One Star Trek: Picard Episode Gave Brent Spiner A Career-First Challenge
By the third season of "Star Trek: Picard," Data (Brent Spiner) had already died twice. At the end of 2002's "Star Trek: Nemesis," Data sacrificed his life to blow up a massive Romulan warship and save the USS Enterprise-E from danger. In the first season of "Picard," however, a motivated cyberneticist gathered up particles of Data's exploded body from deep space and used them to somehow reconstitute Data's brain with its memories intact. Data's consciousness was kept alive in a database on a faraway android homeworld until Picard (Patrick Stewart) found it. Data revealed that he was quite finished being alive and asked that Picard unplug his consciousness. Picard agreed and Data died a second time.
In the third season of "Picard," however, it was revealed that the cyberneticist, Dr. Altan Soong (also Spiner), had saved a copy of Data's consciousness and shunted it into a brand new android body. This new body looked like a 74-year-old Brent Spiner, and also contained the recreated consciousness of Data's evil twin Lore, as well as several other android characters. When this new composite version of Data was activated, it couldn't initially determine which of its personalities would be dominant. It ultimately came down to which consciousness was more assertive, Data's or Lore's?
To visualize this inner struggle, Data and Lore were depicted standing opposite each other in a vast empty white space — a space inside Data's mind. Like Spiner had done in past episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," he played both Data and Lore, the android brothers bickering about which of them was "better."
In a recent conversation with TrekMovie, Spiner talked about the logistics of acting opposite himself, and how "Star Trek: Picard" forced him to play such scenes in a new way. Namely, the director never yelled cut.
Acting opposite one's self in real time
Fans may recall that the character of Lore was first introduced in the 1998 "Next Generation" episode "Datalore." Spiner became adept at playing opposite himself. Using compositing VFX technology — or sometimes just clever editing — Spiner could play multiple characters in the same room. In the 1990 episode "Brothers," he pulled triple duty, playing Data, Lore, and the elderly Dr. Noonien Soong. While making these multi-Spiner episodes, however, the directors were always careful to keep Spiner in distinct costumes, allowing audiences to known which Spiner they were looking at in a given moment. He would film the scenes as one character, acting opposite stand-ins, then change outfits, and do the scene again.
For "Picard," however, Data and Lore were both abstractions of the same Data, meaning that for the first time, they wore the same costume. Also, their scenes were merely face-to-face conversations in a white void, so there was no set to move around. As long as this was true, Spiner was allowed to play both parts without any edits. The actor described it like this:
"[T]here was somebody in costume and makeup for me to look at [on 'Picard']. But there were times in that scene — and this I have never done before — where I would leave the frame as one character and literally come in the other side of the frame as the other character. And there were no cuts. The camera was moving and I was moving and I would just be the other person. It was a challenge! It took an entire day to do that scene and it was a challenge."
Only voice actors typically have to play multiple characters simultaneously. Live-action actors rarely get the privilege.
Spiner's big challenge
Since the characters were dressed the same and had the same makeup, mid-scene character flips needed to be particularly clear; Spiner could no longer rely on costumes to denote which character he was. It was up to him, as an actor, to communicate instantly if we was Data or Lore in any given shot. He continued:
"It really was [a challenge]! Because there was nothing other than the occasional prop to identify which was which other than the playing of the same. To me, I had intentions for one character that were not the same intentions for the other character, so it was easy for me to separate the two. It was a question in our minds whether it would be that easy for the audience. I thought it would, but I haven't seen it, so you tell me."
As of this writing, Spiner may have watched the episode of "Picard" in question. (For those who are curious, it's called "Surrender.") Or perhaps not; many actors love to act, but hate to watch recordings of themselves. Spiner may be one of those actors.
Also as of this writing, there have been no announced plans for Data/Lore to return to "Star Trek." Patrick Stewart has expressed interest in playing Picard for a final movie, but one is not currently in production. The final season of "Picard" closed the book on those characters and Data's future will remain unwitnessed by Trekkies. This is fine. "Picard" was a good enough stroll down memory lane. It's okay to bid Data farewell.