or something like that, which they feel won't make sense to humans, so they each go by Q to them. But their true names do make sense to ponies, so they knew him by his real name: Discord.

Riker tried to lose the trial in "The Measure of a Man"
Think about it for a second. Riker makes weak arguments that Picard easily should be able to tear apart, while sounding passionate about it. The argument about Datas strength doesn't hold water (Picard turns it down) and neither does the "turning Data off" (I'm not that big on TOS, but I believe there's a Vulcan sleeping grip of some sort). As for the removal of hands, wouldn't it be the same as La Forge's VISOR? Did Riker want Data to win? Beyond a doubt he did. All he had to do was put up weak arguments that Picard should easily tear apart.
 * Weak to the viewer, maybe, but the characters themselves seem moved enough by Riker's arguments to Joss this. Picard even tells Guinan that Riker almost convinced him.
 * Its possible that Riker was trying to give Picard an easy win while looking like he was setting up a slam-dunk, and Picard missed it because of his discomfort with the situation, his past history with the Starfleet JAG officer, his worries about Data's chances of victory/survival, along with still having to oversee the daily functionings of the Enterprise-D.

Lal can come Back from the Dead.
At the end of "The Child", Data mentioned that he uploaded her into himself before her death from positronic brain failure. In Countdown, Data was preserved in the form of the "Data Matrix", and came back in B-4 as described above. B-4 was backed up in his own "B-4 Matrix" prior to his own Heroic Sacrifice. Given that matrixes seem to be the form that backups take, there should logically be a "Lal Matrix" in there somewhere. Additionally, computers of the time have been shown to support a sapient intelligence (see the Doctor and Moriarty). Given these facts, Data should be able to create a Holo-Lal and Holo-B4 using the same system. She'll probably be happy to meet "Uncle B-4".

Taking the Universal Translator down would be supremely disastrous...
...because none of the senior staff of the Enterprise speak the same language. 400 years have passed between the modern day and the time of the series, and the amount of linguistic drift that can occur in 400 years is more than enough to create full languages out of simple dialects. Some of the senior staff might speak mutually intelligible languages, but they need the Universal Translator to conduct everyday business. Related to the above WMG above about Picard speaking French, here are the languages that the senior staff speaks:
 * Picard speaks Frainc-Comtou, an already distinct dialect of French that is likely to pick up influcences from its Swiss and Alsatian neighbours by the 24th century.
 * Riker speaks Alaskan, an Anglic language more closely related to Canadian languages than to American languages.
 * Data speaks many languages, but his first language is probably Thetese, an Anglic language closely related to Hong Kong dialects.
 * These days Worf probably speaks Klingon, but the language he uses with his parents is probably a language descended from Russian.
 * Tasha Yar speaks Turkanian, a language possibly descended from Persian or Pashto (going by the likely origin of her surname).
 * The Crushers speak Copernican, an Anglic language with strong Celtic influences descended from Scottish dialects.
 * Geordi LaForge speaks an African language descended from French.
 * Katherine Pulaski speaks Huronese, an Anglic language spoken in the US Inland North.
 * Deanna Troi speaks Betazoid.
 * So Betazed only has one language? That would disprove this hypothesis of languages fragmenting over time on a planet.
 * The popular counterpoint to this (which as far as I know is also unconfirmed by canon) is that the Universal Translator is turned off most of the time, because everyone learned some English/Chinese/Vulcan hybrid language at the Academy.