This is an interesting post about how the Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3, episode 20 “Tin Man” is about autism. If you don’t remember, it’s the episode where the ship is thrust into a face-off with the Romulans over a new life form, an organic spaceship which lost its crew long ago and is now orbiting a star which is on the point of exploding.
Go figure that this site would be the one to confirm my bias. I’m autistic, and I describe it as “a lot of autists are empaths who don’t know how to use their powers.” I’d go one step further than this post explicitly did and say that a lot of those who have alexithymia simply don’t have the vocabulary to describe the emotions they’re picking up — they want to, but it’s like someone with a wider visual spectrum trying to describe the colors of gamma radiation to an ordinary human. Best example I can think of in terms of actual emotions: If you think about it more deeply than most people do, the term “happy” can describe everything from “content, at peace” to “wildly, energetically ecstatic” — but to an autist (or at least a certain type of autist) all of those are different emotional states under an umbrella term.
Unrelated but something else going through my brain: Data is not autistic, he’s the backward version. He’s a robot trying to be/act human; autists are humans trying to be/act robotic. Spock is autistic; T’Pol is autistic; and they do a good job of illustrating it. Data is a robot.