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Other reviewers have done a great job at expressing their disgust with the crew for trying to "reason" with the murderous thing and attempting to understand it. I don't really like the manner in which the script puts the audience in the awkward position of almost hating the captain for his Neville Chamberlain-esque approach in this show.

But I wanted to PRAISE the OUTSTANDING ACTING of Ellen Geer in this episode. She even made me slightly emotional. NAILED IT.

What the doctor did was wrong , so wrong for a human in the 24th century, she was all about revenge. To kill it just when they had a chance to comunicate, what a shame, even the Great William Riker was wrong for the first time in the show in this one.

Only Captain Picard was right, he was the intelligent beeing, the entity had the same right to be in Space than us. I already had massive respect for Picard but This episode prove once again the Amazing Captain he is.

The way he act here is the same than Kirk and Spock would have act Revenge is primitive human emotion , that we still have in the 21st century. Thats why many people in the comments agree with the doctor, because they are primitive human.

Star Trek is about a socially advanced humanity who wear their benevolence and wisdom on their sleeves, but in actuality it's a television show written by a bunch of TV writers who are not from a socially advanced humanity. And sometimes they just botch it up horribly. This episode shows the worst side of Star Trek, when the characters become pompous, morally superior, and dumb. It kills the believability, because such people could not make it very far in even a fantasy version of our world, and certainly couldn't bear the weight of responsibility for other people's lives successfully. In this episode Captain Picard isn't a morally responsible leader, he's a farcical caricature of one. And because of that, it's just not a worthy entry into Star Trek lore.

I think this episode is more about what you would do if a mindless creature murdered your child / mother / someone close you. (In this case, how Dr. Marr feels about losing her son.)

If a bear ate your mother in front of you, would you just say "well it was hungry and that was just instinct, it didn't mean anything by it" or would you not try to kill the bear out of anger and heartbreak?

That's what this episode is about. The harshness of nature.

It's a pretty good, but sad episode. At first Dr. Marr comes across as being crazy, but then you quickly realize she was driven crazy by the death of her son. Who wouldn't be? So as the episode progresses, we being to relate more to her. I think it's a good episode because of the way it makes us think about someone's extreme emotional response to a horrible situation. It's part of being human.

This episode begins with Riker about to get his groove on with yet another alien when out of nowhere comes that dreaded Crystaline entity. It kills some of the settlers (depriving Riker of some more nookie) and the rest miraculously survive and are rescued by the Enterprise.

Soon, Dr. Kila Marr (Ellen Geer--daughter of Will Geer, by the way) comes to the Enterprise to monitor the entity as they pursue it. It seems that in addition to knowing more about the killing machine that anyone, her son was also killed by it--and she is ticked! However, Picard soon makes it clear that his goal is NOT to kill it (even though it basically eats planets) and wants to try to establish contact with the crystalline entity). Naturally Dr. Marr is NOT pleased with Picard's namby-pamby attitude. What's next?

This episode was unusual in that I really found myself hating Picard. I understand about the Federation's whole Prime Directive thing, but the creature eats planets...and he wants to try to be it's pal! He also seems indifferent to the thousands (and perhaps billions) of folks it's killed. And, at the end, SHE is seen as a baddie because Dr. Marr wants to kill it. I say KILL IT!!! A strangely unsatisfying episode.