Brent Spiner is an incredible actor. Data is easily my favorite (regular) character in TNG--Q being my favorite character period. While most acting is reliant on the actor communicating a thought, emotion, or feeling to the audience and making it believable, Spiner does a fantastic job portraying the *lack* of emotion whilst making it utterly believable and engrossing.
The few episodes where Spiner plays multiple characters e.g., any of the Data-Lore episodes, showcase his versatility as an actor. However, the episode that really does justice to how talented an actor Spiner is, is "Masks" (one of my favorites by the way). For those who don't remember, the Enterprise crew discovers an asteroid, decides to phaser it in the name of science, and accidentally uncovers an alien data storage unit which proceeds to embed an entire civilizations worth of personalities in Data's neural net, while using the Enterprise systems to wreck havoc and provide us with lulz.
While I don't remember how many alien personalities Spiner portrays, it gives him the freedom to communicate a wide range of emotions and really shows you just how good of an actor he really is.
Zieveraar wrote:
Yes and no, Stewart's performance (especially in the earlier episodes)reminded me quite a lot of a theater performance, but then so did all of those early episodes.
This is because he *is* a theater performer. In fact, the majority of the cast is too. Gene Roddenberry cast stage actors in the original series (in fact, they even wore "theater" makeup during the shoot) and he kept this theme for TNG as well. The characters certainly became less....stiff(?) as the series wore on, and I suspect this was due in part to the natural progression of the characters within the series as well as the actors themselves getting a handle on their own respective characters, and due to the death of Gene Roddenberry after the first couple of seasons. Not to mention (if I remember correctly) that TNG didn't exactly get great ratings the first few seasons, and I suspect they tweaked the personalities of the characters (and how the actors portrayed them) in order to gain a wider appeal.
Picard is great, there's no doubt about that, but Data has to be the most appealing; in the sense of entertainment as well as the eternal metaphysical question: what exactly does it mean to be *human*.
Edited, Sep 9th 2008 8:22pm by Ponnx Edited, Sep 10th 2008 12:23am by Ponnx