The Star Trek Actor That Should Have Won An Emmy, According To Patrick Stewart

Despite being around for nearly 60 years and having a dozen or so TV series under its proverbial belt, the "Star Trek" franchise has never taken home an Emmy Award for an actor's performance, as hard as that may be to believe. In fact, only Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, was ever even nominated for such an award. This, despite the fact that many renowned stars and widely beloved talents have appeared on screen in the final frontier, from Emmy winners like Ricardo Montalbán and Kelsey Grammer to Oscar winners Louise Fletcher and Michelle Yeoh (the latter of whom even got to star in her own spin-off movie, "Section 31").

Sure, the franchise has experienced plenty of Emmy Award consideration and even taken home some trophies for technical categories like best costuming, best editing, and best special effects. And the original "Star Trek" series and "The Next Generation" were both nominated for outstanding drama series, with the OG show getting the nod in two of its three seasons. Still, they ultimately lost out to "Mission: Impossible" in 1967 and '68 and "Picket Fences" in 1994.

"Star Trek" superstar Patrick Stewart, though, has received plenty of awards recognition, with four Emmy nominations for his work outside of "Star Trek." He's also a three-time Golden Globe nominee and a Grammy Award-winner for his 1996 spoken word album, "Prokofiev: Peter And The Wolf." Yet, Stewart believes that there's at least one other member of the cast of "The Next Generation" who is overdue for an Emmy: Brent Spiner.

Patrick Stewart may be the most beloved cast member of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and perhaps the most widely recognized when it comes to awards. But according to Stewart himself, if anyone in the cast of "TNG" deserved an Emmy for their performance, it's Brent Spiner, who played the stoic android Data. Not only does Stewart point out just what a challenge it was for Spiner to effectively portray a character with no emotions — while still making him effectively funny, dramatic, and even charming at times — but he specifically pointed to Spiner's performance in the third-season installment, "The Offspring."

In that episode, one of the saddest in "Trek" history, Data creates an artificial daughter named Lal (Hallie Todd), but when her programming proves faulty, he must race against the clock to stabilize her neural network before she dies. With not so much as a glint in his eye and a rapid movement of his hands, Spiner is able to elicit genuine heartrending emotion from the audience, who suddenly believes that an emotionless android is feeling some measure of pain.

"Brent Spiner's performance is staggeringly good," Stewart remarked in his memoir, "Making It So." "He found new depths to his character's Pinocchio-like predicament of being a human invention who wishes to become human. It's a major injustice to me that Brent has never won an Emmy for playing Data." But it wasn't just his performance as the franchise's iconic emotionless android that impressed Stewart.

While co-star Michael Dorn gets credit for having appeared in more episodes of "Star Trek" than any other, Brent Spiner might hold the record for playing the most characters, at least among the principal cast of "The Next Generation." Because he didn't just play Commander Data but also Data's evil twin brother, Lore (a role that factored into the "TNG" episode that was Spiner's most challenging to shoot), his human creator, Dr. Noonien Soong, and his long-lost android brother, B-4, in various episodes of "TNG." 

Episodes like "Masks" and "Fistful of Datas" are also memorable for allowing Spiner to stretch his performance beyond the Data character, where he played different heroes and villains when he was possessed by alien spirits or stuck in a malfunctioning Holodeck. Spiner's pitch-perfect performance as Data playing Sherlock Holmes is also a standout, not just because he was inhabiting a different role, but because he was playing a character who is playing a character, a tricky assignment for any actor.

After "The Next Generation," Spiner continued in the franchise, both as Data — in the four "TNG" movies — and in episodes of spin-offs like "Enterprise" and "Star Trek: Picard," where he played Noonien Soong's ancestors, Arick Soong, Adam Soong, and Altan Indigo Soong. He got to perform Data's death scene in Season 1 of "Picard" and still returned in the final season, this time as a new version of Data that was far more human, finally realizing the character's Pinocchio-like dream. Perhaps one day Spiner will achieve Stewart's dream for him, taking home a lifetime achievement Emmy for his part in making "Star Trek: The Next Generation" a hit.