Who dosn’t love Data, and his quest for human emotions? Data is played by Brent Spiner in the classic series Star Trek The Next Generation. Data’s originally planned backstory was that he had been created by aliens. The backstory appears in the novelisation of “Encounter at Farpoint” by David Gerrold, which has Data having been built by alien machines from Kiron III, in order to preserve the memories of a wiped-out human colony.
The episode “Datalore” abandoned this backstory, and instead had the cyberneticist Dr. Noonien Soong creating Data on Omicron Theta after several attempts. In the episode, Data’s immediate predecessor, Lore, Data’s “evil twin”, is reactivated. Data discovers in the episode that he was active on Omicron Theta, but Soong deactivated him and erased most of his memories (although he retains the contents of the Omicron Theta colonists’ journals) at some point prior to the Crystalline Entity’s attack on the colony. The creature destroyed almost all the life on the planet, and Data was then found and reactivated by Starfleet officers. Another of Data’s predecessors, B-4, is discovered in the movie Star Trek: Nemesis. He is functional but dim-witted.
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