BRENT SPINER talks to Richard Matthews about 40 years of STAR TREK, his time as Data and what he would do with the next movie…

Did you watch the Original Series?

I didn’t watch it in its first run. I watched it when I was in college; it was on every day.

What do you think about the plans for the new JJ Abrams Trek film?

It’s great that they’re going to do another film and I think JJ Abrams is a great choice to do it. But I don’t think it’s a great idea to do a prequel to anything. When has that ever been interesting? If Enterprise really said anything it was, “Don’t go back, go forward.” That’s part of the whole beauty of Star Trek, it’s always been about “Go Boldly Where No One Has Gone Before”, not “Go Back to Where They Once Were That We Never Saw.” I think that before that film gets made they’ll have a completely different idea of what it should be.

One of the ideas that John Logan and I had about what the next film would have been was a Justice League of Star Trek. Something would bring all the great Star Trek villains together, from Khan to Shinzon, and Picard is the only person who could stop them and he actually has to go through time and pluck out the people he needs to help him. He goes back to the moment before Data blows up and takes him back to get Kirk and Spock, and goes even further back and gets Scott Bakula’s character Archer. The problem with that more than anything is cost – how do you pay for that?

Do you feel Nemesis was a fitting farewell for The Next Generation cast?

The idea was that it was going to be our last film, so we thought of it as that while we were doing it. It was a movie about family. From Shinzon and Picard being almost like father and son, to the wedding, and Data and his brother. Data embodied the family of man: evil Lore, perfect Data, the father who made them both, and then finally the idiot. Data wanted desperately to be human and he finally committed the most human act of all, which was to sacrifice himself.

I remember during the first season a director saying, “If this show runs for seven years you are going to hate it because you have such a limited opportunity with this character to do anything.” I already thought that was wrong because the first hour of the show, The Naked Now, was really fun and funny and allowed me to do so much. But I had no idea how unlimited it was going to become and that I was going to be able to do things like the Western and the Dixon Hill gangster stuff – it was the role of a lifetime.

One often heard complaint was that everyone was too nice…

That was Gene Roddenberry’s idea, that the crew would have no conflict amongst them. But if you have no conflict, you don’t have any drama. I have to say that Rick Berman really cared, and the fans don’t give him any credit. There were many times where I would want to do things and Rick would say no, Gene would never want to do that. But there were things that happened like Best of Both Worlds and the Borg that I think probably wouldn’t have happened if Gene were in charge.

How has it lasted so long?

Who knows why something lasts for 40 years? Why do people like Coco-Cola? Because it tastes good… Anything that takes place in the future is appealing to large groups of people because it’s comforting to imagine that there is going to be a future when you walk around on a daily level going, “Are we going to destroy this planet?”

Originally published in Dreamwatch 146, November 2006.

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