[Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Episode 6, "Bounty."]This week's episode of Star Trek: Picard brought with the return of more than one dear old friend, along with several more twists and turns in the mystery of what is plaguing the Picard-Crusher family and the Federation at large. In addition to Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) reluctantly joining the Titan on their dangerous and unauthorized mission, and the surprise reveal that Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) has been taken hostage by Vadic, Episode 6, "Bounty," saw the return of a new iteration of Brent Spiner. Spiner is the only Next Generation legacy actor aside from Patrick Stewart who has appeared in every season of Picard. Spiner is best known for having played Data for the full run of The Next Generation, but he's no stranger to playing various characters connected to Data throughout the series including his inventor and alternate versions of the android.
Recently, Collider's own Maggie Lovitt sat down with Picard Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas to break down this episode's many revelations. During their conversation, they spoke about how the Matalas and the other writers went about approaching how to bring back Spiner given that Data had died a pretty definitive and meaningful death at the end of Picard Season 1.
"One of the first questions I had to ask myself was, 'How the hell are you going to do a Star Trek: Next Generation reunion without Data being a part of it?'" Matalas explained, "this character has died twice, and you can't just bring him magically back to life. Something else has to happen." Luckily, given the plethora of characters played by Spiner during the run of TNG, the minds behind this season were able to explore some creative alternatives. "There are some stories that haven't really been told with Data, which is he was backed up onto B-4. Lore is still a dangling chad," said Matalas.
Who Is Brent Spiner Playing in Picard Season 3?
In order to respect the meaningful death that Data was given in the first season Matalas and the other writers had to get creative if they wanted the full TNG ensemble together for the final season of Picard. Taking inspiration both from Spiner's past characters and a major plot point from Picard Season 1, Matalas explained the idea behind this new iteration of Data: "What if there was a final android that was almost perfectly human in the way that Soji or Picard was, that could look like Brent Spiner today?" Spiner also got in on the storytelling, collaborating with Matalas to bring the Data to life one last time. While Matalas couldn't reveal what's next for this Data/B-4/Lore hybrid, he's excited for fans to see how this story plays out. In his words:
"What if it was Jekyll and Hyde? What if both Lore and Data [were] in there with all these other things? Wouldn't that give Brent Spiner something really interesting to play? And couldn't that promise a really interesting final Data/Lore story? I took that to Brent thinking he was going to reject the whole thing, and he was like, "Oh, that's actually really cool." Brent was unbelievably collaborative with it, and Brent had ideas that only elevated it in ways I couldn't have imagined. In fact, some of the best moments of this story were Brent's idea."
New episodes of Star Trek: Picard Season 3 hit Paramount+ every Thursday. Check out Lovitt's full conversation with Matalas when it goes live, and in the meantime, you can watch our recent interview with Burton and Jonathan Frakes down below.