The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Picard season 1 aired last Thursday, featuring a surprise returning cast member – The Next Generation star Brent Spiner. Spiner has already portrayed Data for a few brief appearances across the run, but in the latest episode, he played an entirely new character, but one with deep connections to the android. When Picard and his crew arrived on Coppelius, they discovered Alton Inigo Soong – the hitherto-unknown son of Data’s creator, Noonien Soong.
ComicBook.com has put forward an intriguing theory, though, that suggests things aren’t exactly as they seem. Data’s legacy and family has been at the heart of this season’s storyline, but there’s one major character who’s been conspicuous by his absence: Lore, Data’s evil older brother. To refresh your memories, Lore was created before Data by Soong and was far less stable than his sibling. Last time we saw him on TNG, he had been deactivated and dismantled.
Now, Picard has revealed that Data and Lore’s less-sophisticated brother B-4 was ultimately dismantled, too, and stored by Dr. Bruce Maddox at the Daystrom Institute. So, what if Lore’s parts were studied by Maddox as well? As he was more valuable than B-4, he could’ve taken Lore with him when he vanished to Coppelius. And then, what if he reactivated Lore…who set about a grand scheme, involving altering his appearance to look more human?
As episode 9 revealed, it is the Synths that are the real villains of the season, not the Romulans, as they are threatening to live out the Zhat Vash’s fears and destroy all organic life in the galaxy. That’s just the sort of thing a legion of Lore’s descendants would do. The only hitch here is Alton Soong’s plan to transfer his consciousness into the Golem, an un-ageing powerful android body. As showrunner Michael Chabon said when questioned about a similar theory to this on Instagram, why would Soong need the Golem if he was already an android?
Still, this is a theory worth chewing over, and we’ll see if it’s anywhere near the mark when Star Trek: Picard concludes its debut run with “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2” this Thursday, March 26th on CBS All Access.
