Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Data
4. Captain Of The Enterprise?
Star Trek Nemesis left Data's fate somewhat unclear. His body was of course destroyed along with Shinzon's ship, but before this, he downloaded his memories into the positronic brain of his brother B-4. For years after Nemesis, fans speculated that Data could return in B-4's body. At the end of the film, B-4 even began singing Blue Skies, the same song Data sang at Will and Deanna's wedding.
This theory was then bolstered with the release of the Star Trek: Countdown comic series, which portrayed a resurrected Data becoming Captain of the Enterprise-E. Countdown gave us some backstory on Nero and the supernova that destroyed Romulus, and it was considered canon by some people at the time, serving as a way for the Next Gen characters to pass the torch to the alternate universe TOS films in 2009. Recently, however, Star Trek: Picard has contradicted some elements of the comic series.
In the first season of Picard, we learned that B-4's brain wasn't sophisticated enough to hold Data's memories and personality. Most of him was lost, but the information in B-4 was later used to preserve the essence of Data's consciousness in a kind of ‘afterlife’ simulation. At the end of the season, Data asked Picard to allow him to die naturally to complete his journey, so the simulation was terminated.
Ultimately, dying twice wasn't enough to keep Data down, as Dr Altan Soong was eventually able to extract even more information from B-4, helping him to bring Data back to life a second time inside a new golem body.
Since Data's controversial death in Nemesis, people have suspected that he would return in some way or another. While it's a shame he hasn't got to captain an Enterprise (yet), it's still great to see Data come back to finally wrap up his story in a more satisfying way.