As Star Trek celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, a lot of the attention is correctly on The Original Series. The new documentary, The Sixty-Year Mission, from Mark A. Altman and produced by William Shatner, certainly celebrates and reexamines the original 1960s series, but the reality is, the “old guard” of the Star Trek franchise is no longer the cast of TOS, but instead, the actors from Star Trek’s golden age; the era that resulted in four different Trek shows, from 1987 to 2005. From The Next Generation to Voyager, to Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise, the vast majority of hours of Star Trek come from this era. And so, the characters from those eras have defined and shaped the vibe of Trek even as much as the 1960s crew.
But what if history didn’t go the way we know it? At New York Comic-Con, speaking to Brent Spiner and Robert Picardo — Data and the Doctor in TNG and VOY — Inverse learned that both actors actually, at one point or another, nearly didn’t join the venerable sci-fi franchise.
