The One Star Trek Co-Star Brent Spiner Had Difficulty Working With
In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Data's Day" (January 7, 1991), it was revealed that Data (Brent Spiner) had acquired a pet cat. Likely looking through a database of popular pet names, Data chose the name "Spot" for his orange tabby. Spot was played by a series of cats over his tenure on "Star Trek," including Bud Monster, Brandy, Tyler, Spencer, and Zoe. In the episode "Genesis" (March 21, 1994), Spot devolved into an iguana (don't ask), played by a reptile named Willie. Spot, previously referred to as "he" transformed into a female in "Genesis," likely because the show's writers wanted him to have kittens.
Spot appeared in eight episodes of "Next Generation," had a few scenes in both "Star Trek: Generations" and "Star Trek: Nemesis," and was resurrected for a dream sequence in an episode of "Star Trek: Picard." The cat actor for "Picard" seems to have wanted to remain uncredited. It was endearing that Data owned a cat, especially in the few scenes wherein the android appeared baffled by feline capriciousness.
Spiner has gone on record a few times with how much he hated working with cats. Some cats, he noted, were good at their jobs, which usually involved being still and snuggling. When the cat needed to be trained to do just about anything else, however, Spiner's co-star required many, many takes.
Spiner talked about the Spot actors in a recent interview with TrekMovie, and he revealed that the unnamed cat from "Picard" was a far better actor than any of his Spot co-stars from back in the "Next Generation" days. Although to be fair, the "Picard" cat was given a much less demanding scene.
Ode to Spot
In "Star Trek: Picard," Spot appeared in one of the show's many "inside a character's mind" sequences. In the series, Data had been rebuilt as a 74-year-old man, and had been implanted with the memories of Data, B-4, Dr. Soong, Lal, and his own evil twin Lore. Lore, being a sadist, found that he could erase Data's memories from within and take over psychic real estate, as it were. This was dramatized by Data standing opposite himself in a blank white space, debating with Lore. Data, attempting to appeal to Lore's emotions, kept handing Lore objects that represented his own dearest memories. Lore, without hesitating, erased them all.
The final appeal to Lore was Spot, a cut lil' kitty cat. Surely Lore wouldn't also delete Spot. He does. Don't worry, though, both Data and Spot survive the deletion process. Spiner loved working with the new Spot because it actually listened. In the '90s, the writers and producers of "Next Generation" demanded far too much of a cat, and Spiner loathed the difficulties. This time around, Spiner said, "it was super easy" He continued:
"[I]t went really well because this cat loved me. I'll tell you what, ['Next Generation' writers] Ron Moore and Brannon Braga used to write the scenes with Spot and they always wrote things just to irritate me. They would write things for this cat to do that it couldn't possibly do. So we would be there all day long working because the cat was not a very good actor. And this cat was a brilliant actor. I would say this cat is considered the Daniel Day-Lewis of cats. It wasn't really required to do anything other than snuggle with me, which it did brilliantly. So I was fine doing that scene."
That's so cute.
Three stupid monsters
In the past, Spiner had nothing kind to say about the cats he worked with. Speaking at a convention in 2010, Spiner was recorded saying:
"That cat, I have to say, is the stupidest actor I ever worked with. Seriously. I know there are a lot of cat lovers, and I have nothing against cats, but that cat never took a piece of direction. Ever. One time! One time they wrote in 'Spot eats tuna out of a can.' And he picked it up on the first take. Otherwise, we were there all day with that cat. Bless his soul."
At a 2013 convention, Spiner reiterated his feelings, pointing out that the three cat actors he recalled working with in the early 1990s were, sadly, all long dead, and that they were all stupid co-stars when they were alive. "When we would open a script and see Spot, our stomachs would turn over." A Spot script always took a long, long time to shoot.
Spot was a very resilient character, having survived a full-blown starship crash in "Star Trek: Generations." Data, while poking through the rubble of the Enterprise-D, found Spot hiding in a metal tube. This caused Data to cry, which was a new experience for him (Data was given an emotions chip earlier in the film). The ultimate fate of Spot was not revealed in any canonical "Star Trek" texts, but in tie-in novels, Worf (Michael Dorn) took over care of Spot after Data died (for the first time) in "Star Trek: Nemesis." In that novel, it was said that Spot was already 17 years old — old for a cat — but veterinary medicine in the 24th century would ensure Spot would live another decade.