TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

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.

You say NDs are often into coding...

... but you also don't know what a subroutine is?

Data is just saying he programmed himself with a new feature, a new set of functions that grant him a new capability: 'small talk.'

... The entire point of Troi and Riker making the small talk joke is that Data missed the point of small talk.

Also... Data is the ND person/analog, Data is playing the part of the high functioning autistic person, of the 'eccentric genius' who has great knowledge of complex academic subjects, but has fundamentally difficulty with what NTs consider basic social skills.

His approach is naive and overly literal: Oh, small talk must just be a category or style of human interactions, I'll just quickly make a giant study with available information and pop out a decent facsimile or emulation of 'small talk'.

... But results in Data coming across as a try-hard, a poser, a cariacature.

Data's approach is fundamentally flawed: He missed the actual core of interpersonal social and emotional dynamics, concepts like equivalent reciprocity, how to assess a person's body language and tone, how to gauge a person's level of interest, how situational context works, how to recover from and apologize for an unintentional insult, how to know when you are being percieved as being annoying or having overstayed your welcome...

...most importantly, Data doesn't have emotions, he doesn't have a gut feeling, he himself does not possess all these non formally logical thought influencing fuzzy-logic processes that NTs/most humans have at such a fundamental level that they often are not even conscious of how they work.

For that reason, he will often come across as odd or phony or inapprooriate to many humans... he'd have to have all of that, integrate it with the rest of his personality/systems, and then 'small talk' would basically just emerge without much effort.

To use autistic/ND terminology, Data just tried to hastily construct another kind of mask or persona for a different kind of social ettiquette, and it did not go well.

I say this all as an autistic person who has often found more in common with 'android' type characters in fiction than other characters, and who has often been called a vulcan, robot, computer or android, sometimes as a compliment, sometimes as an insult.

Anyway... if you do ever watch more TNG, there are a fair number of plots that revolve around Data longing to experience emotions, and then actually having emotions via basically being upgraded with another hardware component ... literally, an 'emotion chip', which is basically a far more complex, advanced, experimental and buggy piece of hardware ... initially it basically makes Data manic/depressive bipolar, totally overwhelming him, and it takes him quite a lot of time and effort to learn how to control his emotions...

Kind of like how an autistic person acts after having been far too stressed for too long and then suffers a 'burn-out'.

TNG is definitely a product of it's time (late 80s to early 90s). In the late 80s, "Autistic" mostly meant severe (and likely non-verbal), and ADHD was still ADD, and was only for the most hyperactive types. Non-attentive ADHD didn't really exist. "Aspergers" had only recently been a thing, and was very rare.

TNG is still a fantastic show, that challenges a lot of society (as it was meant to do), but in the modern day, it can leave a bit to be desired at times. Take in in the spirit of it's day.

Sooner or later you'll realize that the ND character in question would've been Geordi LaForge -- or worse, Reginald Barclay -- and it would not have gone well.

If I'm not mistaken, that's TNG s6e18 "Starship Mine" aka "Trek Pulls a Die Hard"

Such a fun episode where Data explores "small talk" with the host of some symposium or other.

Being on the spectrum, I have to say, I weirdly relate to Boimler in Lower Decks, especially early seasons. It’s something about his awkwardness combined with his dealing with his ambition that spoke to me when I got rejected from my dream school a year or so back.

It’s almost like Data is the person you dream of being in some ways and Boimler is the person you actually are in a few aspects.

ND character

What's an "ND character"?