I don't know if this belongs in here or in literature. Feel free to move it if it's better suited in there. Has 0718 appeared in any of the book or comic spin-offs at all? I'd love to know more about his character. I find him fascinating as we know so little about him. I was a little disappointed to see he wasn't in Beyond but does anyone know why?
Yes. The origin of his body, and his mind (differentiation needed) is explored in the IDW Star Trek Ongoing comic "I, Enterprise". He may have been in the STID novelisation In STO, 0718 is science officer of the USS Yorktown NCC-1717, helping destroy a local Delphic Expanse, in 2260. He is available as bridge officer, implying 0718 himself or a copy joins the Alliance and lives out his life in the 25th century, prime timeline.
I'll have to hunt those comics down. I'm hoping that Eaglemoss get around to it with the Graphic Novel collection as I think they're about to do the first few issues of Star Trek Ongoing in the next book. I have the STID novelisation so I'll give that a read. And I do play Star Trek Online, but not seen him yet. I'm still quite early on in the game though.
Ah, good. In STO, he's in one mission, probably along the middle of the story. The comics are also available as Amazon eBooks.
He was in Bob Orci's unmade Star Trek 3 script, and pre-production went as far as him getting fitted up for a uniform - but for some reason he was left out of Pegg/Jung's Star Trek Beyond. I thought Science Officer 0718 was very cool, but I wasn't a fan of his IDW comic backstory or the 0718 name. I much preferred "GATT2000", which is what his character was called in the Into Darkness script. I like the idea of him being a cybernetically augmented humanoid as opposed to an android.
I always took him as being a cybernetically enhanced human. I still can't see him being an android. After all, and yes I know it's now a different timeline, but he seems much more advanced than Data who doesn't arrive for approximately another hundred years.
It's not necessary for Data to be particularly advanced, though. The thing making him special is that he's positronic. Essentially, Soong wanted to do a demonstration on his futuristic positronic brains, and chose an android as the medium - even though apparently androids are of zero worth and interest as such in the 24th century, because none are seen and none but Soong's are equipped with sapience. In the 23rd, for all we know, androids are common everywhere except aboard Prime Kirk's ship. Pine Kirk has some as medical helpers in ST:ID (perhaps required for extracting Kirk's corpse from the warp core); Earth has some acting as policemen. The same could be true of the Prime 2260s where TOS "Return to Tomorrow" has Dr Mulhall express indignation at the idea that the aliens would build their own androids instead of letting Starfleet do it for them. These androids would not be particularly sapient. But 0718 in his onscreen minutes so far has not demonstrated all that much sapience, either. Doesn't mean sapience couldn't be an optional extra for 2260s androids, even if all the real commercial and military demand is for nonsapient androids. All that said, I, too, prefer to think of 0718 as Lobot - the Abrams counterpart to Geordi LaForge, a "disabled" person who in fact is much more "abled" than his colleagues. Timo Saloniemi