Talk:Elementary, Dear Data

An addition to trivia
You can also add that Geordi reconize the shape of the Enterprise UPSIDE DOWN! When Data takes the paper, he flips the paper so that viewers can see the ship rightside up.--BigMac1212 02:33, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

A subtraction from trivia
I intend to remove the item saying: ''When Data and Geordi meet Moriarty for the first time, Brent Spiner (Data) erroneously credits 'the author Conan Doyle' as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The author is actually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.''

This is foolishness: Arthur Conan Doyle is often referred to as "Conan Doyle" for short, in much the same way as Professor Moriarty is referred to as "Moriarty". It even says so in the Arthur Conan Doyle article. --Paul A 12:55, 16 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, saying Moriarty instead of Professor Moriarity is just leaving off a title. Saying "Conan Doyle" instead of "Arthur Conan Doyle" is leaving out his first name and only giving his middle & last. Mr. College (talk) 22:25, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, maybe it's pointless to debate this since the offending quote is now gone from the article, but Mr. College is simply wrong, saying simply "Conan Doyle is not "only giving his middle & last" name; "Conan Doyle" is a compound surname, not middle name and last name. And it's extremely common to refer to authors and other figures by their last name only when context otherwise establishes identity.  Therefore, to refer to the author as simply "Conan Doyle" is perfectly acceptable, and Paul is right to point out the foolishness of mistaking this as an error.  Minaker (talk) 08:59, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I didn't realize Conan Doyle was his last name. I thought if it was his last name, there would be a -.  I thought it was like saying "Tiberius Kirk" instead of "James Kirk" or "James Tiberius Kirk".  Thanks for explaining it to me. Mr. College (talk) 23:39, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Taking stuff out of the holodeck
It is directly stated in Encounter at Farpoint that (as Data puts it) "much of [the stuff on the holodeck] is real", stating that it is physically created using the same technology as the transporter. Although the word "replicator" is not used, this is entirely consistent with later explanations of how the replicator works, so much of the discussion on this topic is irrelevent. Branfish 13:50, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

When did Moriarity know?
I'm not sure if this is a mistake in the show or not. Here's the sequence of events: Geordi calls for the arch to modify the Holmes program, modifies the program to create an adversary who can defeat Data, has the computer remove the arch. Anyways, it seems like Moriarity knew there was something "magical" about the setting when Geordi called for the arch instead of when he modified the program. As a holodeck character, he should not have been aware of anything "magical" until his program was modified. Is it an error in the show that he seems to know what is really going on before his program was modified? Mr. College (talk) 01:19, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Holmes Copyright error
The copyright error was due to the differences in UK and US copyright law. Under UK law the Holmes works all went public domain in 1980 (Life of author+50 years); the problem is US law in 1930 was that Copyright was year of publication+ 28 year with one renewal of 28 years. However the 1976 copyright law extended the renewal period to 47 years (the Sony Bono has slapped another 20 years on to that). So while Lane and company were correct that the Holmes character was public domain in the UK they erred in assuming the characters were public domain in the US as well.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:34, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

The discussion of copyright law is interesting, but I feel like something is missing. I'm not fully understanding how it applies in this instance. It seems that everyone thought all the characters were in public domain, and the characters they happened to use were from early enough Holmes stories to actually be in public domain. Where then does the difficulty lie? Did they have any trouble with copyright at all, or was this some harmless little bit of errata that they possibly remain unaware of to this day? It's not clear to me. 67.142.165.37 (talk) 03:28, 7 June 2010 (UTC)


 * It seems the whole thing is confused with myths. See The Truth about Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. That's not to say the Holmes copyrights are a model of clarity - see This New York Times story for the situation. Timrollpickering (talk) 19:45, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Plot edit
The writer of these plot synopses goes into far too much extraneous and irrelevant detail for a synopsis. The banner at the top suggests it should be edited to remove this detail, so in line with that suggestion, I've just done that. Nearly half the material has been edited out, but if it's thought it's still too much, maybe there is scope for further reductions.88.105.255.158 (talk) 23:57, 2 December 2009 (UTC)