5x04 Silicon Avatar

[7.8/10] Guilt is a great motivator in storytelling. Star Trek tends to go more for straight vengeance (see: the raft of Moby Dick homages throughout the franchise), but guilt is a more interesting emotion in my book. It’s one thing to have anger at somebody who’s wounded you or taken someone away from you. It’s another to blame yourself for that loss, and try to extract a pound of flesh from someone (or something) else to assuage your guilt over it.

Dr. Marr doesn’t just want to destroy the Crystalline Entity because it took her son from her. She wants to make up for her own feelings of having abandoned her child, her self-loathing over the fact that he might have resented her for leaving him with friends to go pursue her career as a scientist, her survivor’s guilt of being off-planet when the Entity destroyed their colony, forcing her to outlive her child. She wants revenge, certainly. But she’s also trying to make up for what she perceives as her own mistakes, which makes her a compelling and unique force in the cheesily-named “Silicon Avatar”.

The episode sees the Crystalline Entity attack another colony, where Riker, Data, and Dr. Crusher happen to be helping some colonists. They and most of their charges survive the attack, but the event brings in Dr. Marr, who’s devoted her life to studying and understanding the entity after the massacre at the Omicron Theta colony. Along the way, she works with Data and the rest of the crew to find ways to track down, communicate with, and potentially neutralize the Entity, using the information they’ve gathered from this latest attack.

What’s fascinating is how her demeanor toward Data changes based on a shift in what he represents to her. When they first meet, she’s gruff and curt with Data, because to her he’s a stand-in for Lore, the person who caused the death of her child. She outright accuses him of conspiring with the Crystalline Entity, treating him more as a threat than an ally. He’s a magnet for how much resentment and anger she feels with no safe place to put it.

But eventually she reaches a turning point. Part of it comes from the realization that, despite his common origin with Lore, he’s genuinely working to help track down the Crystalline Entity and prevent more people from having to suffer the same tragedy she did. But more of it comes from the realization that Data contains not just the journal entries of the Omicron colonists, but some of their thought patterns as well. That means a piece of her son, Renny, is in there, and she begins to see Data as a reflection of this lost child, an echo of him, rather than as a representation of the thing that killed him.

It becomes difficult to reconcile Starfleet’s abundant respect for life with her desire to avenge her son’s death. One of the choices I particularly like in the episode is to make Captain Picard the symbol for that desire to treat other life as equally valid, even if it’s unfamiliar and even dangerous. His comparison between the Crystalline Entity and a sperm whale eating cuttlefish is instructive to the Entity’s destructive consumption habits, and his desire to communicate or otherwise find a non-lethal solution to interacting with the creature feels true to form for an officer so enraptured and devastated by encountering new forms of life like Junior.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s also a good counter-argument to be made that, however guileless the Crystalline Entity may be, it’s caused untold destruction and loss of life, and the moral thing to do is to destroy it rather than risk letting others suffer so it can feed. I appreciate that Riker becomes the proponent of that view, someone who lost a would-be girlfriend in the latest attack and who’s still stung by the loss, but who hasn’t been nursing a grudge as long as Dr. Marr has.

(As an aside, the opening attack has excitement and stakes through Riker’s quick connection with Cameron, a friendly colonist, that adds meaning to the panicked retreat once the entity shows up and Riker has to watch someone he cares for perish.)

Guest performers can make or break a script like this one, and Ellen Geer sells the hell out of what that grudge has done to Dr. Marr. Her terseness with Data, her warmth when she changes her mind about him, and the look of utter pain and pathos on her face when she hears her son’s voice again sell the moumentalness of what she’s going through. Despite some civilization-destroying threats and a crazy sci-fi adversary, this is really an internal episode, more about Dr. Marr’s lingering emotions and regrets, and Geer is more than up to the task of conveying those to the audience.

As I’ve said before, I always admire episodes where characters fall short of Federation ideals, especially for reasons of personal failings. So it has weight for me when the Enterprise is able to find and even contact the Crystalline Entity. It becomes apparent that the creature expresses itself through vibrations and, with enough time and effort, it might be possible to communicate with it. But Dr. Marr can’t stomach preserving, let alone making contact with, the Entity that took her boy from her. So she ups the resonance frequency to a destructive level, locking out the rest of the crew, in the hope that it will give her son peace and maybe put her guilt to rest once and for all.

There is something so human about that. So far as we know (and as Picard suggests), the Crystalline Entity is not a malevolent force. It’s just a hungry creature that may not even fully understand what it’s doing. But rather than try to broker relations, to try to find a way to stop it from hurting more communities without destroying it, Dr. Marr can only think in terms of treating it like it treated her son. The guilt gnaws at her. Her son's death haunts her. And this is the only way she can deal with it.

But the tragedy of it all is that, as Data reveals, it’s not what her son would have wanted. For however much she worried about Renny resenting her for leaving, he was proud of her. He admired her for the work that she did and the career she pursued. Sacrificing all of that in his name, to kill where there’s the potential to understand, goes against what he loved and looked up to in his mother.

In short, it’s something Dr. Marr does nominally for her son, but really for her. I don’t mean that in terms of ill-intent. She genuinely believes she’s acting to give her son justice. But in truth, she’s doing this because the guilt is too much, the loss is too deep, for there to be any other choice in her eyes, regardless of what the situation truly warrants or what her son would truly desire.

There’s a million stories of how vengeance leaves you cold and twisted. Yet, there’s not enough stories about how guilt can just as easily warp us and lead us down the wrong path. That tack adds dimension to Dr. Marr’s morality tale here, and to the constant push-and-pull between seeking out new life and protecting ourselves from its dangers, both practical and psychological, that Star Trek grapples with like no other.