Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Soongs

6. Noonian Soong's Bad Reputation

star trek the soongs
Paramount

Dr. Noonian Soong was harshly ridiculed before he became the father of positronic brain technology.

His early work was successful in the field of cybernetics, but, when he failed to deliver on all of the advances he promised, he was so embarrassed that he disappeared to continue his work in solitude. He used a fake name to travel to the colony on Omicron Theta, where only his neighbours were aware of his experiments. Apparently, Noonian gained a sour reputation among the colonists as well, and they started calling him "Often Wrong Soong" to mock his continual failures.

Eventually, he proved them all wrong by developing his first functional androids, including B-4, Lore, and Data. Unfortunately, Lore was emotionally unstable and led the Crystalline Entity to the colony, where it killed all of the inhabitants aside from the androids and Noonian. Noonian was assumed killed in the attack as well, but really secretly escaped to a jungle on Terlina III, where he finished developing Data's emotion chip.

In this post: 
Star Trek
 
Posted On: 
Contributor

Marcia Fry is a writer for WhatCulture and an amateur filmmaker.