1x22 Skin of Evil

[3.4/10] Tasha Yar was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that (at least until alternate timelines and flashbacks and the other sci-fi mishegoss that Star Trek does and loves so well). And the frustrating thing is that it doesn’t really matter.

It doesn’t matter because nearly a full season in, we still barely know Tasha. We know she escaped from a harsh planet full of [shudder] “rape gangs.” We know she’s a “warrior” who can throw down with holographic ninjas. We know that against her better judgment she’s attracted to everyone from Data to Captain Picard to the asshole leader from “Code of Honor.” But honestly, I can understand why Denise Crosby wanted off the show. After twenty-two episodes, she’s barely two-dimensional, let alone memorable. So when she dies, it’s hard to feel the loss.

It also doesn’t happen with a great deal of drama or intensity. We just see a big goo monster swat her across the landscape and are then told later that it “sucked the life force out of her.” It’s a surprisingly standard display of force, without anything particularly noteworthy or serious, that ends up felling her. Sure, we get a scene in sickbay where Dr. Crusher frantically tries to revive her to no avail, but even that seems pretty mild and lacking in the gravity it should for a main character perishing. The closest we get to it really disrupting the usual weekly adventure is the crewmembers being extra gabby at the usual “What should we do next?” board meeting.

But maybe the biggest disservice to Yar and to Crosby is that this weekly adventure is downright terrible, scanning as something yanked out of the TOS reject pile. Counselor’s Troi shuttle crashes and the Enterprise crew has to deal with an amoral demigod oil slick who lives for misfortune and torture. It uses its powers to toy with the crew, try to convince them to do terrible things for its amusement, and ultimately get it off this planet.

But none of this is interesting. Most of it is dull, with long stretches where nothing happens but the oil slick, named Armus, just monologuing at our heroes while they fruitlessly debate the merits of compassion and respect for life. It’s a tired, caricatured debate, which was held with far more interesting antagonists long before and long after “Skin of Evil.”

It certainly doesn’t help that Armus himself is laughable.The show aims to make this monster a bigger threat than the usual foe, essentially sacrificing Tasha to show its power and might. But it’s hard to feel that when it talks like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, both in terms of its goofy booming intonation and halting speech pattern for everything, not to mention the awful, generic dialogue the writers give it. You half expect there to be a Trelane-like twist where it’s just a child, because only a ten-year-old would find such generic declarations of villainy interesting or scary.

Likewise, the look of the thing is horrible, and not in a good way. Armus basically looks like Magneto if he were trapped in a goopy trash bag. You can see the show shooting for a proto-Venom vibe here, with an inky black villain sluicing around as though unbound by the laws of physics, but it ends up playing like a dude in a sheet who got himself trapped in a tub of chocolate pudding. There’s a few cool visual moments, like Riker getting sucked down into that puddle, but mostly it just looks silly, even by 1988 T.V. budget special effects standards. Even the one striking image here, of Armus rising from the muck, is a well the episode goes to too many times until it loses all impact.

And that’s all the episode really has to offer. Armus bloviates about dimestore nihilism to the Starfleet officers for what feels like an interminable amount of time. They strive to rescue Counselor Troi in increasingly half-baked or cockamamie ways. Little happens beyond the same repetitive “tests” and Saw-like games to try to prove that everyone is as cruel and heartless as Armus is, while the good guys dutifully resist and display their over-the-top noble selflessness. It has all the depth of a thimble full of hot fudge topping.

The one truly amusing thing about the episode is that Picard basically speechifies the damn thing to death. It takes an off-the-shelf Picard speech about humanity’s goodness to send the creature into such paroxysms of pain that its energy depletes and Worf is able to break its hold on the away team and beam everyone up. Despite its cartoonishly evil bent, I can sympathize with the goop monster, as Picard’s thudding oratory almost pained me into submission as well.

Then comes Yar’s memorial, where she just so happened to record a farewell message to her crewmates in the event of her death. The senior staff gathers on a Windows desktop background to bid goodbye and hear Tasha’s last words to them. Instead, she basically goes through each person’s character sheet as though she’d been reading from the series bible.

The problem is that Tasha had been underserved by the show up to this point, so it’s not as though we’ve seen tons of interactions between her and the others to support such kind words about her alleged “friends.”’ The episode tries to hotwire this a bit with a nice enough moment between her and Worf in the early going, but the truth is that TNG just hasn’t earned the sentiment it’s going for as Tasha departs, a closing tribute to the way she was often present, but barely developed as a character in the series’ early run.

The best thing you can say about “Skin of Evil” is that it draws (maybe accidentally) a stirring parallel between Armus and Tasha. Eventually, Troi learns that Armus was abandoned on this planet, the product of some luminous beings who were able to separate out everything bad about them and eventually expel it. Armus is a sentient splat of maliciousness, but there’s at least hints that he’s miserable and even pitiable in what he’s become from that origin. Tasha also had a rough road to the present, having survived a failed colony and had to make it on her own from an incredibly young age.

The Next Generation teases out the contrast between them. Armus is seemingly immortal, but unhappy and unenviable because he serves only evil, and is thus trapped by it. Picard’s dumb speech lays it on too thick, but it’s an interesting enough idea. Tasha, on the other hand, dies, but she dies doing something she believes in, serving the good, and loved her life for that. “Skin of Evil” suggests that despite its abrupt ending, a life ended too soon lived in pursuit of the good is preferable to an eternal life that knows only the hollowness of aimless malevolence. The delivery mechanism is atrocious, but the idea has merit.

Still, that may be giving TNG and “Skin of Evil” too much credit. It’s rare to be able to kill off a main character, especially in the era before The Sopranos’s prestige TV boom made it more common. Instead of utilizing that to give the character a meaningful death, or at least a good episode, The Next Generation squanders Yar’s departure in a display of bad storytelling, embarrassing villains, and feelings that ring hollow instead of true.