Entertainment
Star Trek’s Greatest Hero Saved The Day With Abstinence, In A Scene They Wouldn't Let You See
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek is a relatively cerebral franchise, but its characters have always embraced sex, often using it to save the day: for example, Spock once seduced a Romulan commander to help complete his mission, and Sisko slept with Mirror Universe Dax to avoid blowing his cover. Even Data was willing (a little too willing) to get freaky with the Borg Queen so that he could eventually save the Enterprise-E. But in a deleted scene from one memorable Next Generation episode, the android did the reverse, saving the day by not having sex with an alien woman who wanted to see just how “fully functional” he really was.
The scene in question was written for “The Most Toys,” an episode where Data is kidnapped by a collector (Kivas Fajo) who wants this android as part of his collection. He treats Data like an exotic doll, dressing him in special clothing and forcing him to sit in a particular position. Eventually, Data makes a successful escape with the help of the collector’s assistant, an alien woman who feels betrayed after her boss threatens to kill her despite her 14 years of loyal service.
TFW You’ve Found The Galaxy’s Most Advanced Toy
In the broadcast episode of “The Most Toys,” this is the only reason given for her willingness to help Data out, but it’s a pretty good one; after all, who would want to stick by a boss who is threatening to kill them? However, in the original script, she is given another motivation in a scene that never made it into the final episode. It all starts when Kivas Fajo gives her a very unusual command: to go have sex with their captive android.
Why the heck would a collector of the galaxy’s rarest items send his assistant to go have sex with an android? Simple: as Data discussed in the Season 1 episode “The Naked Now” (and as he discusses with the assistant, Varria, in this episode), he is “programmed in multiple techniques” so that he can offer “a broad variety of pleasuring” to his companions. Kivas Fajo apparently wanted to verify the existence of those techniques, the same way that somebody who buys used electronics wants to make sure the items he purchased are still (ahem) fully functional.
A Booty Call Gone Wrong
Ironically, Data is initially down, which would have brought his body count to two after Tasha Yar. But once he learns that this is all a weird test on Fajo’s part, he refuses Varria, leaving her completely humiliated. Not only did her boss try to use her, but the person she was meant to seduce ended up rejecting her. This (along with the aforementioned threat on her life) ends up providing the motivation she needs to help Data escape from the clutches of Kivas Fajo.
In the original script, it seems like Varria wouldn’t have been willing to help if Data had slept with her, but the humiliation of his refusal spurred her into action against her abusive employer. In this way, everyone’s favorite android did something that perhaps nobody else in Star Trek has done before or since. Namely, he saved the day by staying abstinent (something Riker clearly never learned about in Starfleet Academy).
Given how weird the fandom gets about these sorts of things (don’t get Next Gen fans started about Beverly’s ghost obsession!), it’s probably for the best that this plot point from “The Most Toys” script was never actually filmed. It’s even better that such a scene never made it to a NuTrek show like Discovery. After all, the only thing more awkward than watching a Starfleet officer turn down beautiful women would be watching Tilly try to turn this into a moral lesson: “That’s the power of abstinence, people!”
Entertainment
The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem
Entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s essay, “Something Big Is Happening,” is going mega-viral on X, where it’s been viewed 42 million times and counting.
The piece warns that rapid advancements in the AI industry over the past few weeks threaten to change the world as we know it. Shumer specifically likens the present moment to the weeks and months preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, and says most people won’t hear the warning “until it’s too late.”
We’ve heard warnings like this before from AI doomers, but Shumer wants us to believe that this time the ground really is shifting beneath our feet.
“But it’s time now,” he writes. “Not in an ‘eventually we should talk about this’ way. In a ‘this is happening right now and I need you to understand it’ way.”
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Unfortunately for Shumer, we’ve heard warnings like this before. We’ve heard it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. In the long run, some of these predictions will surely come true — a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me certainly believe they will — but I’m not changing my weekend plans to build a bunker.
The AI industry now has a massive Chicken Little problem, which is making it hard to take dire warnings like this too seriously. Because, as I’ve written before, when an AI entrepreneur tells you that AI is a world-changing technology on the order of COVID-19 or the agricultural revolution, you have to take this message for what it really is — a sales pitch.
Why people are so worried about AI right now
Shumer’s essay claims that the latest generative AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic are already capable of doing much of his job.
“Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.”
The post clearly struck a nerve on X. Across the political spectrum, high-profile accounts with millions of followers are sharing the post as an urgent warning.
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To understand Shumer’s post, you need to understand big concepts like AGI and the Singularity. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a hypothetical AI program that “possesses human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can.” The Singularity refers to a threshold at which technology becomes self-improving, allowing it to progress exponentially.
Mashable Light Speed
Shumer is correct that there are good reasons to think that progress has been made toward both AGI and the Singularity.
OpenAI’s latest coding model, GPT-5.3-Codex, helped create itself. Anthropic has made similar claims about recent product launches. And there’s no denying that generative AI is now so good at writing code that it’s decimated the job market for entry-level coders.
It is absolutely true that generative AI is progressing rapidly and that it will surely have big impacts on everyday life, the labor market, and the future.
Even so, it’s hard to believe a weather report from Chicken Little. And it’s harder still to believe everything a car salesman tells you about the amazing new convertible that just rolled onto the sales lot.
Indeed, as Shumer’s post went viral, AI skeptics joined the fray.
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It’s not time to panic yet
There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of Shumer’s claims. In the essay, he provides two specific examples of generative AI’s capabilities — its ability to conduct legal reasoning on par with top lawyers, and its ability to create, test, and debug apps.
Let’s look at the app argument first:
I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
Is this impressive? Absolutely!
At the same time, it’s a running joke in the tech world that you can already find an app for everything. (“There’s an app for that.”) That means coding models can model their work off tens of thousands of existing applications. Is the world really going to be irrevocably changed because we now have the ability to create new apps more quickly?
Let’s look at the legal claim, where Shumer says that AI is “like having a team of [lawyers] available instantly.” There’s just one problem: Lawyers all over the country are getting censured for actually using AI. A lawyer tracking AI hallucinations in the legal profession found 912 documented cases so far.
It’s hard to swallow warnings about AGI when even the most advanced LLMs are still completely incapable of fact-checking. According to OpenAI’s own documentation, its latest model, GPT-5.2, has a hallucination rate of 10.9 percent. Even when given access to the internet to check its work, it still hallucinates 5.8 percent of the time. Would you trust a person that only hallucinates six percent of the time?
Yes, it’s possible that a rapid leap forward is imminent. But it’s also possible that the AI industry will rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. And there are good reasons to believe the latter is likely. This week, OpenAI introduced ads into ChatGPT, a tactic it previously called a “last resort.” OpenAI is also rolling out a new “ChatGPT adult” mode to let people engage in erotic roleplay with Chat. That’s hardly the behavior of a company that’s about to unleash AI super-intelligence onto an unsuspecting world.
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This article reflects the opinion of the author.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
See results from over 25 AI models side by side with this game-changing tool
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Credit: ChatPlayground AI
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Whether you’re using AI to generate images, code, or just field questions, ChatPlayground AI is a Chrome extension you can access easily. It doesn’t just give you multiple answers; it also helps you work more efficiently with AI through features like prompt engineering, image and PDF chat, and the ability to save past conversations for future reference.
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Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
Big Salad’s Birthday Sale
This week only, we’re offering 20% off annual subscriptions to Big Salad, our weekly newsletter (and the #1 fashion/beauty publication on Substack). For $4/month, you will get every issue for a year — packed with fun finds, life realizations, and essays on sex, dating, love, marriage, divorce, parenting, and friendship — plus access to our deep archives.
Last Friday, I wrote about a dating realization I had that changed everything (gift link, free for all). The comments were truly incredible, and I felt really moved by the ability to share relationship (and life) highs and lows with women who really get it. We really are all in this together.
Here are a few more issues you may enjoy…
On sex, dating, relationships, and friendship:
The genius advice my therapist gave me when my marriage ended.
What it felt like to have sex for the first time post-divorce.
How do you know if it’s time to get divorced?
Four ways I’ve learned to deepen friendships.
The book that profoundly changed my friend’s sex life.
Reader question: “I want to talk dirty in bed, but I’m nervous.”
Nine habits that are making my 40s my favorite decade.
On fashion and beauty:
How to style a shirt like a Copenhagen girl.
7 things we spotted people wearing in Paris (plus, two magic Paris itineraries).
13 beauty products we always finish.
Do I get botox or filler? Readers asked, and I answered. 🙂
At age 46, I finally figured out my hair.
Gemma’s #1 drugstore beauty find.
Our 13 favorite swimsuits.
And, most of all, amazing life insights from women we love:
Ashley C. Ford on why poverty makes it hard to figure out what you like.
Anne Helen Petersen’s book-filled island cottage.
Three people share how they changed their careers. Then, three more women share!
Brooke Barker’s great conversation starter.
Hunter Harris tells us what movies and shows to watch right now.
Abbey Nova’s jaw-dropping garden makeover.
Natasha Pickowicz wants you to throw yourself a party.
My sister’s parenting hack that I can’t stop thinking about.
Alison Piepmeyer’s amazing wallpaper before-and-after photos.
15 incredible books to read.
Nine ways Kate Baer is coming out to play in her 40s.
Here’s the discount link for 20% off annual subscriptions, and here’s the Big Salad homepage, if you’d like to check it out. We would love to have you, and thank you so much for your support and readership. Joannaxo
P.S. We also offer 50 comped subscriptions per month for those who’d like to read Big Salad but aren’t in a place to pay for it at the moment. Just email newsletter@cupofjo.com to get on the list. Thank you!
The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem
See results from over 25 AI models side by side with this game-changing tool
