10 Star Trek Undercover Operations That Went Wrong
5. Data Runs Amok
Star Trek: Insurrection begins with a spectacular covert cock up. Starfleet have been spying on what, at first, appears to be an idyllic, peaceful pre-warp civilisation (although we later discover there's much more to the Ba'ku than meets the eye). Hidden in a camouflaged facility and utilising cloaked suits to stalk the villagers out in the open, it's imperative that they remain undetected.
It turns out the motivation behind the covert operation isn't exactly wholesome. The Federation have teamed up with the Son'a, despite their obvious bad-guy energy. They plan to abduct the oblivious Ba'ku and transport them to another planet while they're still none the wiser. It would leave the path clear for harvesting regenerative particles from the rings around the planet, rendering it uninhabitable.
It sounds like the perfect, diabolical scheme...but their mistake was assigning Data to the operation. There was no way that curious, Sherlock Holmes superfan Data was not going to discover their evil plan. No way. And after he was shot, his ethical subroutines kicked in, causing him to go berserk and reveal both the researchers and their observation post to the Ba'ku.
And if this sounds at all familiar, The Next Generation episode Who Watches The Watchers tells a strikingly similar story. A proto-Vulcan pre-warp race discovers a hidden observation post, resulting in a panicky clean-up when 'The Picard' is assumed to be a godlike entity. It's nice to see that no lessons were learned between that particular misadventure and Insurrection...