T’s Trek Trivia Tuesday: “I’ll See You Soong”

The many faces of Soong

We now know when Star Trek: Picard season two will launch, and we also know a few of the actors who will be making appearances in it. John DeLancie’s Q will make a return, as will Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan. Jonathan Frakes will be vacating the director’s chair for another shot at Riker, and Brent Spiner will be back as…who?

Back in October, Spiner spoke in an interview about his PIC season two return, commenting that he wouldn’t be playing a character he’d ever played before, instead creating a new member of the Soong family. For those keeping score, Spiner has played nearly every member of the Soong family, with a few exceptions: Dr. Julianna Tainer, Data’s mother; Dr. Ira Graves, who, as the father of Noonien Soong’s work, considered himself Data’s grandfather; and Lal, Data’s daughter.

Soongs portrayed by Spiner have appeared in a few series, so I thought now would be a good time to test your knowledge of the Soong family tree, in alphabetic order, starting with:

---

1. Altan Inigo Soong

Data’s human brother, Altan Soong, appeared in the first season of PIC, so if you haven’t seen it yet, first of all, what the heck are you doing with your life, go watch it now, and second, beware of spoilers.

Picard and crew found Altan on Coppelius, where he and his synth creations were hiding out. While following in his father’s cybernetic footsteps, Altan did not confine himself to making artificial humanoids.

What else did this genius son of a genius create?

Altan Soong (Brent Spiner) and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) meet in Star Trek: Picard

Even mad geniuses need something adorable to cuddle once in a while. That’s why Altan created a synthetic cat, named “Spot II” in homage to Data’s cat of three decades earlier.

But Altan didn’t stop there. Coppelius had no butterflies until he created synthetic ones with color-changing wings. Cool!

---

2. Arik Soong

Altan is as far into the future as we’ll go today, and Arik Soong is as far as we’ll go into the past. In the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise, Arik was being held in a detention center. He’d been hanging out there for ten years (and counting) as punishment for the crime of stealing frozen Augment embryos and hiding them until he could one day thaw them out and bring them to life.

He had freed a small number of the embryos by the time of his arrest, and when the now-adult Augments commandeered a Klingon ship and killed its crew, Captain Jonathan Archer came to the prisoner for help. Arik was insistent that the Augments meant no harm, but by the end of the three-episode arc, he had changed his mind.

What made Arik change his mind, and what solution did he attempt?

Arik Soong (Brent Spiner) finds a temporary way out of prison in Star Trek: Enterprise

In a misguided notion that would have made Victor Frankenstein blush, Arik Soong believed the Augments to be the future of humanity. He failed to learn from the lessons of the past, ignoring the history of Khan Noonien Singh, which proved that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

But when Arik learned that the Augment leader, Malik, had murdered his brother, and then saw him torture and murder crew members at Cold Station 12, Arik knew he had to fix the problem. He began resequencing the DNA of the unborn Augment embryos, hoping to remove their aggressive tendencies. Procedures like this are controversial today, and apparently will be no less so a hundred years from now. Saying that Malik wasn’t thrilled would be an understatement and Arik ended up leaving his Augment “children” in a search for Archer’s help to prevent them from wiping out a Klingon colony.

---

3. B-4

Sometimes it’s not easy being the oldest sibling. You have newbie parents who, even though they’ve read every child-rearing book they could find, won’t really know what raising an ankle-biter is like until they actually have a chance to do it themselves. Hence, the oldest child is the one they experiment on, figuring things out along the way, and sometimes even getting it wrong.

B-4 knows what that’s like. The oldest Soong-type android that we’ve met to date is the poster child for parental experimentation. Sure, he has a positronic brain like his younger siblings, Lore and Data, but it’s a much simpler one, and the network, in Noonien Soong’s opinion was a failure. Despite the fact that he had to shut B-4 down, Noonien found that he couldn’t dispose of his eldest son, so he kept him in storage.

It was no accident that, many years later, the Enterprise-E happened upon B-4.

Where did Picard and company find B-4 and why was he there?

LaForge (LeVar Burton) reactivates B-4 (Brent Spiner) in Star Trek: Nemesis

The Enterprise crew located B-4, in pieces, on the planet Kolarus III in Star Trek: Nemesis, where Picard’s Romulan-created clone, Shinzon, had placed him as bait. Once Geordi reassembled and reactivated him, B-4’s new programming took hold and the android prototype began gathering computer data on Starfleet’s military preparedness. It was a plan that was simultaneously complex and convoluted, and which ended poorly for Shinzon.

---

4. Data

The youngest of Noonien Soong’s android “children,” Data is, of course, the one we know best. He served on the Enterprise-D and then on its successor, the -E, until his physical death.

Data carried the memories and experiences of the entire Omicron Theta colony after the crystalline entity killed them all and, though he spent seven years saying that he possessed no emotions, he seemed to have them without realizing it. When he finally made the plunge and allowed Noonien Soong’s emotion chip to be implanted in his brain, he was finally able to display them.

In the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there was an accident that activated a new program for Data to experience.

What was the accident and what was the program?

Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) and Data (Brent Spiner) conduct an experiment on Star Trek: The Next Generation

In “Birthright, Part I,” Data suffered an accidental plasma shock during an experiment. Afterwards, he began to dream for the first time, seeing Noonien Soong as a young blacksmith forging the wings of a bird. It developed that Noonien had implanted a dream program that he hoped would activate when Data achieved a certain level of development.

Later in the season, the dreams turned to nightmares involving disturbing images of Troi in the form of a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting and Dr. Crusher drinking from Riker’s head with a straw. The whole thing turns out to be due to the influence of some interphasic organisms, with a penchant for really gross imagery.

---

5. Lore

Talk about middle child syndrome! Lore spends his whole life (after getting reactivated by Dr. Crusher and Chief Engineer Argyle) trying to live up to the expectations set by his younger brother.

He fully recalls his time with the colony on Omicron Theta and says that when it was found that he was too perfect, he was deactivated and replaced by the flawed Data. It’s all a lie, of course, and Noonien sets the record straight when he tells Data that he is not less perfect than Lore. Lore was too dangerous and unpredictable. Far from being envious of Lore, the colonists were afraid of him. That’s why Lore was deactivated.

Data and Lore are nearly identical in every way, Soong tells him, and it’s true. They look so much alike, they could be twins. Or at least played by the same actor. But when Lore is activated in the episode “Datalore,” he has something that Data doesn’t have.

What is it that helps the crew tell Lore and Data apart…until it doesn’t?

Data (Brent Spiner) finds his older brother Lore (Brent Spiner) untrustworthy in Star Trek: The Next Generation

Lore is reborn with a facial twitch. It’s an annoying little habit, and, with twenty-fourth century technology, it’s surprising that it can’t be fixed. Oh, wait. It can. And it is, when Lore knocks Data out (with a drink spiked with a pill; I’m not clear on the science of how that might work on an android) and, removing the twitch from his own face, creates one on Data. The twitch switch is enough to fool every seasoned officer aboard the starship, but fortunately Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher, who’s been in Starfleet for just over a month, can’t be taken in and Lore’s dastardly plot is foiled.

---

6. Noonien Soong

Doctor Noonien Soong is the man who, arguably, started it all. Without him, there would be no B-4, no Lore and, most traumatically, no Data. True, Arik began research into cybernetics from his cell in the 2100s, but Noonien was the one who made it practical. His stick-to-it-iveness helped him to transcend the slightly mean nickname of “Often Wrong Soong” and the doubts of those around him. If not for him, Starfleet would have been bereft of a fine and loyal officer.

It is nearly impossible to discuss the Soong family, past or present, without invoking Noonien’s name, which is evidenced by how many times it’s already come up. Like any good artist, a little piece of his soul, his personality, his very essence can be found in his creations. The same is true of the man who portrayed him and five other members of the Soong family. If you watch the different characters he plays, you can see how Brent Spiner imbues each with a different sense of self. Yet there is still a lot of Spiner to be found in each as well, tying the family together in a way having different actors portraying the roles would not achieve.

That wasn’t the way it was conceived, however. Spiner had played Lore in TNG season one, but when it came time to bring Dr. Soong onto the show in the episode “Brothers,” he was not the first casting choice.

Do you know who was?

It’s an unexpected family reunion when Noonien Soong (Brent Spiner) summons Data (Brent Spiner) to him on Star Trek: The Next Generation

When Brent Spiner learned that an episode was being written revolving around Dr. Soong, he thought it would make sense that Data and Lore had been patterned after Soong’s own visage, so he went to the producers and suggested the idea. But the role had already been cast.

Chinese-American actor Keye Luke was set to play the aging scientist. Luke had become famous playing Lee Chan, “Number One Son,” in the old Charlie Chan films and had also played Kato in some of the Green Hornet serials and in the 1970s, he played Master Po in Kung Fu. Star Trek fans probably know him best, however, from The Original Series episode “Whom Gods Destroy” as Donald Cory, the hapless director of the Elba II asylum for the criminally insane, who gets captured and tortured by the inmates.

As soon as Spiner learned of the casting, he withdrew the suggestion, but sadly, Luke’s health was too poor for him to film the role. He passed away less than two months after the episode aired.

---

It will be interesting to learn which new Soong Brent Spiner will be playing in PIC season two. Whether it is an ancestor of Noonien or a descendant, it’s sure to be an interesting character, probably with a genius-level intellect and a love of science, and possibly with a cat named Spot. It won’t be long until we have the all the answers.