TNG Rewatch: 5x04 "Silicon Avatar."

Sorry for the bump, but I just read this, and I think it belongs here, certanly not worth it's own thread, unless it's a Troi is worthless thread, which I could get behind.

 

Troi is only useful when the script demands it. Just like how Geordi's VISOR is only useful when the script demands it. And Worf is always thrown across the bridge because the script demands it.

Honestly, if Troi's powers were used to their full potential at all times, the Enterprise crew would face far fewer dilemmas. Heck, according to Nemesis, she can defeat cloaking devices, ahem, perfect cloaking devices.

 

Yeah, everyone kind of stands there and asks her, nicely, to knock it off well past the point it was clear what she was doing and had no intention in stopping.

 

This pretty much sums of my feelings of this episode:

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/season-5/5x04/silicon-avatar-hd-333.jpg

 

Why wouldn't this be a continuation of the putative "Roddenberry vision"? Clearly, the outcome here is something the heroes find undesirable, so it's just the flip side of the coin.

FWIW, I think "Roddenberry" would have been right on this one. This is another one in a long series of Space Menaces That Breed: our heroes encounter a deadly life form and establish that it is capable of breeding, and potentially even going to do so very soon. What automatically follows is that it's tactically stupid to destroy the creature.

Just think it through. It has taken our heroes this long to meet even a single specimen of the species. But it is a species, because it breeds. Killing one will just leave the galaxy full of its kin, while depriving the heroes of their one and only chance to find out the weaknesses of the species. Kirk doomed the next skipper to having to deal with the Space Amoeba and the Dikironide Cloud from the same underdog position he himself held, by not taking his time and finding out more about these creatures. There was absolutely no hurry there: in neither of the cases was the creature going to kill again any time soon.

With the Sentient Cloud of TAS or the Doomsday Machine or NOMAD, we are left in the dark about their motive powers - would a month of careful observation be possible, or would the beasts reach their next target in that time? Only NOMAD is established to be capable of high warp, and we learn of no pattern in its deadly travels, of no previous or future victims. With the Flying Pancakes, it's clear that they cannot spread further except if provided with a starship, so Kirk's hurry there is decidedly ill founded (especially as it results in his XO going blind!). OTOH, Kirk doesn't display appropriate hurry for finding out whether the Pancakes would already have spread on other worlds besides Deneva.

Clearly, the writers don't think in tactical terms in these episodes. This leaves our heroes looking particularly bad, too. I think we should credit Picard with sound thinking here, perhaps setting him apart from Kirk in that respect. Certainly he is within his rights to declare the Crystalline Entity essentially harmless: any starship with halfway decent shields can ward it off without any risk, and making it go veggie is a tactic very likely to succeed, even if only as a delaying tactic so that further study can be conducted.

As far as the drama goes, I don't find the Marr character either objectionable or totally uninteresting. She's an attractive exercise in controlled rage, and as such something that well fits the TNG tempo of storytelling. I also like Data's half of the story here, as he first serves as an innocent and wronged valve for Marr's rage, and then in very human fashion gets back at her with the stinging comments at the end - he can be very cruel when he puts his, uh, brain to it.

I do dislike the heroes-in-molasses climax, though: stepping in sooner would have meant better dramatic pacing, and it could always be stated that the switches Marr had flipped before the intervention would already be deadly to the Crystalline Entity.

Timo Saloniemi

 

So what was its proper name. I've heard Great Crystalline Entity

 

That name was apparently coined by Lore, who thought he was in communication with the beast and thus might even have gotten its approval. The name is first used in a Captain's Log that is based on information obtained from Lore, and our heroes adopt it readily enough.

Timo Saloniemi

 

What bugged me most about this one is how Marr takes complete control over the attempts at communicating with the entity even though it is Data's research and plan that provides the means for communication. How did Marr have any idea that manipulating the signal the way she did would destroy the entity? Never mind how she managed to lock Data out of his own station.

 

Mixed feelings about this one.

First, it's a proven killer. The question is whether or not it really comprehends what it's doing. Even when "conspiring" with Lore, did it understand the consequences of what it was doing, or did it have a different frame of reference than us?

So the question is: do we talk with it, and tell it there may be consequences within our laws? What could we or would we really do to punish it? Or would we simply say there were mitigating circumstances, give it a clean slate and then study and befriend it?

Well Dr Marr takes any of those ideas out of our hands.

I feel in a way with my frame of reference, that some sort of justice has been done for lots of innocent dead people, and yet also sad that we didn't learn more.

An episode that makes me feel and think this way has to be pretty decent. Though I wouldn't call it top-of-the-line.

RAMA