Crew Profile: Data

How the role of our favourite android was created, and the unknown actor who brought him to (un)life

Some performers are so intimately connected with one key role, that there is just no escaping it. It happened to Leonard Nimoy with Commander Spock, and it happened to Brent Spiner with Lieutenant Commander Data. It is hardly a secret that Spiner’s role in Star Trek: The Next Generation was intended to substitute for Nimoy’s in terms of being the outsider capable of reflecting upon the human condition. But the creation of this role is a more complex tale than it might at first seem.

Gene Roddenberry had already laid the seeds for the Data character in an obscure 1974 made-for-TV movie The Questor Tapes, written by Star Trek writer Gene L. Coon (“Arena”, “Space Seed”, “The Devil in the Dark” etc.). The story concerns an android (played by Robert Foxworth) whose memory tapes are incomplete searching for its creator in order to uncover its purpose in life. The movie also featured Majel Barrett and Walter Koenig in roles. As with much that Roddenberry pursued ‘between the Star Treks‘, this was intended as a pilot for a show, but it never happened. Roddenberry never lost interest in the concept, though.

However, the suggestion that this was the genesis of the Data concept is disputed by other members of the TNG production team...