Silicon Avatar

The bad CGI alien is back, and this time it's personal!

Riker is busy hitting on colonists when suddenly a giant CGI snowflake attacks and his date is killed, and Riker is doomed to dine alone. I can’t shake the feeling this isn’t even his worse date so far. Anyway, after this dramatic opening act, the show switches to a more familiar (and cheaper!) talking heads format. An expert on the Crystalline Entity is brought aboard, and she happens to be the mother of one of the colonists killed on Omicron Theta, where Data was assembled. After initially distrusting our android officer, she comes to realise he can channel the memories of the colonists - including her son, leading to a perverse relationship between the two. When she ultimately conspires to kill the big shiny monster, Data informs her that her son would be disappointed that she betrayed her scientific ideals.

Words

Literally nobody on the production team had any desire to bring back the Crystalline Entity, but they were pulled into the concept for this episode by an intriguing pitch by an inexperienced writer, Lawrence V. Conley, whose only writing credit I can find anywhere is for this story. Jeri Taylor championed it internally:

Of all the characters to bring back, who'd have thought the Crystalline Entity? But the Moby Dick premise of this obsessed woman whose son’s consciousness was stored in Data was too good to pass up.

Michael Piller was also excited by the Moby Dick angle, while Taylor was additionally drawn to the idea of a mother’s vendetta resulting from the loss of her son. The pitch seemed to have been helped by its unusual title - in 1991 ‘avatar’ had not come into common currency in videogames, and still had an exotic quality. Taylor later suggested that “no one knew exactly what it meant”, which surprises me, since clearly it is Data who is being referred to, but perhaps I am too well-versed in the Hindu traditions (my first tabletop RPG, published in 1993, was entitled Avatar).

Ol' Yellow Eyes is Back!

Speaking of which, Brent Spiner’s Data has to carry the episode, and Spiner was not impressed:

I didn’t think it was a very good episode. If this was to really conclude the story of the crystalline entity, I don’t think it was really the way to go.

Michael Piller was similar disappointed with the final result, and to my knowledge no fan has ever taken this episode to heart. It just doesn’t adequately pay off its intentions. My own family’s response to this story was very much in line with most of the fanbase, who find it hard to side with Captain Picard’s high ideals when it comes to the suggestion to communicate with the murderous snowflake.

Acting Roles

There’s a really weird structure to this story, since it starts out implying it’s a Riker episode, but after the death of his date he slinks off into the background and the remainder of the episode is largely a double act between Ellen Geer’s Kila Marr and Brent Spiner’s Data.

Geer had a long career that started in 1961, with a recurring role as Doris in Falcon Crest and as Mary, the matriarch and midwife of ‘the World Below’ in Beauty and the Beast. She is also the daughter of Will Geer, who played the grandfather in The Waltons. I personally don’t find the double act between Geer and Spiner strong enough to hang the story upon, but this problem originates in the screenplay and isn’t the fault of the performers. The story has to step gingerly towards the goal of having Data channel Kila Marr’s son, and this eats up a lot of the time that could have been used to add depth to Geer’s character.

Then there’s poor Susan Diol as Carmen Davila.

It’s bad enough she’s set up to be just another notch on Riker’s interstellar bedpost, but they kill her off in the first act just for dramatic effect. Despite only appearing once in Seinfeld, she’s still well-known for playing Audrey, the large-nosed woman who George persuades to get a nose job, which was in fact her next role after this one. They get her back in Voyager with a far more substantial role, thankfully.

Despite the setup at the beginning of the story, Jonathan Frakes’ Riker is swiftly side-lined, and he has less to do than Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard on the whole. However, he acquits himself well in the scene where the captain questions whether his personal feelings are affecting his judgement. Nonetheless, the double act between Geer and Spiner eats up almost all the screen time, and there’s little left over for anyone else.

Oh, and yes, Brent Spiner is really playing the guitar here (pictured above). He released his album “Ol’ Yellow Eyes is Back” in the same year as this episode aired.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There’s a matte painting used to show the destruction on Delta Rana IV, but it’s not new to this episode, having been created for “The Survivors”. It does look very different in this context, though.

Also from “The Survivors” is the Husnock warship, here appearing in its modified form as the freighter Kallisko using footage shot for “The Most Toys”.

The location shots at the start of the episode took place at Golden Oak Ranch, where they shot the classic Trek episode “This Side of Paradise”. The location been used in lots of movies too - what stands out for me is the 1961 The Parent Trap and 1985’s Back to the Future, although it was also used in two of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Independence Day.

The big SFX sequence this week, however, is the attack of the Crystalline Entity. Having it superimposed over a planetary surface helps to overcome the CGI, which has aged terribly. To stage the attack, visual effects coordinator Rob Legato superimposed eighteen-inch miniature trees into the foreground of live footage of the fleeing colonists. A four-foot tarpaulin was spread along the ground and compressed air shot up through it from underneath to create the ‘sand trap’ effect.

It’s an impressive piece of composition, and sadly a lot more remarkable than the rest of the episode.