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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