......with a little tweaking here and there. Sadly, Berman was only into episodic formatting in TNG (for the most part and Lal was never mentioned again. Totally typical for him. 😣). I would have loved to have seen Lal again. A dev wasted opportunity......
I don't mind fanfiction. I believe that it can be a great way to stretch the limits of your imagination and become even more enthralled in your favorite fandom. Sure, some of it can be pretty bad but normally the bad writing and out of character actions are tempered by the passion that the author has for their work.
Then there's works like this.
I tried really hard to see the author's feelings in this work but it just seemed like her main agenda was to re-write the character of Lal to be a Mary Sue self-insert. Normally I'm OK with self-inserts because hey, who hasn't written or imagined a Mary Sue insert at one point or another? I'm fine with a little bit of character reimagining, but the author seems to have completely lost touch with the characters that made STTNG so wonderful- especially the characters introduced in The Offspring. The "romance" between Data and Lal was pretty creepy. I know that it was never quite stated as a romance, but that's how it comes across in this script and it creeped me out. I'm fully aware that this was the product of a new and very underdeveloped author, but I can't help but think that this would have been better kept 'in the vault' and re-written after she gained more experience.
I also want to note that despite the author claiming that this was "free", I still had to pay for it. I didn't notice that until afterwards and if the author wishes to continue the claims of 'this is free' then she needs to remove the .99 price from the item or remove the claims of it being free from the synopsis. This did not affect my rating, however. If the author really wants to have her work read, I recommend going to fanfiction (dot) net. It's free and easy to use.
I wish I could give this a higher rating but this just wasn't all that good.