Twenty years ago, millions of people watched as Brent Spiner was slammed against a window by a pissed off alien and used as a human puppet. "Diiieee," Spiner's character in Independence Day, the long-haired hippy scientist Dr. Brackish Okun, groans with a tentacle wrapped around his throat. Bill Clinton watched on a private screening in the White House, millions more watched on VHS in November of that year, even more on DVD in 2000, even more on Blu-ray in 2007, and even more on TV through amazingly frequent cable showings throughout the last two decades.

On set in 1995, however, it was a different scene. The alien was actually a friend of Spiner's who had worked as a makeup guy on Star Trek, and the script had one major divergence: "Initially in the original script, Adam Baldwin picked me up off the floor, turned to Robert Loggia and said, 'He's dead,'" Spiner explains.

But they cut that line. And as a result, Dr. Okun's fate has been a mystery for 20 years.

Normally, this would seem like a tiny detail in an action movie about a character who only has about three total minutes of screen time.

Except Spiner also happened to play Lieutenant Commander Data for seven seasons on a little show known as Star Trek: The Next Generation. His fan base is huge—as his 1.4 million Twitter followers show—and is one that's known to obsess over details like the serial number on the crashed shuttle in Episode 23 of Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season.

"I think you're number 3,027 of people who asked me, 'Wait I thought your character was dead.'"

So, when Spiner's Dr. Okun was left for dead, his cheek flat against the glass and a tentacle flexing on his Adam's apple, people wanted answers.

A frequent face at Comic Con, and other such gatherings, Spiner has been asked the question a few times over the last 20 years. 

"Everyone has asked," he says. "I think you're number 3,027 of people who asked me, 'Wait, I thought your character was dead.'"

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Ambiguity in film is a powerful narrative device. Was Harrison Ford's Deckard a Replicant in Blade Runner? Was Leonardo DiCaprio still dreaming at the end of Inception? For the last year, Game of Thrones fans have been agonizing over the fate of Jon Snow. But this was different. This, if anything, seemed like a lapse in storytelling—more of an oversight in the editing process that didn't tie up Okun's story. This is more of a Star Wars' "Who shot first? Han or Greedo?" question than anything else. But Spiner knew the answer to the question the entire time.

"I never actually thought the character was dead," Spiner says. "I thought he was near dead, but still alive. There was an assumption that this creature was choking me. But it wasn't actually choking me—it was just possessing me, platonically of course."

Why else would they cut the "he's dead" line if they didn't want him back for a sequel? On Friday, Okun's fate will have an official answer, as Spiner returns in Independence Day: Resurgence. His character first appeared in a trailer for the film early this year, and fans went nuts.

"There's still people every day," he says. "If I look at my Twitter feed, there's always someone saying, 'Oh my God, he's back, I thought he died.' It's still going on and it will only end when people see the movie."

And Spiner says Okun gets more than a few minutes in this film. He has a backstory, and this time his fate wont be so ambiguous. "It'll be pretty clear," he teases. "I don't think it'll be vague at all."

Though most of the world—or Star Trek fans at least—knows him as Data, an entirely new generation will know him as Dr. Okun, which might be a baffling thought for Boomer and Gen-X Trekkies. "The film has been on television probably more than any other movie; I think it's on every day someplace," Spiner says. "There are certainly people who only know me for this character who don't even know about Data."

For an actor whose career has been defined by one iconic character, it's in many ways a miracle that Okun came back from the dead. This doctor, whose mind seems to be in a perpetual LSD fog, is far off from his Soong Type Android in Star Trek. And Okun is on the opposite side of the spectrum from Spiner's newest character, the mysterious and evil Sidney on Outcast—a dark character on an even darker new series on Cinemax based off the comics by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman.

"When I was growing up and going to acting school and trying to be an actor, it didn't occur to me that I wanted to play one character for my entire life," Spiner says. "I was trained to play all kinds of things, and even in the context of Star Trek I got to play all kinds of things. It's always fun to play something you've never been before, and it's particularly interesting to have Sidney juxtaposed against someone like Okun."

Long live Dr. Brackish Okun.

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