“As you know, I provide the most memorable deserts.”
Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when “avatar” was a fairly obscure concept. So it was when “Silicon Avatar” aired, one of those rare episodes to come to the production via the slush pile of Michael Piller’s open-door script policy at Star Trek. It’s also one of my least favourite episodes ever, a weak-kneed semi-sequel to “Datalore” that finds a creepy old woman trying to access the Omicron Theta colonist memories stored in Data’s head, because one of those colonists was her son. I guess there’s a story there, but cripes, “Silicon Avatar” is dull.
It has a gangbusters first act, though, as Riker and the away team (after some of the most indescribably lascivious verbal foreplay in Riker’s long career of lascivious verbal foreplay) are attacked by the Crystalline Entity, which lays waste to the entire planet. It’s a great ten minutes or so, thrillingly rendered, and if the episode had had the sense to, say, pin the upcoming revenge plot on Riker or one of our other heroes, something interesting might have been made of things. As it is, though, we get Ellen Geer as Dr. Kila Marr, who is 90% of what’s wrong with the rest of the episode. I find the character loathsome, through and through, and pretty much can’t stand watching her. I think there’s a version of this attempt that would have painted Marr as somewhat tragic, but the final episode can’t find that gear. Instead we plod through four acts of Marr being pissy with Data before realizing he has her son’s memories stored in his head; and then creepy (like, almost incestuously creepy) when she starts to mistake Data for her son. And then she kills the Crystalline Entity and we all go home. Boring.
There’s something underneath all this that’s interesting, of course, being the idea of the digital “footprint” we are all now going to be leaving behind us when we die. Theoretically, if there’s no great technological crash in the 22nd century, my great great great grandchildren will be able to read Blogging the Next Generation, or listen to Mamo, or watch my movies, or have any other kind of unfettered digital access to portions of my living presence that will exist beyond my death. It’s a weird concept to grapple with – and it’s equally weird to survive a loved one and realize that, say, their Facebook account is still active, or other pieces of them linger in the great Google hive mind. I suppose we’ll get used to all this, but my generation – the boundary generation for this phenomenon – probably don’t consider the ramifications of their digital footprint as much as they should.
One last thing: there’s a hilarious shot of Picard with one of his feet cocked lazily on his desk before Riker arrives at his door, at which point Picard straightens himself up and starts acting more fussy.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.