Alternate Casting: David Gautreaux as Data

[Navigator_NCC2120]

I think I read years ago in Starlog magazine that Gene Roddenberry said he wanted Data to look like Pinocchio, which Spiner resembles, Gautreaux does not.

In this case, they could have taken Paul Reuben.

Armored Saint,



Thanks, I enjoyed that photo of Paul Reuben. It made me laugh out loud. I have never seen it before.


Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
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[alpha_leonis]

Yes, Xon is a precursor to Data.

Xon realizes that the reason that Spock performed so well in his tasks on board the Enterprise was that he was half Human and therefore could understand emotional Human nature. In order to perform as well as Spock, he knows he is going to have to eliminate his Vulcan revulsion at emotional displays. He is, in fact, going to have to reach down within himself and find the emotions that his society has repressed for thousands of years so that he will have some basis for fully understanding his Human associates.

What this means is: whereas Spock was engaged in a constant battle with himself to repress his emotions in order to be more Vulcan-like, Xon will be engaged in a constant struggle within himself to release his buried emotions to be more Human-like for the sake of doing a good job, his primary considerations. This will be at least as difficult for him as it was for Spock to maintain his stoic pose. Also, we'll get humor out of Xon trying to simulate laughter, anger, fear, and other Human feelings.

I've always seen Data as the love child of Xon and Quester.

Thanks for the link (and quote). I had remembered that Data was based on Xon, but didn't have a reference handy at the top of the thread.

A new sensibility for TNG, that they didn't have when they were producing Phase II, was that they wanted deliberately to move as far away as possible from the TOS framework -- since TOS by this time had developed into its own, still-in-production movie series. The producers obviously didn't want the two parts of the Star Trek franchise to compete with each other any more than they had to.

In addition to the complete recast and setting the new show almost a full century later, they also decided specifically *not* to feature a Vulcan character. That character would have been hobbled from the outset by direct comparisons to Spock. So while they did choose to "recycle" Xon, they chose to make him an android instead of a Vulcan because that was arguably the smallest possible "leap" away from their original concept, that still fit within the new framework behind the show.