How many heads can one android have? In the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation two-parter “Time’s Arrow,” Data’s android head is found deep in the Earth because, thanks to time travel, Data lost his head in the past, which at the beginning of the episode is his own future. This leads to some bootstrap paradox action, but it also raises a larger question: is Data’s head the same robot head in all timelines? What would happen if Data’s head from an alternate timeline were to enter “our” timeline? Is Data more than the sum of his parts, and is his soul contained in more than one head?
In the latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 — “Fully Dilated” — Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) returns as a fully functional, albeit purple, head. How does this Data head fit into Trek canon? We caught up with Lower Decks supervising director Barry Kelly to sort it all out.
Throughout Lower Decks Season 5, there have been hints of a larger multiversal story quietly unfolding in the background. In the season premiere, the USS Cerritos encountered an alternate version of itself from a slightly different dimension, while there have been a few references to the crew needing to close various “fissures” throughout the season. The new episode begins with Captain Freeman’s log explaining that a purple version of the Enterprise-D accidentally slipped into our universe, then left again. This version of the Enterprise-D is very similar to the one we’re used to from The Next Generation, but, well, purple.
“Our season is that we get to make fun of multiverse stuff while doing our own multiverse stuff simultaneously,” Kelly tells Inverse. As a supervising producer, he’s had a hand in various aspects of Lower Decks since 2020. And as a director of five episodes, Kelly describes himself as thinking about a “rolodex” of images from other Trek shows so Lower Decks can put a unique spin on their concepts.
As iconic characters go, the return of Data is a big one, even if it’s technically a more purple Data. There have been legacy characters on the series before, but as Mariner (Tawny Newsome) says to Data’s head, “You’re very famous.” Because Lower Decks takes place in the 2380s, famous Data is also deceased at this point. Lower Decks happens after the film Nemesis (2379) but well before Data’s recent resurrection in Picard Season 3 (2401). Assuming there’s no time travel involved, it’s possible, that in the purple universe, the Enterprise-D wasn’t destroyed in Generations, and Data didn’t perish in Nemesis.
From Kelly’s point of view, it’s not a question of worrying about a fictional multiverse too much, but instead accepting that multiverses are the only way to make sense of most big franchise canons.
“It’s the only way you can have all these iconic versions of iconic characters going at the same time,” Kelly says. “If you’re trying to have an adult brain and trying to harness canon, your brain's going to break. So, to me, the multiverse is the one caveat. You’re like, okay, multiverse, this is how storytelling needs to work to get the best stories, sometimes.”
Still, certain things happened in the purple universe in the exact same way as the Prime timeline, including Data losing his head in “Time’s Arrow.” In fact, Kelly points out that a joke from “Fully Dilated” was created on the fly by Spiner and showrunner Mike McMahan.
“The writers tried their best to nail down Data, which I think they did. He’s a real reactive charter,” Kelly says. “But that one line when he said, ‘I waited until Captain Picard, myself, and some guy in a silver jumpsuit dug me out’; they came up with that in the recording booth. That was never in the script. They were just trying to find something funny for him to say that was way more specific than ‘when I woke up in a cave.’”
As Lower Decks winds down, Kelly promises that the multiverse shenanigans will get bigger, and that fans might not be ready for what that entails. “The last two episodes go hand-in-hand,” he teases. “Episode 9 is pretty nuts. Whatever multiverse Star Trek idea that you've always wanted to make, I hope you get to see our fun version of it.”
Clearly, Data’s head is just the colorful beginning.
