The Star Trek Comic That Resurrected Data Years Before Picard

At the end of Stuart Baird's 2002 flop "Star Trek: Nemesis," the brave android Data (Brent Spiner) sacrifices his life to blow up the Scimitar, a weaponized Romulan ship that was on the brink of destroying the U.S.S. Enterprise. Data always aspired to be more human, and his sacrifice was the ultimate expression of his humanity. It also fulfilled Spiner's desire for Data to be killed off, something he had been asking for since "Star Trek: Insurrection."

Spiner, however, got to have his cake and eat it too. The actor also played B-4, an android prototype built before Data. B-4 was discovered early in "Nemesis," and Data reassembled his long-lost android brother, finding that his brain was a rudimentary version of his own. B-4 was childlike and nonperceptive but showed potential. The film ended with Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) talking to B-4, trying to explain to the android that his brother was dead. B-4 didn't seem to understand but showed some evidence that Data had uploaded his memories into B-4's brain before his death. Data was dead, but Spiner left the "Star Trek" door open, so to speak, should the franchise's writers want to hire him to play B-4. 

Spiner did return to "Star Trek" multiple times after "Nemesis," of course. He turned up on "Star Trek: Enterprise," playing an ancestor of Data's creator, and Data's consciousness was retained on a hard drive in the first season of "Star Trek: Picard." Most recently, Spiner played a human-like android that was an amalgam of Data, B-4, their evil brother Lore, and several others, on the third and final season of "Picard." It was a clever way to resurrect the Data character without literally resurrecting the character. 

Of course, before Data could go through all the "Picard" drama, some enterprising expanded-universe authors resurrected him in non-canonical novels and comics. Most notably, the 2009 comic "Star Trek: Countdown" saw Data fully reintegrated into B-4's body.

"Star Trek: Countdown" was a tie-in comic title specifically written to lead into J.J. Abrams' 2009 "Star Trek" reboot film. While Abrams' film took place during Captain Kirk's early years as a Starfleet officer, the comic aimed to span the whole of the extant "Star Trek" timeline. In the second issue of "Countdown," it was explained that Geordi La Forge was able to salvage Data's emotions chip from the explosion that killed him. When Geordi installed the chip in B-4's body, it activated all the latent memories that Data had uploaded into him. Data was essentially resurrected in his entirety. "Countdown" takes place about eight years after "Nemesis," so Data only missed out on a few years of life before returning.  

Of course, the "Countdown" comic is only one non-canonical future for Data and B-4. Other novels also dealt with the androids in interesting ways. In J.M. Dillard's 2007 novel "Resistance," it was said Data's memories may have been in B-4's body, but that his personality never emerged. In that book, B-4, barely conscious, was sent to the Daystrom Institute for study and close care. 

David Mack's 2012 novel "Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory," however, went a step further. That book explained that Data's creator, Dr. Soong, managed to upload his own consciousness into a youthful android body at some point (the very elderly Soong died in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation"). The android Soong located B-4's body (it was being kept in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-style cold storage), and scooped out Data's memories, transferring them into his own android brain. The resulting character was called Data Soong, and he went off to live his own life, away from Starfleet, elsewhere in the cosmos. 

Of course, when the third season of "Picard" aired in 2023, the canonical fate of Data was decided. He was now a human-like amalgam of several android beings. 

The novels and comics are fun speculative exercises, though.