Brent Spiner’s Mystery Star Trek Character Details Revealed
Picard's showrunner says Brent Spiner's character will be a "new old" role.
When Star Trek: Picard released its season 3 teaser last month–giving us our first look at the lead cast of the third and final season–there was one noteworthy absence; Brent Spiner was nowhere to be found. In most likelihood that’s because no one knows exactly who Spiner will be playing other than it won’t be the late android Starfleet officer Lt Cmdr Data. Now showrunner Terry Matalas has revealed some teasing details about Spiner’s character, including that we’ve met the character before… except that we haven’t.
Speaking to TrekMovie on their All Access Star Trek podcast, the Picard showrunner insisted that even if Brent Spiner’s character had been included in the Star Trek teaser, it wouldn’t have revealed who he was playing. “Brent’s character is specifically tied into the plot and the mythology in ways that if you were to show a poster, you would have a thousand more questions,” Matalas explained. He added, cryptically, that Spiner, “plays a new old character that you have seen and never seen before. It’s, we think, a great way to do this that honors what has come before yet treads new ground.”
If that sounds frustrating, don’t worry; it will get more frustrating. According to what Matalas told TrekMovie, not only do you have no idea who Brent Spiner is playing in Star Trek: Picard‘s third season right now, but you won’t know until part of the way through the upcoming season. “The answers to your questions are better told in the context of the story than to say, ‘And now everybody, here is a link to who this character is,'” Matalas insisted. “If you see him now and got a name, there’s too many questions tied to ‘Okay, so who is that now?'”
We’re not here to argue with Terry Matalas, but since speculation will no doubt run rampant in the lead-up to the upcoming season, we may as well get it started. The first thing we’ll speculate is that, whoever Brent Spiner is playing in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, it seems likely–and, man, we hope we’re right–it isn’t another damn Soong. Spiner played Data’s creator, Noonien Soong, a number of times throughout the course of The Next Generation. He played Noonien’s ancestor Arik Soong on Enterprise, the even earlier predecessor Adam Soong on season 2 of Picard, and Noonien’s descendant Altan Inigo Soong in Picard‘s inaugural season. We’ve had our share of the identical Soongs and it seems likely if Spiner were playing another one, there would be no reason to not show him in the teaser.
But it would seem criminal for Spiner to play a character without some connection to Data in Star Trek: Picard, which leads us to the obvious choices of his evil twin Lore–who Data deactivated in The Next Generation‘s final season–and the prototype B-4 who was discovered in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. A disassembled B-4 showed up briefly in Picard‘s first season, but Lore’s ultimate fate has never been fully explored. He would seem like the most likely candidate, but even if it’s him, we’re still stuck with the showrunner’s mysterious hints that he’s someone we “have seen and never seen before.” Perhaps a re-programmed Lore? And if so, re-programmed by who? And why? Did someone upload another consciousness into him? Or, oooh! Maybe they put the holographic Moriarty in him! He’s come back for revenge on Doctor Pulaski for eating all of his scones.
