Brent Spiner, the actor most famous for portraying the android Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, has actually played a few different versions of the Soong type android. Dr. Noonien Soong – also played by Spiner – the aforementioned creator of Data, actually made a pair of androids before he constructed the Enterprise-D‘s beloved operations officer.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view.
Data
Far and away the most prominent Soong type android, Data was actually the last of the three to be created, and Soong considered him to be his greatest success. Data would appear in virtually every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation – he’s missing from exactly one episode, “Family,” which takes place largely away from the Enterprise – and all four accompanying movies, and has appeared in dream sequences in the first season of Star Trek: Picard. Data essentially filled the role played by Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series, the alien who struggles to understand humanity. But whereas Spock rejected his humanity, Data was in desperate search of his, always trying to find new ways to explore his existence and his sense of personhood. As Commander Riker once noted, he was, for all intents and purposes, a sci-fi version of Pinocchio.
Data met his end in Star Trek: Nemesis, the final film to feature the TNG crew. He sacrificed his life to save Captain Picard’s, a gesture that would haunt Picard for the next two decades, as we’ve seen in Star Trek: Picard. Data was one of the richest, most fully realized characters in all of Star Trek, so it’s no surprise that Picard would keep Data’s influence, even after his death.
Lore
Created prior to Data, Lore was in many ways his complete opposite. Whereas Data struggled to grasp human emotion, it came easily to Lore. But Lore’s emotions tended toward greed and vanity, seeing himself as superior to humanity. Data encountered Lore on three separate occasions over seven seasons on TNG. He made his debut in “Datalore,” where he was seen to be in league with the crystalline entity, a giant sentient space crystal that wiped out Soong’s colony years earlier.
The second meeting happened in “Brothers,” when Dr. Soong himself activated homing beacons in both androids, not realizing Lore was still alive. Lore stole an emotion chip Soong had developed Data before murdering his creator. Their final showdown happened in the two part episode “Descent,” where Lore had made himself an army of Borg drones who were suffering from the individuality that had been injected into the collective from Hugh in the TNG episode “I, Borg.” Data was eventually forced to kill Lore, believing himself to again be alone in the universe.
B-4
In Star Trek: Nemesis, a prototype Soong android – even earlier than Lore – was used by the villainous Shinzon as a lure for Picard, of whom he was a very Tom Hardy looking clone. B-4 was not nearly as sophisticated as Data or Lore, even after Data transferred a copy of all his memories into B-4‘s positronic brain. B-4 was left behind on the Enterprise after Data’s death, ironically now a poor copy of their old friend.
There was hope that Data could one day emerge from B-4, but that was not to be; in the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, the ban on synthetic life means B-4 currently resides in a storage drawer at the Daystrom Institute. Whether or not B-4 plays a role in some sort of resurrection of Data is yet to be seen, but fans have likely seen the last of B-4 himself in Star Trek.
