10 Star Trek Scenes Even More Impressive When You Know The Truth
9. B-4's Parts
Star Trek: Picard has divided quite a few people. Season one started a bit too sweary (language, Clancy!), and ended with someone nodding off whilst pressing CONTROL + V. Season two fared little better in spite of a solid opener. Still, some of the stronger scenes that had fans thankful for the pause button included all the throwbacks to The Next Generation. Who wasn’t brimming with glee when Picard visited his vault at the Starfleet Archives?
For good nostalgia like this, you need a good prop master. On Picard this fell to Jeff Lombardi. For one (rather brief) scene in the first episode of season one, he seemingly went to extraordinary lengths for his craft. In it, Picard is at The Daystrom Institute to find out more about Dahj. At one point, Doctor Agnes Jurati opens a drawer that contains the dismembered Soong-type android, and Data lookalike, B-4. To achieve this, Lombardi decided he wanted to use as many of the "old Data parts" as possible.
The problem with this was that a lot of the old Trek props had been auctioned off and "scattered across the world". Rather than build a new model, Lombardi and a CBS archivist managed to contact people who had bought these "Data parts" in the auction; Data’s head had been sitting in a crate in Calgary, and his torso in a crate in Hong Kong. These were then recovered and used with little-to-no alterations/touch-ups as B-4 in the scene.