cranked up to eleven, but by the end of the week, pretty much everyone wanted to deactivate him and sell him to the nearest Jawa." The events of the episode would be followed up in later seasons, with the crystalline entity returning in the fifth-season episode "Silicon Avatar". Brent Spiner reprised the role of Lore in the episodes "Brothers" and "Descent". Special effects The presentation of the Crystalline Entity alien this episode was re-created in computer generated graphics for the HD release on Blu-ray discs of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The original standard definition Crystalline Entity effect was also computer generated, and it was one of the first uses of CGI graphics on the show. Reception "Datalore" was first broadcast on January 18, 1988, in broadcast syndication. The episode received Nielsen ratings of 10.3 million on the first broadcast, which was a dip between "The Big Goodbye" which received ratings of 11.5 in the previous week, and "Angel One" which gained ratings of 11.4 million in the next week. Several reviewers re-watched the episode after the end of the series. Keith DeCandido reviewed the episode for Tor.com in June 2011. He summed up, "While it's important in the grand scheme of things in what it establishes about Data's background, the episode itself is horrendously bad, from the clumsy script to the embarrassingly inept body-double work." He thought the ending was anticlimactic, that the characters all acted "as dumb as posts", and that Spiner's performance as Lore was scenery chewing. DeCandido gave "Datalore" a score of four out of ten. Cast member Wil Wheaton watched the episode for AOL TV in December 2007. While he credited the art direction of the episode, he criticised the story, saying that "it comes down to lazy writing that has things happen because they're supposed to happen, rather than having them happen organically. The characters are credulous when they should be skeptical, the audience is not surprised by anything after the second act, and there are story problems that should have never gotten past the first draft." He remembered really enjoying the episode as a child, but felt that it did not hold up on repeat watchings as an adult, and stated that Spiner's "fantastic job creating distinctly different characters in Data and Lore" was not enough to remedy the other faults in the episode. He gave it a D grade. Michelle Erica Green,