Overall Silicon Avatar is a decent episode. The actual crystalline entity stuff is pretty dull. The xenologist – Kila Marr, has nice arc – her shift from being suspicious of Data to using him to assuage her feelings of guilt over her son’s death works well, and I like that she actually goes nuts at the end. It’s not enough to bump this up to a 3, though.
But then the Crystalline Entity shows up! Riker doesn’t seem all that worried. Doesn’t he remember that it destroys all life?!
After the opening titles, he remembers.
They hide in a cave until it leaves.A Crystalline Entity specialist comes aboard to study what happened.She really doesn’t like Data, and even theorizes that he’s in cahoots. No one else has survived an attack from the Entity, even when they had better caves to hide in. Both Riker and the specialist want to kill the Entity, but Picard wants to try to communicate with it first and see if they can get it to go vegan.This was a big party until Data cleared the place out with his rendition of Your Body Is A Wonderland.Picard puts his foot on a table.The specialist learns that Data has all the records from the colony where her son was killed by the Entity.She asks Data to talk to her using the voice of her son, and it’s as weird as you’d think it would be.They find the Crystalline Entity!They start to communicate with it on a base level, but then the specialist sends a bad noise over instead of a good one.a really bad noiseShe did it for her son. The episode ends with Data telling her that her son would probably be sad about this because the son was so proud of her interest in science, but it’s too late, this lady has lost it.
