Grief, Loss, and the Limits of Reason

Lal's clinical failure and death force a confrontation between analytical problem‑solving and raw emotional loss. The crew's measured protocols and Data's technical actions cannot fully contain mourning; their grief exposes the human costs of experimentation and the insufficiency of pure reason to account for moral injury. The scenes — diagnostic urgency, the admiral's pronouncement, and the bridge aftermath — dramatize how loss re‑indexes relationships and tests institutional narratives.