effervescentexplosion:
Instead of ignoring Brent Spiner’s natural aging process, I like to think that Data has been making subtle physical alterations to his face so he’ll seem to age along with his friends because he wants to experience aging with them.
There’s an episode in the seventh season of TNG, Inheritance, that mentions that Data has an “aging” program. Nonetheless, Brent Spiner decided he had grown too old to play the character and had the writers kill him off in Nemesis.
They did leave a door open to bring Data back and while they never had a chance to do it in another TNG movie, they did do it in a comic series called Countdown, which is set just before the events of the Star Trek reboot. Data is brought back in B4’s body, he rejoins Starfleet and eventually becomes captain of the Enterprise.