In “Star Trek: Picard,” Spot appeared in one of the show’s many “inside a character’s mind” sequences. In the series, Data had been rebuilt as a 74-year-old man, and had been implanted with the memories of Data, B-4, Dr. Soong, Lal, and his own evil twin Lore. Lore, being a sadist, found that he could erase Data’s memories from within and take over psychic real estate, as it were. This was dramatized by Data standing opposite himself in a blank white space, debating with Lore. Data, attempting to appeal to Lore’s emotions, kept handing Lore objects that represented his own dearest memories. Lore, without hesitating, erased them all.
The final appeal to Lore was Spot, a cut lil’ kitty cat. Surely Lore wouldn’t also delete Spot. He does. Don’t worry, though, both Data and Spot survive the deletion process. Spiner loved working with the new Spot because it actually listened. In the ’90s, the writers and producers of “Next Generation” demanded far too much of a cat, and Spiner loathed the difficulties. This time around, Spiner said, “it was super easy” He continued:
“[I]t went really well because this cat loved me. I’ll tell you what, [‘Next Generation’ writers] Ron Moore and Brannon Braga used to write the scenes with Spot and they always wrote things just to irritate me. They would write things for this cat to do that it couldn’t possibly do. So we would be there all day long working because the cat was not a very good actor. And this cat was a brilliant actor. I would say this cat is considered the Daniel Day-Lewis of cats. It wasn’t really required to do anything other than snuggle with me, which it did brilliantly. So I was fine doing that scene.”
That’s so cute.