Numerous Trekkies were heavily disappointed when Brent Spiner’s Data faced his end in Star Trek: Nemesis. Fans were united on the point that a character like him deserved a more respectable death. Interestingly, the makers had a more bizarre plan to show the character’s end even before Nemesis in the ninth film Star Trek: Insurrection.
After the massive popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation series, the makers decided to give four theatrical flicks to Patrick Stewart and his co-stars. Among the four films, Star Trek: Insurrection is often counted as the worst one on the list. However, the writers of the film later revealed that their initial plans for the film were much different and darker than what we saw in the final cut.
Why was Star Trek: Insurrection‘s story changed?
When Patrick Stewart and the rest of the TNG stars started the film series with Star Trek: Generations, it was conceived as an underwhelming project. It was Star Trek: First Contact that received widespread praise. But the series crashed harder when Stewart returned with Star Trek: Insurrection.
The studio wanted Star Trek: Insurrection to be a light-hearted and fun-filled affair. Later, Star Trek‘s oral history, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years written by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross revealed that the writers of the 1998 film had a very different plan in their minds. The screenwriter of the film Michael Piller stated in the book (via Screen Rant) that Picard and Data were meant to be “brutal and bitter enemies“ in the early draft.
In the first draft, Picard and Data are brutal, bitter enemies. In the film there’s a wonderful moment where they battle in a dogfight while Picard sings Gilbert and Sullivan. That used to take seventy pages, and in that battle Picard was ultimately forced to kill Data.
Piller asserted that such a dark story was immediately rejected by Patrick Stewart. The X-Men star directed the writers to the Fountain of Youth storyline that we witnessed in the final cut. The co-writer of the film Rick Berman added that even Paramount was unwilling to go on that path. To Michael Piller’s disappointment, nobody wanted a Star Trek film with such bold themes.
It was really not Patrick who put the kibosh on the story, it was the studio. And I think to a great degree they were right. They thought a Star Trek movie should be up and fun and exciting. And those were not words that really fit into Mike Piller’s vocabulary. Exciting maybe, but not fun. But that was like the biggest note that we really ever got.
It cannot be denied that ultimately what we got was not welcomed by most of the fans. While it is difficult to predict how the hardcore Trekkies would have reacted to such an end for Brent Spiner‘s character, several aspects of the film were immensely criticized. Shoddy CGI, boring screenplay, and a forgettable villain, everything attributed to the poorness of Star Trek: Insurrection.
The weird journey of Data in the Star Trek universe
Although Data was saved in Insurrection, the makers were finally greenlit by Paramount to bid farewell to the character in Star Trek: Nemesis. The Brent Spiner character was essentially placed as a replacement for Spock from The Original Series. Sadly, when the makers wanted to replicate a Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan situation in Nemesis, Data’s death was not as well received as Spock’s.
To everyone’s surprise, Star Trek brought Data back in the Picard series. Season 1 of the Patrick Stewart show largely focused on Picard’s guilt over the android’s death. By the end of the first season, Picard got a chance to properly bid a last goodbye to him after his remaining consciousness also faded away.
However, Picard season 3 confused the audience more by bringing back Brent Spiner again in the sixth episode titled The Bounty. This Data was unveiled to be a newer version of the android with the combined personalities of Lore, B-4, Data’s daughter Lal, and Dr. Altan Inigo Soong alongside a new synthetic more-human body.
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