caveats:
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Re-watched Star Trek: Nemesis recently. W.T.F. were they thinking killing off Data?
Like Jesus, the series couldn’t have gone out with a happy ending? It was bad enough they trashed the Enterprise D at the end of Generations, but this was just lame-o.
(yes, I know “B4” is supposed to be Data in some ways, but it’s not enough)
IIRC, Brent Spiner was starting to look old and pudgy.
I think they were going for a similar Spock effect, where Spock “dies” (kinda, but not really) and it’s seen as a moment of poignancy and hope at the same time.
The difference, of course, is that ST2:TWoK didn’t totally blow.
yeah but they didn’t need to kill him - that’s not the way 24th century humanity deals with overweight aged people.
Beat to it! * stomps feet *
To expand on what The Other Waldo Pepper said, Brent Spiner felt he could no longer credibly portray an android that does not physically age. He felt Data was best presented with a youthful appearance.
No one cares if Frakes or Stewart or the rest start becoming overweight aged people, because Riker and Picard are people who age and maybe become overweight. Data, on the other hand, is a toaster.
See, especially, the final Enterprise episode, “These Are the Voyages.”
Spiner said he thought he was getting to old to play Data. He said he should not age (although they did allow for aging in some scriptwank). They did try to do a TWOK, but made it too obvious. It’s hard enough to do it when it hasn’t been done before.
I still don’t get why b4 wasn’t played by a different actor. Argue that, after Lore’s disaster, Soong experimented with an android that did not look like him, but abandoned it for Data when he thought he’d figured out the problem.
But they might’ve made B4 pick another apperance in a sequel, so it’s not that bad. But it still feels hokey.
how is “spiner’s fattiness” relevant to the plot of the movie, though? he was Data through the entire movie, except for the last 5 minutes
I mean I don’t think not killing Data makes the prospect of a 5th trek movie any more probable, but maybe?
Not “fattiness,” maybe, but Spiner is 61 now, 53 when Nemesis premiered. You could hardly expect him to look as he did in 1987, when he was 38. As mentioned, Data does not age, being a machine. Humans grow old, develop wrinkles, a flabby chin, and other visible signs of aging. You can’t expect a human being to have a consistent unchanged, appearance over the course of 23 years or more. William Shatner could get away with playing a 60 year old Jim Kirk. Spiner can’t play an android whose appearance is that of a human in his mid 30’s. It’s the same reason Shatner wasn’t asked to appear in the latest Star Trek film. He aged 14 years past Kirk’s last appearance when he was killed in Generations, so it wouldn’t have been believable to have him appear in a flashback. It would have looked like the DirecTv commercial with Shatner redoing The Undiscovered Country. Spiner would look the same if he continued playing Data.
Well, it turned out to be a moot point because that was the last NG film, and even before the release of Nemesis it was still likely destined to be the last one.
ok, yet again, this is irrelevant to the plot of the frickin movie.
whether it’s because of body fat or age, Data was a character in 95% of the movie. killing him off at the end, just so he wouldn’t have to return for another movie because it would make Data “human because the actor is human” is manifestly unsatisfying a reason for why they couldn’t have let Data live and then explain his absence in a subsequent film (the possibility of which, as is noted above, was rather unlikely)
Plus, that excuse falls really flat with the introduction of B4, who looks just like Data, is played by Spiner, also does not age, and is not killed off at the end of the film.
I’m not with you here. The series was ending. What did Data want? Humanity. What better way for him to show humanity than for him to sacrifice his life to save his captain and the rest of the crew?
I don’t think B4 matters in the way that Cesario suggests that he does. I view B4 as a way of contrasting what Data would have been like at his very beginning to the distance that he had come by the end of his journey. In Nemesis, we see the morally and intellectually complete Data sacrifice his life. B4 allows us to see just how far Data had traveled all those years. B4 helps elucidate Data as a character; he isn’t meant to be a replacement for Data or a follow-up to him.
Frankly, I thought the title of this thread said it all. I was rather surprised when the rest of the post contained another question. 
I actually liked the movie; I would have given it three and a half stars out of four. It definitely has some really cheesy parts, but compared to, say the recent Star Trek movie, it was pretty good. Star Trek (the recent film) is just Star Trek: Nemesis with worse acting and an even more improbable plot. I think people like the more recent movie more just because of the sexy young actors.
I liked it because it had great joy. I enjoyed Nemesis for the way things go swoosh and boom, but it wasn’t a very good movie. I guess the wedding reception scene was nice.
It may be unsatisfying, but that is the reason Spiner gave for killing Data, and he is credited as one of the screenwriters of the film.
(Preface - I know the Star Trek novels are “non-canon.” However, since Nemesis, the novels have a shared continuity. Events in a novel by one author can be referenced and affect events in a novel by a different author, so the novels have an interlocking “canon” of their own. I know this neither shares nor replaces the “canon” of the TV series and films, however.)
To show how little of an emphasis is placed on B4 post-Nemesis, Data’s memories and personality don’t even get a chance to resurface within B4. In the novels, Starfleet orders that B4 be disassembled and sent to the Daystrom Institute for study. Much as they attempted to do with Data in “The Measure of A Man.”
I realize this doesn’t preclude the possibility of B4 making a future appearance, should Spiner ever agree to play him.
Need more spoiler space to avoid mouseover spoilage, and/or an open spoilers tag in the title, if spoiler courtesies apply to movies this old. (I don’t know if they do or not)
Unfortunately Nemesis was just a bad movie all around. The plot wasn’t very good, the main villain wasn’t particularly memorable, and, for reasons I cannot fathom, they introduced the Remans who are an important race in the Romulan empire that we never heard anything about in over 30 years of Trek.
Personally I think B-4 exists so everyone can have their cake and eat it to. They get to kill off Data but -wink, wink- he’s really still with us. Yeah, I know some people juxtapose B-4 and the Picard clone demonstrating that we all make our own destiny but quite frankly I can’t give the writers enough credit to come up with that.