While Paramount Pictures is still figuring out the next move for the Star Trek film franchise, Brent Spiner sees a Star Trek: The Next Generation reboot movie as inevitable. A Star Trek: The Next Generation reboot isn’t one of the three projects reportedly under consideration. Those projects are the original time-travel plot for Star Trek 4, Quentin Tarantino’s ideas based on a class Star Trek episode, and Noah Hawley’s pandemic-themed pitch. But Spiner says he’s a fan of the most recent movies, which feature a younger version of the Star Trek: The Original Series cast in a “rebooted” timeline. While he has no inside knowledge about the film franchise’s future, he thinks The Next Generation will eventually get the same treatment.
“I’ve loved the recent movies,” Spinner told SyFy Wire after announcing his upcoming fictionalized memoir. “I think that sooner or later, they’re going to do a reboot, a motion picture version of Next Generation, and cast some young guys in our parts.”
As for whether he holds any ill-will towards anyone who replaces him as Data, Spiner joked, “Well, of course, I do. But no, I look forward to seeing it. I think it would be cool if they spun our show off.”
Spiner retired from playing the android Data after reprising the character one last time in the first season of Star Trek: Picard (which is now filming its second season). His final season as Data was opposite Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, with Data prepared to experience humanity’s last essential moment: death.
“It was an unbelievably beautifully written scene — [showrunner] Michael Chabon at his finest,” Spinner told TV Guide. “Both Patrick and I were both like, ‘This is fantastic,’ and we were both really moved by it. It was just wonderfully written, and I think the intent was to soften the blow of Nemesis and give Data a gentler exit than he had in that film… When he blew up in Nemesis, I never expected to get the backlash [the show got] from so many fans over that. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a great, big emotional ending, and he’s sacrificing himself for his friends’ and that was just. But it didn’t seem to sit that well with too many people.
“I mean, there was just a finite amount of time that I can actually play Data, no matter what anyone says… I think we did it in such brief sequences that it was fine to do it, and I felt good about it. But I wouldn’t really entertain the idea of doing it again because I just don’t think it would be realistic. So it seemed right to me to give him this more gentle sendoff, and it seemed right to me in the context of the entire season of Picard and what Picard himself had been experiencing because of the loss of Data. I think it allows him to feel okay about it too. So it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Star Trek: Picard is streaming now on CBS All Access (soon to become Paramount+).