Born
this date in 1949 was Brent Spiner, the actor best known as android
Lieutenant Commander Data in Star Trek: the Next Generation. 10
things you might not know about his character.
Data
is a self-aware, sapient, sentient and anatomically fully functional
male android, the fifth of six known androids designed by Dr.
Noonien Soong. Who built his androids to look like him, so he and
Lore, Data’s older brother, could all be portrayed by Brent
Spiner.
Androids
may not age, but actors do, so it was written into Data’s back
story that Soong created him to age at the same rate as a human.
He
was the sole survivor on a planet called Omicron Theta after an
attack from the Crystalline Entity, a creature which converts life
forms to energy for sustenance. He was deactivated before the attack
in the year 2336 and was discovered there by Starfleet in 2338, and
re-activated. Data attended Starfleet Academy from 2341 to 2345,
studying mechanics and exobiology. He served aboard the USS Trieste
before being assigned to the Enterprise under Captain Jean-Luc
Picard in 2364.
What
is he made of? A fan website called Memory Alpha lists his
components thus: “24.6 kilograms of tripolymer composites, 11.8
kilograms of molybdenum-cobalt alloys and 1.3 kilograms of bioplast
sheeting.” His skull is made from cortenide and duranium. His
ultimate storage capacity is eight hundred quadrillion bits (100
petabytes) and a total computational speed of sixty trillion
operations per second. He is ambidextrous and could, if he wanted
to, paint a picture with his left and right hand at the same time.
In the show, however, he appears to favour his left hand, as Spiner
is Left-handed. Data blinks at random, like a human, thanks to a
Fourier series. His genitals are fully functional so he could
perform as a sex robot, although he’s not programmed to enjoy the
sex act as a human male would. He can fall 11.75 meters without
damaging himself.
He
doesn’t need to eat or sleep, although he sometimes does in order
to appear more human. As he has no sense of taste, Data often
wouldn’t bother eating. He can’t get drunk on alcohol, but
components in his processing systems can be similarly disrupted by
polywater. He doesn’t need to breathe, either. He could survive in
space and underwater, as shown in one episode when he attempts to
swim while out sailing on a lake with Geordi La Forge. His body was
too dense for him to Swim – he sank to the bottom and had to walk
along the bed of the lake to the shore. It took nearly two weeks to
get the water out of Data's systems, but he survived the experience.
Data
doesn’t remember much about his early life as his memories were
wiped. In one episode, he meets his “mother” Juliana Tainer, and
she fills him in on some of them, such as the fact that he didn’t
like wearing clothes in the early days and would walk around naked
since he wasn’t affected by heat or cold. The Soongs wrote him a
‘modesty subroutine’ to correct this behaviour after people in
the colony complained.
Eric
Menyuk, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Kevin Peter Hall, and Kelvin Han Yee
were all considered for the role before Brent Spiner was cast. He
used the character of Robby the Robot from the film Forbidden Planet
as a role model while researching the role.
Data
can be turned off. There is an on/off switch just below his right
shoulder blade. Very few of his crewmates know this: Captain Picard,
Dr. Beverly Crusher, and counselor Deanna Troi.
Data
has a pet Cat called Spot. In Star Trek: Picard, his memories of
Spot are the last ones that Data "surrenders" to Lore.
Spiner
has said that his favourite scene as Data was the one where he
played poker on the holodeck with a re-creation of Stephen Hawking,
in which Hawking played himself.
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