Brothers
It's 'Brent Spiner versus Brent Spiner featuring Brent Spiner' as the family season springs triplets on us
A medical emergency! Sounds exciting. Oh wait, it’s just two young guest stars who have had a spat and now one of them is now in the infirmary. But wait, it’s even less interesting than it first seems because the reason he’s incapacitated is that he ate a fruit. This really is one of the dullest openings to a Trek episode ever. But wait - it’s all a second season style thematic framework to establish the episode is about the stupid things that brothers do to each other. Soon we soon get rolling on the real plot. Data starts acting weirdly, and before you know it he’s taken over the ship - proving once and for all that everyone who said that letting an android into Starfleet was dangerous was absolutely right. Fortunately, he doesn't team up with the Borg and exterminate the crew (although give it a few years...), instead he has a family reunion with his brother Lore and his father, Dr Noonian Soong. Who wants to bet this doesn't end with them all hugging…?
Words
This is the first writing credit for Rick Berman, who is now in charge of the whole shebang since Gene Roddenberry has quietly stepped into the background. Incredibly, the original plan did not involve bringing Lore back at all, but rather just Data meeting his creator. But this meant after the impressively engaging opening of Data embarrassingly outmanoeuvring the entire crew, the story fell flat as it was just talking heads all the way from there. Michael Piller suggested this was a golden opportunity to bring back season one’s Lore, and persuaded Berman to run with the idea.
There’s a lot to love in the screenplay, especially little touches like the absurdly long access code Data specifies in Picard’s voice:
DATA (in Picard’s voice): Computer, establish a security code for access to all functions previously transferred to Bridge.
COMPUTER VOICE: Enter code.
DATA: (in Picard’s voice speaking at a breakneck speed): Four, one, three, three, six, eight, Tango, one, eight, one, one, seven, one, Charlie, four, Victor, three, eight, eight, eight, zero, Foxtrot, six, one, five, three, three, five, nine, five, seven, lock.
Although the LCARs screen doesn’t at all match this version from the screenplay, as you can see:
What’s more, the spoken version doesn’t match either of these! Oh well, small details we should certainly try and overlook.
The story, in case you missed Soong saying it explicitly in the final act, is Jacob and Esau from the book of Genesis with added androids. The core of the tale works well, but I do find the framing story with the two gormless brothers rather lacklustre. It’s clear what it's intended to do, it’s just vastly overshadowed by everything else that’s going on.
Acting Roles
Not content with evil twins, TNG just had to go one better and give us dodgy triplets. However, there was an enormous technical challenge getting Spiner alongside Spiner and Spiner. Having two different characters on screen is one thing, but three played by the same performer...? I won’t say it hadn't been done before, but it was a genuine challenge to deliver this to the standards expected in the early nineties on the unbelievably tight timelines of network television. I note, however, that there are no shots featuring all three Spiners at the same time, something that became much more achievable as digital editing tools improved over the next decade.
Producer David Livingstone remembered how hard it was for Spiner, TNG veteran director Rob Bowman, and visual effects director Robert Legato to pull it off:
They worked out some of the motion control shots and did a lot of preparation in terms of figuring out what to do, because that kind of preparatory time on the stage when everybody is standing around is not a good idea. What we did was we taped out the floor like in a stageplay or a multicamera show, and then actually blocked it out and staged it. I’m glad we did, because it saved us a lot of time. If we hadn’t, it would have been really dicey.
Spiner found this sequence incredibly difficult to work with, even with a lot of rehearsing with stand-ins for each of his other two roles. To help him concentrate, Sound Stage 16 was closed off for two and a half days while Spiner worked through all his lines. It all comes across brilliantly in the end, and belies the effort required behind the scenes to make it happen.
Also, can I note that Brent Spiner is not the only one playing Data in this episode? Patrick Stewart also plays the android while he’s impersonating the captain. It’s not a difficult role for him, really, just his own voice rendered flat and uninteresting, but it works brilliantly to add a little panache to Data's involuntary escape scheme.
Gates McFadden’s Dr Crusher is saddled with the tedious B-plot, although Riker sets it up for her. She’s mostly there to sit with the two guest stars while talking to them in her most patronising voice, and she isn’t given any material of consequence.
As for the guest stars, Cory Danzinger who plays Jake had a recurring role as Kipper in the 1987 Beauty and the Beast show, while Adam Ryen who plays Willie had a few roles including a bit part in Child's Play 2. They are barely noticeable here, and even if they were the finest child actors of all time they couldn’t make us care about this extremely limp ticking clock plotline.
For the most part, the rest of the regular cast is just reacting to Data stealing the Enterprise, although nowhere quite as memorably as poor Worf and minions trapped behind a forcefield, picking up another loss in his tally against aliens and robots (Worf 7-Aliens 10).
I know, it’s not like Data decks out Worf like Lore did, but trust me, that Klingon definitely didn’t come away from this incident feeling like a winner. If he’d been on a Klingon ship, there would have been brutal and bloody consequences for a whopping breach of security like this one.
Finally, we get a sprinkling of Colm Meaney’s Miles O’Brien with such humdrum classics as “I wouldn’t advise that, sir - the phase coils don’t take well to ricochets.” Your time is coming soon, Mr O’Brien.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
It’s an episode for make-up and shot composition more than anything else, but shout out to the Pakled costume that is brought back to give Lore an amusing excuse for not being lost in space forever.
They also make a fake-jungle in Sound Stage 16 using mostly potted ferns!
But it’s really that latex ageing special effect on Brent Spiner while he’s playing Dr Soong that’s the SFX star this week. Of course, it took hours to put on - but guess what? So did Data's regular make-up! (Brent Spiner is nowhere near as pasty in person as Data seems on screen.) Michael Westmore had him in the chair for four hours to make him up as the old man, and in so doing gave Spiner the missing link to who he might go about playing the character. Spiner later remembered:
It wasn’t until I saw the makeup on my face that I knew what to do. At least seventy-five percent of that performance was due to Michael Westmore. He put the idea onto my face, and I suddenly understood... People started treating me like I was old, even though I had worked with them for three years at that point. Everybody was treating me with so much more respect, because I was a man who had lived a long life. And the older I acted between scenes, the nicer people treated me. It was incredible.
As far as I can tell, after putting on the Data make-up several days a week for three years, dressing up as dad for a few extra hours was a thoroughly refreshing change of pace for Spiner.
As uneven as this episode is, its greatest moments are wonderfully stylish and they all depend on having at least one Brent Spiner in the scene. Michael Piller felt certain this was going to be an unforgettable episode, and the technical team give us three great reasons to agree.