The Mysterious Star Trek TNG Computer Voice Fans Are Still Trying To Decode

Before we go any further, you’re going to need a bit of context about the first Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which Majel Barrett Roddenberry provided the computer voice. The episode “11001001” features the Enterprise-D getting some important upgrades from a mysterious alien race known as the Bynars.

These new guys hijack the ship in a crazy scheme to go help their homeworld, leaving Picard and Riker as the only officers onboard because they skipped out on shore leave for something more important: flirting with a cute AI courtesy of the ship’s upgraded holodeck.

This was the 15th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was the first one in which Majel Barrett Roddenberry provided the computer voice, something she had previously done on The Original Series (more on this later). Her precise voice soon became a staple of the franchise, and she continued to voice Federation computers for other spinoffs. However, the ongoing mystery of this episode is that there is also a male computer voice, someone who has never been identified but who we had heard from exactly once before.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation premiere episode “Encounter At Farpoint” featured the mystery man who later provided the computer voice in “11001001,” at least in subsequent airings. While that first episode was originally broadcast as a movie-length premiere, it was later split into two parts for reruns. When that happened, the same mystery man provided some opening narration for the second part, saying, “Last time on ‘Encounter at Farpoint’…” before the recap of earlier events.

As longtime Star Trek fans know, Majel Barrett Roddenberry would later replace this man for the “last time, on…” segments as well as becoming the full-time computer voice. However, voicing the ship’s computer on TNG was likely not very difficult for her: Star Trek: The Original Series and most of the original films used her as the computer voice, as did later spinoffs Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and even Enterprise.

That meant she was the only Trek actor at the time to appear in six different shows in the franchise, and her influence was so great that Google originally codenamed its 2011-era Voice Search Android enhancement “Majel.”

Majel Barrett Roddenberry is a true Star Trek icon, and she even provided the computer voice for Star Trek (2009), a film that came out after she had passed away. She leaves behind a rich legacy of onscreen and offscreen appearances throughout the franchise, but we can’t help but wonder who the secret male computer voice was back in “11001001.”

Now, we can only hope that guy returns in the final season of Lower Decks, a show that has focused on evil-talking robots way more than we ever would have guessed.