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Star Trek TNG S05E04-06 Silicon Avatar | Disaster | The Game – “Kwazy Kupcakes” | First Time Reaction – To Baldly Go Podcast (Ep. 068)

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First-Time Watch – Star Trek: the Next Generation Season 5, Episodes 4-6

Our first-time watch through Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 continues with Silicon Avatar, Disaster, and The Game.

This week gives us three very different episodes: the return of an old enemy, a disaster that puts familiar characters into completely unfamiliar situations, and a story about addictive technology that somehow feels considerably more relevant now than it probably did in 1991.

Across the three episodes, we found ourselves talking about:

  • Great concepts that don’t always stick the landing

  • Characters placed into unexpected situations and pairings

  • How people respond when they're pushed outside their normal roles

  • Technology, addiction, and dopamine

  • Episodes that contain all the right ingredients but somehow still don’t quite work

We covered:

Silicon Avatar

The Crystalline Entity is back.

After destroying another human settlement, the creature the Enterprise first encountered all the way back in Season 1 once again becomes the focus of Data and the crew. This time, they are joined by Dr. Kila Marr, a scientist who has spent years studying the Entity after losing her son during its attack on Omicron Theta.

What initially looks like a scientific mission slowly becomes something much more personal.

There is a lot here that works. The callback to Data’s past gives the episode a sense of history, and Dr. Marr’s obsession raises an interesting question: what happens when someone dedicates their entire life to understanding — or destroying — the thing they blame for their greatest loss?

Unfortunately, we weren’t sure the episode knew how to finish that story.

Things we discussed:

  • A cool concept that was poorly executed

  • The return of an…enemy?

  • Calling back to events from five seasons earlier

  • A good episode that didn’t quite stick the landing

  • Why the ending suddenly gets strange

  • Whether there was any way this story could have ended satisfactorily

  • Dedicating your life to finding and destroying something

  • Data’s subtle character development

  • How actors fake playing musical instruments

  • Some Starfleet Academy discussion

Disaster

A collision with a quantum filament cripples the Enterprise, leaving different groups of characters isolated throughout the ship.

And that gives us some pairings we would probably never have gotten otherwise.

Picard is trapped in a turbolift with a group of children. Worf is stuck in Ten Forward with Keiko O’Brien as she goes into labor. Crusher and La Forge have their own crisis in the cargo bay. And on the bridge, Troi suddenly discovers that being the highest-ranking officer present means she is now in command.

The episode balances a legitimate threat to the Enterprise with a surprising amount of comedy — and somehow the combination works.

More importantly, it gives several characters a chance to surprise us.

Things we discussed:

  • Watching Star Trek on a phone versus a television

  • Worf in extremely awkward situations

  • Unusual character pairings

  • Balancing comedy against an existential threat

  • Science words!

  • What happened to Troi’s empathic abilities?

  • Cheese that actually works

  • Characters proving they still have the ability to surprise us

  • Troi reluctantly accepting command

  • Physics in the vacuum of space

  • Galaxy Quest

The Game

Riker returns from Risa with a new game.

That probably should have been a warning sign.

Before long, nearly everyone aboard the Enterprise is wearing a headset and obsessively playing a simple game that stimulates the brain’s reward centers. When Wesley Crusher returns from Starfleet Academy, he quickly realizes something very strange is happening to his old crew.

There are so many pieces here that should make for a great episode.

Wesley is back. There is a conspiracy taking over the Enterprise. The episode is playing with addiction, technology, peer pressure, and manipulation. Decades later, it is almost impossible to watch without thinking about smartphones, social media, mobile games, and the constant hunt for another tiny dopamine hit.

And yet, despite all of that, we just didn’t care very much.

Sometimes an episode really can be less than the sum of its parts.

Things we discussed:

  • A surprisingly good metaphor for modern social media

  • Kwazy Kupcakes!

  • South Park and Brooklyn Nine-Nine doing similar ideas better

  • Having all the elements of a great episode without actually becoming one

  • Wanting to like an episode but just not caring

  • Phone addiction before smartphones existed

  • Wesley’s return

  • Phone games versus Super Mario Bros.

  • Idioms

  • Neuralink

  • Another Star Trek after-school anti-drug special?

  • Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64

  • Our favorite phone games

  • Jigsaw puzzles and dopamine hits

Final Thoughts

This was an interesting group because all three episodes gave us something worth talking about, even when we weren’t completely satisfied with the final product.

“Silicon Avatar” has a compelling premise and some surprisingly effective connections to Data’s history, but the ending left us cold. “Disaster” takes a fairly straightforward crisis and makes it work by putting characters into roles and relationships we rarely get to see. And “The Game” may have the most interesting idea of the three — especially looking at it from 2026 — but somehow never becomes as compelling as its premise suggests it should be.

A quick production note: I had some internet issues during this recording, and there are a few moments where the audio dropped.