Brent Spiner on Star Trek’s Biggest Data Plot Hole — And the Question They Still Won’t Answer

Brent Spiner just poked a fun hole straight through one of Star Trek: Picard Season 2's big question marks, then topped it with a wild idea that even the showrunner refused to entertain. Yes, this is about the Soongs, the Picards, and whether those family trees ever secretly crossed streams.

The dangling thread: Did Adam Soong have a biological kid?

In a chat with T. Rick Jones at Daily Star Trek News, Spiner says the show leaves a fairly basic question unanswered: did Dr. Adam Soong, his character in Picard Season 2, ever have a biological child? That uncertainty is still just… hanging there.

"They've never answered that question, and they probably never will."

Given how the Soongs treat 'children' as projects as much as people, it tracks that the show never nailed it down. But Spiner being Spiner, he also pitched an idea that takes this from mystery to total chaos.

Spiner's 'please never say that again' pitch

He floated a hypothetical to executive producer Akiva Goldsman involving Renée Picard (played by Penelope Mitchell), Jean-Luc's ancestor we meet in Season 2. And Goldsman shut it down immediately.

"I told [Executive Producer] Akiva Goldsman and he went, 'I don't ever want you to say that again.' It's basically this: we've met Picard's [ancestor, Renée, played by Penelope Mitchell]. If Soong impregnated Renée, in the future that would mean [Noonien] Soong and Data and Picard were actually related. But it was too much."

To spell that out: Adam Soong plus Renée Picard equals the Soong line and the Picard line literally merging. That would make Picard's longtime rapport with Data feel less like mentorship and more like daytime soap. No one asked for that twist.

Quick refresher on the Soongs (aka: why this gets messy fast)

The Soong family is laser-focused on artificial life. Across the franchise we've met multiple generations, all played by Spiner because, in-universe, the line tends to reuse the same face. They also have this unsettling habit of treating offspring like outputs.

• Adam Soong (Picard S2): a 21st-century eugenics wunderkind who used his own proprietary genetic tinkering to create multiple 'daughters.' One of them, Kore, had severe genetic defects that made her extremely vulnerable to sunlight and even everyday pollution. Adam ran countless experiments on homeless veterans, got entangled in a scheme that would have him assassinate Renée Picard to secure Kore's future, and wound up exiled after Picard intervened.
• Arik Soong (roughly a century later): moved away from Adam's approach to eugenics and chased artificial life by other means.
• Noonien Soong: the legend who built six Soong-type androids, including Data, Lore, and B-4, with a few more siblings in the set — the most advanced artificial lifeforms the Federation had seen.

Yes, that family tree is a corkscrew. Spiner has played them all with different edges, and that's half the fun — and half the confusion — when you start connecting dots across centuries.

Where Picard fits in all this

Star Trek: Picard is a direct sequel to The Next Generation, with Patrick Stewart back as Jean-Luc. It ran three seasons, ten episodes each, from January 23, 2020 to April 20, 2023, mostly set between 2399 and 2402. The show sits squarely in sci-fi drama territory, was created by Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer, and Alex Kurtzman, and streams on Paramount+ in the U.S.

So… did Adam have a natural child?

The show never says. Spiner thinks it probably never will. And as for his 'what if he fathered a Picard' curveball — entertaining as a thought experiment, sure, but it would glue together two of Star Trek's most iconic bloodlines in a way that breaks more than it fixes.

Star Trek: Picard is streaming now on Paramount+ in the U.S. If you somehow found a tasteful way to link the Picards and the Soongs without it feeling like a telenovela, I want to hear it.