Hello, fellow humans.

Brent Spiner might be a seriously underrated actor. My two fav Data episodes are 'A Fistful of Datas' where Spiner is playing as multiple holodeck characters at once, and (forgot ep name) where he's taken over by an entire alien civilization and he's rapidly switching between multiple alien personalities. Watching Brent Spiner perform Data's complex roles is a friggin' master class in acting. Watching Data "glitch" mid sentance for example. Spiner is just incredible

The other episode is Masks.
- Masaka is waking!
He actually thinks the masks episode was one of his weaker episodes because he had almost no prep time. It's basically all personalities he made up on the spot. But thats why he's so great, because I never would have known.
Brent was even pretty great in Enterprise no? As

Not sure about that one film though
The first handful of episodes, you could tell that spiner was trying to figure out how to play data. There's something just ... Off about his portrayal of the Android.... It's hard to describe.
But, to be blunt, there were a lot of things that were "off" about season 1.....
- Yeah, that was pretty much everyone in Season 1. The whole show was trying to figure out how to be itself.
- That's weird. I've never really heard much criticism of season 1 before.

Now I have to watch the whole series again lol

Yeah same 🤣. This is a great excuse to do so.

Is this canon or did the poster just cherry pick a few instances?

This might be legit. Brent Spiner said in interviews that he was consciously keeping track of Data’s growth during the series. He intentionally made him feel like a blank canvas that behaved in an uncanny way at first, and slowly introduced more and more human mannerisms and warmth to his character.
Without instruction, for seven years & four movies. He was probably doing the same thing during Picard.
- Thank you.
- Can I note that Data served many years in Starfleet prior to the start of TNG? He wasn't activated the day before the Encounter at Farpoint mission started. He would have had years of experience working with humans by that point.
- I feel like the time(s?) he played future Data he "jumped ahead" on the mannerisms too.
You'll see him mimicking behavior throughout the series. One of my favorite examples is in Starship Mine aka "Star Trek does a Die Hard" with Data's attempts at small talk.
- I’m convinced that a lot of his footage in that episode was Spiner goofing off or intentionally blowing takes and they just used whatever they could.
  There’s an outtake of the scene when he’s “being Hutchinson” to ~~Troi~~ Crusher and Riker. In the episode it’s the same scene cut short because the extended scene quickly devolves into crude humor that couldn’t be aired on network TV at the time - both Frakes and ~~Sirtis~~ McFadden gasping at what Spiner said.

Still better human than Zuckerberg

He's a better human than most.

Im surprised he doesn't take on accents, too. That's something people do. I remember catching myself taking on a southern accent while talking to a lady from Tennessee while on a long flight and then getting all self conscious that she might think I was mocking her and I wasn't even doing it on purpose. 😩

I used to do this unintentionally while working in a call center. We dealt with a lot of folks from the south who had similar accents. I'm Canadian, eh?
My coworkers used to say that when I'd show up to work, I was (my name), and by the time I be left, I was farmer (my name).
I honestly didn't intend to do it. I'm just so used to mirroring the people around me.
My wife does this. She technically has a southern accent, but since she lives near Philly she mostly has the standard mid Atlantic accent, sometimes a Philly accent, but she's only the phone every day doing customer support and she'll switch to British accents, Hispanic accents, Indian accents... she just does that. Over the phone not as awkward, but in person can be quite weird. Makes it extra fun when we play D&D though.
I do the same. Three days in London and it's "Pass me the ba'a mate!"
I have to stop myself doing this too, but more because I'm really bad at accents and they all come out like I'm taking the piss at the best of times.

I learned to do this in job interviews. It works!

I do that too, it's just (ez) masking, it makes others perceive me more human-like.
\ Which is absolutely necessary to 'live in a society' & not get constantly excluded.

Sucks to have to work that hard just to hang out.
- It's not even to just hang out, it's for normal opportunities (like getting a job, asking for some services from other humans, etc). Basically to at least not repel other humans (even showing constant kindness doesn't help in some cases bcs simply "to weird/alien" & thus unpleasant, even without any accidental miscommunication, which happens with my body language all the time).

Humans do this unconsciously! I was on a first date and thinking, "Pretty sure this woman likes me." So I mirrored her for a little bit then started purposefully changing my posture, and she went right along with me! Had to stop before I laughed out loud and had to explain myself.

I guess this is why they did it. A clumsy, overdone imitation of human behavior that reflects his ambition to appear as human as possible.

Data is a mimic. Got it.

I always super identified with adata growing up, awkward social interaction, and I, myself did the mimicry thing, still catch myself doing it when meeting new people. I found out I'm autistic 3 years ago, and Data is a SUPER autistic coded character.
- Yeah, all those episodes about how Data was awkward and stilted when trying to interact with humans, and he would have gotten along well with certain neurodivergent ones. Same applies to Vulcans, really - the ones that actually uphold the ideals of logic and aren't all smarmy about it, at least.
  I saw an interview a while back where Brent Spiner said he only found out that autistic people identified with Data years after the show was over. He said it was good he didn't know at the time, because it might have ruined the performance if he were aware of it while doing it.

Not gonna lie, I've read a lot about the series and heard many people talk about it, in particular Mike and Rich Evans at redlettermedia, and I am stunned to that I have never heard any reference to this. Made my day reading this, I should probably just bite the bullet and watch the whole series.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring