UNCUT - Silicon Avatar (TNG S5E4) | Star Trek Journey 211
Comments (102)
Ha! Good point - the Federation needs to vet their admirals and specialist experts as they’ve all got some kind of agenda…
For me this is also a C. Nothing bad, but nothing amazing.
You don't always need to agree with the crew you know. I totally saw where she was coming from! You're gonna need to break that bad habit especially when we get to less "perfect" crews. Also a "C" is not good 😭
C is an average episode, and for TNG an average episode is good.
This isn't even related to the episode, but one comment of "People aren't going to hate you for shit your brother did" had me literally lol and shake my head. Having two older brothers who spent their entire lives in and out of prison after begging, borrowing, and stealing everything they could from every town in three counties, I certainly know that plenty of people can hate you for things your brother might have done, haha. It doesn't help when you all have a memorable last name, either. :D For decades, I had to deal with people not wanting to give me a job, or rent me an apartment because one of my brothers had burned a bridge there already years before I even left high school. Or they would just complain to me about how my brothers owe them money or stole something from them and how I should do something about that. I find the whole thing funny in hindsight as it's in the past and I've moved a distance away from the area since then, but man. I know 100% for a fact that people you've never met can hate your guts just because of something your brother did that you didn't even know about.
I'm in agreement with you all on the grade for this show, a solid C. Not great, not terrible.
I always took the doctor's side in this episode. If a rabid animal was killing people in a town it is to be put down. This is on a much larger scale...it should be destroyed. Picard's example of the whale is a pale excuse. Indeed cuttlefish are not people...and if we forget that in the future...then i pray the future does not come.
Same. What she did was logical.
Data speculates that they survived the cave because of an unusual concentration of particular metals in the rocks. You may have missed it.
The look on Alex’s face near the end….i kinda felt the same way about Dr. Marr. She really went off the deep end in a kinda creepy way. I rewatched here with you guys and reevaluated my views on this episode. I hated her at the start, then felt sympathy, then… well Alex’s face reflected how I felt at the end. It’s a good episode, and very Star Trek. I’d give it a B, because it’s so Trek, but I can understand “surprisingly good C” as well. If this were season one or two y’all would have graded it higher.
Forgive my GenX vocab, but what’s an op? Opp? Awp? have multiple conflicting theories. First guess was spy, but that didn’t seem to hold up here?
Short for opponent or opposition. Basically someone in opposition to you or your goals
Heeeeyyy I made it in the takes! Lol tho that lady sucks IN THIS EPISODE! Quite sure she’s awesome
Until now, didn't realize the title was referring to Data
I don't think the desire for communication was wholly a naive, "maybe we can be friends!" But more of a "let's not assume anything about this creature, but instead try to talk to it and objectively understand it before taking action." If that entity came out calling them all insignificant and worthless even after they managed to talk to it and prove both their and its sentience, Picard would likely have obliterated it. But if it turned out to be a puppy that just needed more training, then Picard would've got the ball rolling on that. And if it could be resoned with, made to feel guilty for the lives it took, and with a better food source found, Picard woulda done that too. I don't think it's as black and white as people want to think.
Exactly
I was rewatching this reaction tonight and thought about Picard’s after action report to Starfleet. I bet he ROASTED that woman and got ALL her credentials revoked.
Okay. Just in general. WHY DON’T THEY ALWAYS MAGNIFY THE VIEW-SCREEN?! Why does the Captain always have to ask?!?!
This watch-through (it had been a while for me) made me realize how Dr. Marr really snapped mentally when she heard that ship being attacked. Somehow I had not picked up on that before. She was definitely less crazy before that, so I can forgive Troi A BIT for not noticing something "terribly wrong" sooner.
I'd suggest that the crystalline entity did know that "people" are intelligent because it did communicate with Lore and actively worked with him to plane how to eat the creatures on enterprise. I feel like if they would have communicated it would have said "oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you guys were smart intelligent I promise not to eat people again" then the next month it eats another colony.
1:10:46 No, Alex, porking WAS to be the dessert. Riker's favorite part of dinner!
1:09:12 We all recognized the crystalline entity. We didn't splooge our panties over it though.
55:15 Riker never had a relationship with Carmen. He never had the chance. They were planning their first date/hookup at the beginning of this episode.
"And as you know, I provide the most memorable desserts" There had to be something prior, it just happened off-screen and potentially ret-coned in. They act as though they were old flames because that's what the script demanded, which of course is awful because of how much we've come to expect continuity and setup.
Trying to figure out how wrestling as Picard would work. “There’s no need to resort to violence. We can discuss our differences and learn from each other. I will forfeit this match in the interest of peaceful diplomacy.”
53:45 She seemed genuinely emotional to me.
45:55 Well, Alex, at least you weren't bored like Josh looking at his phone...
37:14 He could remember the sound of his (own) voice too.
Whilst I was it was completely wrong to destroy the Crystalline Entity, expecting a parent who has lost a child to it to behaviour rationally when face to face with is like asking a human to behave like Data. Lore was the true murderer of the Omicron Theta colonists, including her son, and it is very common for the family of murder victims to have a level of hatred towards the family of the murderer attaching blame to them even in cases when that isn’t fair or proportionate. So her reaction to Data was a perfectly human one. Riker’s response too, having been through the attack, was not really any different to when they witness a friend being attacked by someone’s pet dog in the park seriously or mortally wounds them them, rightly or wrongly in all cases we opt as a society to destroy the dog rather than attempting to retrain it. We have judged it to be too difficult to do that. Picard’s choice were largely the correct ones, but the episode demonstrates how people cannot be expected to be rational when experiencing survivor guilt and trauma when faced with their attacker or the killer of people they cared for. And how easy it is for those that were victims or survivors of an attack by that killer to deal with things in a rational scientific way like Picard. Picard’s only error was in assuming that faces with rational argument people would simple step back from needing to take revenge. Letting her be near the controls when faced with her son’s killer despite knowing her stated preference re the outcome really was incredibly naive of him.
I'd agree with you if it had been more recent. But It had been 27+ years.
14:58 It spared some tree roots and such. That's really at odds with it scouring everything biological.
9:52 Yes he is, Josh. S1 reference!
7:52 Well, the times they visit a planet and nothing odd happens aren't televised because they don't make very entertaining or compelling stories. 😀
Yeah you’re right that never happens. Link below unrelated . . https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708713/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Maybe C is for “could take it or leave it”
The moral quandary. Has anyone ever seen "Jaws"? Why didn't they just try to reason with the poor shark and get him to try a nice green salad.
Because sea cables are yummy.
While it may be cheating discussing real world reasons characters are different, it may be more likely Kirk would side with Riker here, but back in TOS I don't think the show hammered home communication and understanding all life quite as much as TNG does. Sure, the sentiment is there even in TOS, but it wasn't so front and center as Picard's wonder and love of the idea. And how much it breaks him up to kill like in Galaxy's Child. And in Darmok the idea that the other captain died for the chance of connecting with the other race.
TOS with its penchant for fisticuffs and posturing and romance hawking was more middle ages than the civilized advanced society portrayed by humans in the late 24th century.
This is one where, what WAS there is pretty good, but the story needed something more going on. Maybe one more encounter with the entity besides just that audio message. Maybe a bit more time with Riker, etc. Maybe Data talks to Crusher or someone about grief, losing a loved one. Just SOMETHING more.
This is a solid B for me. Dr. Marr is very interesting, the performance is sometimes a little sideways and sometimes VERY effective, but her arc throughout the episode is great and I think her motivations at all points are clearly defined. Data owning her with the mic drop at the end is fantastic. Riker's riz making another appearance, and his tense convo with Picard I thought was great and it's a rare case where I don't think either of them were right, which is an interesting change. I also think NOT bringing Lore back here as many were surely expecting (I know I was back in '91 or whenever) was a nice non-event - keep people on their toes.
Watching reaction after work but for me this episode is in the “it’s fine” category. The beginning is great, and very well done but I’m not a massive fan of the guest star in this episode (always chuckle that she can’t hold the Tri-Corder properly) there’s some good ideas here but they don’t really developed enough.
Not watched yet, but felt like saying that I get unreasonably excited when you guys post Star Trek. I know the schedule, it's never a surprise, but I still react like someone gave me a little present out of the blue.
Something REALLY telling when Data is reading back the logs of Marr's son, the woman he describes when talking about her is ABSOLUTELY not the woman standing there being affected by it. He specifically mentions his mom's sense of humor, and through the episode Marr shows NO humor. She is serious all the time. I think this is to show just how broken and changed she was by her son's death.
The nearly 30 YEARS she has had to get over the terrible death of her son has wrecked her sense of humor. Not much in life is going to be funny when vengeance is a way of life.
So, I'm going to take a dissenting viewpoint. As much as I appreciate a good "Picard moralizing" episode(Darmok, Drumhead, Who Watches the Watchers, MoaM), and while I have long cited Picard as a role model, there are times where he's flat out wrong , and this is one. It's not the worst example, but it's still bad. So on the one hand, from a purely "explore all options" standpoint, I understand trying to communicate with the creature. However trying to moralize that it did nothing wrong and compare the people it's killed to cuttlefish just makes him look like a pretentious ass. First off, humans are very different from cuttlefish. Humans learn and advance and examine and try to understand the world around them in a way nothing else on Earth does. I've heard a philosophical argument that Humans, and any other intelligent life out there, could be considered the universe's way of understanding itself. Sure that's a little metaphysical, but there is an objective difference between insects that operate purely on instinct and people who have accomplished feats of science, art, engineering and philosophy and learned about the workings of the universe from the subatomic to the cosmic scale. Second, a whale feeding on plankton or cuttlefish isn't wiping out an entire species. Nor is eating a steak or a chicken breast. Even if you want to argue the morality of eating meat, it's all, or mostly, replicated in the 24th century. There are no vegans in the future because you can eat all the meat you like without ever hurting an animal. Assuming that planet at the start was something like Earth, then it had millions of unique plant and animal species that took 10s or 100s of millions of years to evolve. Now they're all gone. And how many other planets have been wiped out? All that life, all that biodiversity lost, all for the benefit of 1 singular creature? Yeah that doesn't wash. Now to be fair to Picard, at least he acknowledged that killing it was an option, but the thing is basically the Flood from Halo. There are times where moralizing needs to be put aside and action needs to be taken. Finally, even if you want to compare us to cuttlefish in relation to the CE, you can be damned sure that if the cuttlefish could defend themselves from the whales, they wouldn't hold back, and we would just accept that as a fact of nature. Shooting a grizzly that's trying to eat you is also a fact of nature. If we were truly ants compared to this thing, we wouldn't be able to destroy it by essentially yelling at it. For all intents and purposes the creature is a parasite. It's sucks life out of the galaxy and returns nothing of value. Plus given Lore was communicating with it, we can infer it has some idea of what it's doing. Bottom line, fuck that thing. Riker may have been biased, but he did nothing wrong here.
Riker didn't do anything wrong. Picard didn't do or say anything wrong. Dr. Marr did the wrong. Picard's assertion the the Entity has as much right to exist as everything else in the universe is paramount. That is why Picard espoused the beliefs and hopes he did. The entity was not in danger of erasing all of humanity from the cosmos. Don't look at Whales and Plankton from the Human perspective. Look at it from the Plankton's perspective, and then the Whale's perspective.
dude, there were absolutely some HARDCORE adult trek fans back then, before "fandom" was really an acceptable thing, like people who would wear their trek costumes to work, and the showrunners were aware of these people.
LOL. The entire phenomenon of Star Trek was carried by us, back in the day. I remember working the theater when Star Trek V came out. Peole showd up in uniform to watch it. People also showed up in fedoras with whips when Indiana Jones III came out, and went out in the parking lot and started whipping each other. it was always a thing. People showed up in batman costumes to the first batman. Fandom has been a thing for a long time. You should have seen the Dr. Who conventions back in the 80's.
if you're rewatching TOS, please watch te version with the updated effects. It makes the show so much more enjoyable. and watch in production order!
I never noticed - that opening location looks REMARKABLY like Betazed.
It's the sister planet, Thetazed
You mentioned maybe it's just the crew of the Enterprise that are enlightened and I think you're totally right, if Q had come to any other ship to judge humanity we would have been cooked
I would agree with their take. To me, there's a few memorably bad episodes, but there's a lot that are just ok and kind of forgettable, and this one def falls into that category. I feel like they could have done more with the crystalline entity, not sure what, but more then the impetus for a moby dick story.
yeah, the doctor and riker's views are understandable, but unlike Picard they aren't looking at the big picture. There may be many more of these things out there, and destroying one may be like a declaration of war. Seeing it if it was possible to communicate and offer an alternative energy source was worth it in the long run even if this particular crystal entity had killed lots of people. and as Picard pointed out, it wasn't necessarily doing this out of malevolence or a desire for conquest, but as part of its natural feeding cycle.
Yup!
Why they were safe in the cave- that question is really setting up her accusation of Data, so I think we're supposed to assume Data's hypothesis of the presence of the two interacting metals creating interference as being the correct one.
We many never know. But Dr. Marr was not out of line in her suspicions. We know Data did not and would not do that, but she didn't.
I love Star Trek but I hate some of the strange modern morality that was in TOS but really came out during TNG. Picard's speech is strange. It really does not make much sense. I am more on the side of the Doctor than Picard. If you take Picard's logic to its end then any killing of humans for food is not wrong it just is. It is like we are the antelope and the entity would be the lion. I do not see humans like that at all. I do not think most people do either. There is something special about the human race. That is how we view ourselves . At least most of us. I do not see it more enlightened to think of ourselves as less. To devalue human life which Picard logically does is not much of a view IMO.
Interesting take. Don't agree with it at all, but interesting take.
I am a hospital chaplain so I have a lot of empathy for the woman who lost her son. That must have been very hard. I like this episode enough until then end. I think it cheapened the episode to have her kill the entity. It was kind of stupid. It made Picard too right. More ambiguity would have been better.
If her son had died in the past year maybe two, I could understand her drive for vengeance. But after 26-27-28 years, she really needed to talk to someone.
I assume if not for starfleet, Picard would just travel the galaxy looking for random things to surrender to. People like him get people killed in the real world.
I use Paramount+ to watch along (it's a terrible service, but i need my ST) but the fucking site is down. Very frustrating. Time to finally sail the seven seas and download it I suppose.
Good reaction. I think I have similar thoughts, but here's the thing, for me at last putting myself in her shoes... I might have made the same choice to kill it. That blood rage that'd overcome me if anyone harmed or killed my friends or parents? Indescribable. And I don't have kids but if I did, I imagine that emotion would be amplified tenfold. So, I think she's wrong. Picard is morally correct. Communicate first, if possible, and it was in this case. But I get it, and the terrifying part is, in her shoes, I'd be wrong too. Also, monikers for each tier: S - Spectacular A - Awesome B - Banger C - Contract-Filler D - Dreadful E - Erase from Canon
Tough fit, because I think there needs to be a "dreadful" category too. C is alright, don't care, Erase from canon though is too harsh to fill in Dreadful's shoes imo. It's like the difference between a phaser set to level 5 and a phaser set to deatomize.
I was 27 when this came out & I jumped up & said "The Crystalline Entity!"... guess I'm a hopeless nerd. The rest of the episode was a disappointment. I kept hoping Lore would show up. Dropped it to a mehep - C-
I immediately knew what it was too. In the summers between seasons I’d watch older ST on videotapes, so it was always fresh in my mind.
This has some of the funniest comments i've seen you guys do yet! She's the female Dr Stubbs of reactions
How timely! An episode about a revenge-seeking renegade who kills a dangerous Crystalline Entity Organism, responsible for countless deaths.
I think the families of the victims and those in danger will be grateful to Dr, Marr for her actions, as I'm sure many in Starfleet Command feel the same way.
Totally agree with Josh about Riker/Kirk vs. Picard. I think Kirk would've acted much like Riker in both of these episodes.
I did actually enjoy the relationship between Data and Dr Marr. Those were the highlights for me. Still pretty mediocre episode though
I would say most fans did catch that the return of the CE was a callback to Datalore, but keep in mind by this point in the series we had seen season 1 episodes 3 or more times after repeated viewings.
It seems like Alex Dings an episode for making you feel about a character the way the script wants you to feel
I’m self aware enough to know that is what they intended. In fact, I enjoy being worked where emotion can be dragged out of me towards a character. That being said, I still don’t care for the episode that much.
I wonder if there are more than one of these entities out there. To quote Kirk " I hope not. I found the one quite sufficient."
In the comics and other not quite canon sources there definitely are more. One would assume its a species, not a sole being, so there are probably more, just not any that are hanging out around federation space.
If I had to choose whom to serve under as my Captain........Kirk.
yeah, the guys should have that debate, which was the popular "usenet nerd" debate of the time, so much so it was referenced in the Simpsons. For me it's easy- who gives me the better chance of survival. Kirk lost a lot more people then Picard did. Of course at the time, killing redshirts was to raise the stakes, but you don't really see the same "yellow shirts: phenomenon on TNG. Of course we are also talking about a federation that seems significantly more powerful, even though for most of tng's early run its been weakened, either by the gillworm invasion or the borg attack, but we see what the federation can look like when its properly mobilized.
You don't want to destroy it and can't shut down the resonate transmission...........just drive away. Problem solved.
I thought the same thing. Or the CE could just leave. Inverse square law.
As an European Moby Dick is just a story for me. But I have the impression it must be something like the Holy Grale for american writers. They do the Captain Ahab thing over and over again. Sometimes with great success but sometimes not so much.
I don't think most people have read the story independently in America (hell most people hardly read at all). But I think it has been standard in many colleges in intro to American literature classes. Which most writers were probably in. Definitely throughout the 20th century. I think it's a bit less ubiquitous now.
I am not on board with Riker's reaction at the end. I think that was too over to 1 side. I think the shot of him should have shown him to be emotionless so the viewer wasn't sure if he was happy, disappointed, maybe both. More ambiguous, less in our faces would have been a better way to go - keep the audience guessing.
I don't think he had a grin on his face. The shot of him was pretty fleeting but he had a "well that's done" look on his face in my opinion.
Agree with your score. My memory was that this was a better episode than it was. Odd choice not to inject more urgency into the bridge crew’s final scene in trying to shut down the transmission - why not simply cut the power? They seemed uncharacteristically content to just stand there staring at her whilst the entity was slowly resonating to destruction.
The plot armor shields were UP!
I absolutely love the angry commentary on this one, along with some good guesswork on how the plot would play out and Lol'd hard at "the episode with the pierogis" quip by Josh at the end.
Hey! Where were you when the Crystalline Entity attacked? Where?!
I always thought the name of the character -- Dr. Marr sort of gave away her intentions. To mar something is to destroy, destroy or deface which is ultimately the resolution. This episode has two of my favorite scenes, Picard's cuddlefish analogy and Data's speech saying "I believe your son would be very sad now". Yet another reminder that one-off episodes are only one-off until they are referenced again -- Star Trek may be heavily episodic, but it's internal continuity and references to previous Trek is always spot on. As more Trek comes out (and you begin watching DS9 and VOY) you'll see some references to things that happened during TNG. For me, these little moments are very special, as it shows the care and dedication that is put in to make sure that the storylines jive. For me, this is between a C and B so C+ weighted. Keep up the great reactions!
The name can also be a reference to her being mared herself. She's let her feelings toward this thing completely destroy her to the point where she is nothing like who her son described. In trying to avenge her son's death, she's actually dishonored him in the worst way possible by living and acting in a way that her son would have never wanted.
I was not prepared for 'what's the difference?' when she says they're not talking about cuttlefish, they're talking about people. Edit to add: I thought they were initially going for more of a misanthropic take. After getting into the after discussion, I appreciate that I think they're talking about how the entity isn't necessarily malevolent, which is true.
Nothing more to it than that?
Get off your phone bro.
I like how Alex references Galactus. I always wondered if the writers got the inspiration for the crysaline entity from that character.
TNG The sex scoreboard Carmin gets Fraked or I mean Riked, then dies with a smile on her face Riker 11 new +1 Troi 3 Dr. Bev 3 Data 2 Picard 1 Worf 1 Geordi 1 Broccoli 2 i Chief/Keiko 1 Extras: You may think that Carmin and Riker could not have done some terra-forming but remember she said “you remember” about desert which means before the Crystaline C-block, Riker did some earth shaking. Wild pioneer types probably do it like they do on the Discovery channel
Chief/Keiko are newlyweds and (REDACTED) I think their count has gotta be... AT LEAST 1x/week.
I can’t wait to watch this episode. I’m positively cracking up over it
did the reaction shatter your expectations?
I order a Ham and Cheese Pizza and they put pineapple on it............ I'm Killing Them! ;P
You get it!