In the fourth episode of the fifth season of The Next Generation, I was seriously unprepared for this experience. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Trigger Warning: For discussion of grief/death.
I honestly did not expect this episode to become an intense character study about grief and longing and revenge. I DIDN’T. I spent most of the first twenty minutes struggling to remember “Datalore,†only to suddenly realize that the whole point of this episode had changed. It’s a brilliant thing to watch, honestly, because it’s so unsuspecting. Ellen Geer takes this story, and she makes it hers, and I’m unnerved by what I just watched.
Here’s the thing: I honestly thought this was going to be an episode that took place entirely in that cave. A survival episode, if you will! The show hadn’t done a claustrophobic thriller in a while, and with the return of the Crystalline Entity, maybe we’d have a change to learn what the hell it actually was. Given how exorbitant and showy the opening chase scene was, I figured that’s where the story’s energy would be focused. (Seriously, we have almost never seen an action sequence like that on The Next Generation.) There was enough emotional motivation to give weight to a whole plot. Riker’s crush was killed! Everyone was trapped! It’s an antagonist from a past episode that’s known for being brutal and horrifying!
And then the Melona Four colony is spared. I didn’t initially interpret it as them being “spared.†Like Data, I figured something in the cave made it impossible for the Entity to kill them. Thus, Dr. Kila Marr is brought onboard and MY LIFE IS RUINED. I figured something was wrong fairly early on because her face kept doing that thing every time Data spoke. And lord, I’ve got to give credit to Lawrence Conley’s story and Jeri Taylor’s teleplay, because Dr. Marr has so much depth it hurts. It would have been easy to just make her the vengeful antagonist, the kind of character who is out to get what she wants and that’s it. However, Dr. Marr is so much more complex than that, and I think her shifting relationship with Data is a perfect demonstration of that.
Honestly, just think about what she goes through here with Data. She’s openly hostile to Data at first, so much so that she’s willing to openly refuse to work with him during her first meeting with the crew of the Enterprise. Then, on the first expedition down to the caves on Melona Four, she ignores Data and rubs it in his face. Then she accuses him of the crime Lore was guilty of: collaborating with the Crystalline Entity. IT IS A VERY ROUGH THING TO WATCH. Of course, we know it’s absurd to consider that Data would ever do such a thing, but that’s right around the point where Dr. Marr finally reveals why she’s so intense.
The Crystalline Entity murdered her son on Omicron Theta.
I think that this episode’s willingness to use plot points from past episodes is what makes it so strong. I’d forgotten that Data had the memories, logs, and limited thoughts of the people on Omicron Theta, and the story utilizes this fact in a heartbreaking manner. As Dr. Marr grows closer to Data, realizing her view of him is flawed, she begins to see him in a new light. Her friendliness towards him is for a selfish reason: he can give her a glimpse of the son she lost. I don’t think she entirely misuses Data, but it’s clear to me at the end of this episode that she’s projected an imaginary relationship onto him in order to feel more comfortable.
I don’t blame her, though, for feeling as she does. Grief motivated her to become obsessed with tracking the Crystalline Entity, and her lack of closure over her son’s death caused her to seek him out within Data. That scene where she listens to Data read out her son’s log, but in the son’s voice… goddamn, y’all. Ellen Geer, YOU ARE TOO MUCH.
And look, I understand why she’d want to eschew her scientific sense of wonder and duty in order to kill the Entity. Honestly, I get it. I understand Riker’s logic, too. This thing, even thought it may just be surviving, was still killing thousands upon thousands of lives. It had to at least be stopped, and I got that one way to do that was to kill it. But Picard’s reasoning was sound, too, especially since that was the whole point of the Enterprise: to seek out new life and new civilizations and to respect that life. But that’s the horrible tragedy of this episode. Just as the group gets close to being the first people to ever communicate with this Entity, Dr. Marr kills it. She kills it, believing it will have given her son peace.
We’ll never know what it tried to tell the Enterprise. But the most damning aspect of “Silicon Avatar†is Data’s final words to Dr. Marr. She’d convinced herself of her morality, assuring Data that her son would have been happy with what she’d done. Look how she caressed Data in that scene! She was clearly affectionate with him as if he was her son. But Data, unaware of the emotional weight of the situation, completely destroys her with his interpretation of her son’s thoughts.
“Your son would have been very sad now.â€
WELL, NOW I AM. THANKS A LOT, NEXT GENERATION. THANKS. A. LOT.
The video for “Silicon Avatar†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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