“Skin of Evil”
Written by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer
Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan
Season 1, Episode 23
Original air date: April 25, 1988
Star date: 41601.3
Mission summary
Since not much is going on, Chief-Engineer-of-the-Week Leland T. Lynch decides to polish the Enterprise’s dilithium crystals; fortunately, chugging along at impulse just means it will take that much longer to pick up shuttlecraft 13, in which Counselor Troi is returning from a conference on “How to Succeed in Starfleet Without Really Trying.” Then sensors read an emergency on the shuttle, interrupting Worf and Tasha’s long-overdue bonding moment—she’s really looking forward to a martial arts competition in a few days, and Worf’s betting on her, even though they don’t have any money in the future. (Or maybe because they don’t have any money in the future.)
The shuttle inexplicably loses power and crashes on the uninhabited planet Vagra II in the Zed Lapis sector. Lynch jams the dilithium crystals into the warp core and hopes for the best, and the ship races to the planet. But something blocks their ability to scan the shuttle or beam up its survivors—debris or something, maybe. Riker, Yar, Data, and Dr. Crusher beam down to investigate.
Shuttle 13 is in bad shape, but the away team can’t approach it because a black puddle on the rocky ground keeps oozing to intercept them. Weird. Data’s totally stumped, but suggests that it could be a living creature. “Very good, tin man,” it intones, and a humanoid shape rises from the muck.
They exchange pleasantries—the thing’s name is Armus—and Riker requests access to the shuttle. Armus declines, and Yar decides to force the issue. The creature zaps her, sending her flying, and easily absorbs the energy from Riker and Data’s phasers. Dr. Crusher pronounces Yar dead, but still spends a while trying to revive her, to no avail. Bummer.
They briefly discuss the senselessness of Yar’s death, then Picard promotes Worf to Acting Chief of Security; after all, he wouldn’t be a true Klingon if he didn’t benefit from his superior’s untimely death. Worf immediately proves himself more competent than Yar by deciding to remain aboard the ship to develop a tactical solution to their problem, while Riker’s team returns to the planet with La Forge, who hopes to offer a different perspective on their slick adversary.
Down on the planet, Armus covers the shuttlecraft to chat with Troi. He tells her that her friends have left her, but she doesn’t believe him. She can sense the creature’s nature and knows that he needs to make people suffer. And, oh look, here’s the away team. It’s play time! When he leaves the shuttlecraft, Worf and Wesley on Enterprise note that his energy levels were lower while he was covering it—a common side effect of talking to Troi—which they may be able to exploit to beam everyone to safety.
Armus keeps messing with them: He makes Data’s instruments fly away and knocks La Forge’s VISOR off his face. What a jerk. Armus slips off to chat with Troi again, and tells her that he is the castoff, concentrated negativity from a powerful and beautiful race—left behind like some sort of… Skin of Evil! Troi’s pity for him only pisses him off enough to drag Riker into himself. There’s only one reasonable course of action—Captain Picard must beam down to the planet and place himself in mortal danger with the rest of his command crew in order to deal with Armus personally.
Armus toys with the away team some more, forcing Data to aim his phaser at Dr. Crusher and making her choose the next person to die. But Picard has realized that talking about his feelings makes Armus weaker, so he convinces him to let the others go. Armus spews out an oil-covered Riker and allows the away team to beam away while he and Picard parlay. All Armus wants is a starship, but Picard insists on seeing Troi first.
As the captain and counselor help Armus confront his troubled past, Worf and Wesley manage to beam up Troi, the injured shuttlecraft pilot, and Picard, leaving Armus behind to scream in impotent rage. They blow up the shuttle to remove his last chance of escape, slap up a “Do Not Enter” warning on the planet, and get the hell out of there. But there’s still one more bit of unpleasantness to get through… Yar’s funeral.
Yar has left a recorded message for each of her “friends” on the holodeck, where she shares the things she learned from and appreciated about each of them. Her last is for Captain Picard.
YAR: If there was someone in this universe I could choose to be like, someone who I would want to make proud of me, it’s you. You who have the heart of an explorer and the soul of a poet. So, you’ll understand when I say, death is that state in which one exists only in the memory of others. Which is why it is not an end. No goodbyes. Just good memories. Hailing frequencies closed, sir.
PICARD: Au revoir, Natasha. The gathering is concluded.
DATA: Sir, the purpose of this gathering confuses me.
PICARD: Oh? How so?
DATA: My thoughts are not for Tasha, but for myself. I keep thinking how empty it will feel without her presence. Did I miss the point?
PICARD: No, you didn’t, Data. You got it.
She’s not really dead as long as we remember her. What was her name again? Tar?
Analysis
At last, our long national nightmare is over.
I feel bad that I’m actually relieved at the death of a series regular, but it’s just one more step to getting this show to the TNG I love. Who knows how the show might have turned out if Denise Crosby had played Counselor Troi instead of Marina Sirtis, or if she had remained on the show longer? But as senseless as her death was—about as senseless as the rest of the episode—bigger and better things await her. As much as I dislike Yar in the first season, her mind-bending return to TNG in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is one of the highlights of the series for me, as is the creative way they bring Crosby back into the fold as a recurring character. Even seeing her again in “All Good Things…” is a special treat that oddly enough does more to flesh out her character than the entire first season of forced exposition. Truly, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
I imagine that even with the likely rumors that Crosby was leaving the show, or hints that a major character would die, Yar’s brutal, bizarre, meaningless death must have been a shock at the time. Far from a dispensable red shirt on the original series, she’s a character that some people must have grown to like, or at least identify with. Maybe even care about her, a little? As Dr. Crusher works to save her life, viewers might have expected a last-minute miracle, but it would take many more seasons before she would be brought back to life. But hey, I have a more important question: What was that strange mark on her cold, lifeless cheek?
The biggest problem with Yar’s death is that the characters aren’t able to truly deal with it. She dies twelve minutes in and the rest of the episode proceeds pretty much as usual, aside from an excruciating holographic farewell—which must have been ironic for Crosby to deliver since she tells them to dwell on “good memories.” We won’t see anyone wrestling with her loss in any significant way next week, and pretty soon we’re on to a new season; the only person who shows any real sense of loss is Data, who holds onto that holo recording of her. (On a side note, are these really the only people who liked her on the ship? And why is she transparent if she’s a holographic image… on a holodeck?) It’s kind of mean to make her last words on the show, “Hailing frequencies closed, sir,” don’t you think?
Although the “episode where Yar dies” is otherwise basically a write-off—Armus looks and sounds like a monster-of-the-week on The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, with little more to motivate him than he’s made of evil—it touches on the classic Star Trek themes of immortality, abandonment, and loneliness. But I’m most fascinated by Armus’ probing questions about whether one life means just as much as another to Troi. Though she and Riker insist that all life is equal and deserves to exist, it rings falsely. “Preserving life, all life, is very important to us,” Riker says. “We believe everything in the universe has a right to exist.” Countered by this:
DATA: Curious. You are capable of great sadism and cruelty. Interesting. No redeeming qualities.
ARMUS: So what do you think?
DATA: I think you should be destroyed.
ARMUS: A moral judgment from a machine.
When I saw the explosion on the planet’s surface, for a moment I thought that Picard had bombed the crap out of it to destroy Armus, but it may be an even worse punishment to leave him there forever, alone. I will also note that Picard never lies to Armus; he very carefully avoids promising to transport him off the planet, evading the question and enforcing conditions on agreement before finally flat out refusing him. I appreciated this small bit of morality, in an episode where it’s important for the Enterprise crew not to resort to Armus’ measures to survive.
So in the end, unlike Armus, this episode has some redeeming qualities, but it is further crippled by extra screen time for an overwrought Counselor Troi, as well as yet another example of the captain beaming down into a hazardous situation. Aside from this episode’s ultimate importance to the series now and in years to come, I think we should warn off any who think of approaching it.
Eugene’s Rating: Warp 1 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: Perhaps not technically a fashion choice, per se, but Armus’ costume, or whatever, is Gorn-level ridiculous and I really expect a lot better from Star Trek by now.
Best Line: PICARD: You say you are true evil? Shall I tell you what true evil is? It is to submit to you. It is when we surrender our freedom, our dignity, instead of defying you.
Trivia/Other Notes: The original title for this episode was “The Shroud.”
Jonathan Frakes was submerged in Metamucil and printer’s ink for the scene in which Riker is absorbed into Armus. At the time, LeVar Burton reportedly told him, “Frakes, I never would have done that!”
Yar was originally killed even earlier in the episode, with less emphasis on her death. Roddenberry felt that her death was fitting for a security officer.
Marina Sirtis sheds real tears for Yar during the memorial scene; she and Denise Crosby had become close friends. The cast was very sad to see her go.
According to Ron Moore, Yar’s character was brought back in response to fan and staff reactions to her death. (Another perspective might be that they hated her so much, they killed her twice.)
Writer Joseph Stefano was a veteran of the 1963 science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits–and it shows.
Previous episode: Season 1, Episode 22 – “Symbiosis.”
Next episode: Season 1, Episode 24 – “We’ll Always Have Paris.”
I can only speak for myself, but as I remember it the news that Crosby was leaving was well known and the episode had no tension for me. In fact I have always hated the ‘CPR of the future scene’ because no one else get it. Before and after anyone who dies will simply be dead, not heroically but futile attempts to revive them.
I do remember wondering who was that had cast off Armus, oil slick of evil. They could not have been as noble and good as they proclaimed to leave such dangerous evil lying around unguarded, ready to pounce on any passing shuttle. (And I’m still voting the Organians)
This episode also had the tired cliche of the captain ordering repairs faster than the estimate. Lynch is a pretty crappy engineer if he tells the captain 20 min, but it can be done in three simply by ordering it.
Hey, don’t you go dissing The Outer Limits. The original was a great show and Stefano wrote some decent episodes for it. Unlike this one. (Although maybe Stafano’s original script was better.)
There really aren’t any redeeming features, are there? The sets are bad, even by season 1 standards. Hell, they’re bad by TOS standards. The McGuffin is stupid. Yar’s death is stupid. About the only thing going for it is that Troi sort of almost does her job. She actually does a little head-shrinking on Armus and it sort of works for a while.
As far as LeVar Burton’s comments about not being willing to roll around in Metamucil and printer’s ink: Man, he should talk. Every time he takes off the VISOR and has to put in those solid white scleral shells I cringe. I’ve got a serious eye thing, and just the thought putting those in or taking them out makes my skin crawl.
Obviously, the main topic here is Yar. It was pretty well known that Crosby was leaving the show and there was talk they were going to kill her character off, but to make it such a meaningless death, one that didn’t even really advance the plot in any way, turned off a lot of people, even those who didn’t like Tasha. I almost think this was the producers’ way of punishing Denise Crosby for not liking what was being done with her character, talking publicly about it, and finally asking to leave the show because of it. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” could be seen as an apology of sorts, giving Yar a good death. But then they went and took that away from her, too. I did like Sela though.
Aside: I went to Memory Alpha to look up Sela’s name and they had a photo of Yar’s goodbye hologram. My first thought was, “That’s the “§&%ing Windows 95 default desktop background!” Then I realized Win 95 was still 7 and a half years in the future. Now I’m just puzzled.
I hate this episode. I know it’s cause she wanted to leave, but I do believe her character could have been a real genre-breaker for the time, a tough, competent, and yet still attractive and clearly a woman. Instead we got Miz FEEEEEEEELINGS and two versions of Doctor Cares-a-Lot, and all the decisive, action-oriented roles went to men, all the way until Ro Laren shows up, way too late.
Instead they misused her, shoved her aside, gave her the horrid background, and never gave her (Crosby) the chance to grow as an actor that some of the other less…initially gifted…of the actors got (*ahem*FrakesSirtisWheaton*ahem*).
And we went back to the groundbreaking (not) situation of having the old white man be in charge, the next-oldest white man 2iC, the white-man-painted-green as third/Braino, one Black man as a sexless differently abled engineer/helmsman, another as the always-violent-before-talking brute, and the two women in charge of caring for heart (Crusher) and soul (Troi). I’d stopped watching by this point, but when I saw the show later I loathed them for making it.
I really like a decent death – if she’d done something heroic, ANYTHING, in the death scene, it would have been much more tolerable. I can take a pointless death when the dying one chooses it. But to just have this pointless act, out of nowhere, with no opportunity for anything to make it a “good” death? That’s a crap way to get rid of a character intended to be important to the show, and especially the only mould-breaking character of the bunch. :/
@3 Caitie
Well said, though I’m not sure Pulaski counts as a Doctor Cares-A-Lot. She’s a rather less pleasant female stereotype, but we’ll get to her. I’d also quibble with your inclusion of Wil Wheaton in that list. He had already turned in an outstanding performance in Stand By Me. One that had actually left me slightly optimistic about his character before the show began. He, more than anybody else, may have been a victim of the writing. Looking back, I feel like the writers really hated the Mary Sue-ness of Wesley, especially while Roddenberry was leaving his greasy fingerprints all over everything, and they took it out on the character as best and nastily as they could.
I can concede on Wheaton; I may be influenced by my current view of his current self, of whom I have rather less stellar an opinion than many seem to.
But I’d say Pulaski is exactly that: she only turns grumpy (like Bones did) when she’s thwarted in her intense drive both to help people and to ignore her own needs in doing so. She regularly risks her own life to do so,, making her a form of the self-sacrificing mother figure that is so, so common (oh, ye gawds, Supernatural and its MOMMY ISSUES!). I like her, personally more than Crusher, because at least she’s not almost always nice to people, which the lovely Ms. McFadden often is.
Plus, y’know, Diana Muldaur. Who’d been in two of the most awesome episodes from the old series! :D
I fell asleep watching this–twice–and laughed out loud fairly continuously through the eulogy. Maybe I’m a bad person.
An oil slick was never, ever going to be a believable character, and an alien with no motivation other than “well it’s just evil” does not a villain make. In any case, if you KNOW you have a nasty environmental hazard down there holding one of your people hostage and killing another one, why would you let the captain beam down. In fact, why would you let ANYONE beam down. I’d just send down a hologram, or Data, or a sack of turnips. That’d probably piss him off and tada! Emotional drano.
For a group of allegedly compassionate, progressive spacefarers, what they do to Armus in the end is the height of cruelty. If he’s so dangerous and so alone, just put the thing out of its misery. Don’t condemn it to another million years of isolation.
As for Lt. Tar: what the hell. I understand on an intellectual level why Roddenberry was interested in showing someone dying in the line of duty. But as an emotional viewer, that was absolute crap. You can have someone die on a routine mission but can they maybe do something?!?! It doesn’t even have to be a cliche kind of heroism. It can be a private, personal kind of heroism that defines her. But nothing about her death contributed anything to a) the episode; b) her character; c) the progression of the series; or d) the emotional development of the other characters. Eugene is right, no one has to face her death except for a lengthy three-minute presentation. There’s no wrestling with what that death means, how the other characters weigh the risks they themselves take every day, or whether that mission was worth losing a friend over. It’s just senseless and emotionally vacuous.
The eulogy: where is the rest of the crew?? ST has this problem a lot, where they think that the people you see on the bridge are the only friends anybody has. Either there’s a strict caste system going on, or it’s seriously contrived writing. (One of the few things I liked about DS9 was that people had all kinds of friends in all areas of the station.)
I also just don’t buy that I’d want the rest of my friends to hear what I have to say to each person individually. For one, I know I’d feel a lot more special if my dead friend send me a personal note than just lumped it into a bucket checklist to be read in front of everyone. I cannot BELIEVE that the writers had Tasha thank Troi for teaching her how to be feminine. Just wow. The real problem here is that Tasha thanks people for who they are using adjectives to describe their virtues–virtues we have never seen in action. If the series had bothered to show instead of tell, there’d be no need for any of that sequence. If the show had actually put these people in situations that highlighted the qualities Tasha imagines in them, we would feel the force of her goodbye without her having to say it. As it is, it feels like the hollow desperation of a hack writer getting his digs into a character he loathes one last time.
Rating: Impulse power.
Ding-dong, the witch is dead.
Aw, that’s not fair. Tasha probably wasn’t really a witch. But—like the Witch of the East, upon whom Dorothy’s Kansas cottage falls—the only thing we really knew about her is what others said about her.
“An outstanding officer.” Never saw it. Never saw it, before her stockinged toes curled up and withdrew under the house the writers threw down on her in a cyclone of terrible scripts and casting choices.
Though they changed the division colors, Tasha goes out in the most pathetic and meaningless manner of the lowest ranked Red Shirt. Ever.
The closest this gang rape survivor ever got to a characterization was when she got roofied on polywater and set out to hornily hunt down the ship’s biggest battery-operated sex toy, a fully funktional positronic phallus. Cmdr. Data—evidently only pretending to be drunk just to get lucky like a frat boy, since no other explanation was offered or made sense—leaped at the idea of joining in on the date rape of a junior officer. Horrid, just horrid.
The next stab at characterization was when this gang rape survivor was captured for Idi Amin’s (or was it Mobutu?) love slave harem and forced into some saucy girl-on-girl action. Again, horrid.
Women’s issues in TNG get handled with the same clumsiness as other issues of social justice: An arrogant fiat at the outset that such problems do not exist in the STU, followed by a sludge of scripts that indicate (directly or indirectly), yes, they do.
One wonders if she could have been written any better, given the era and the emphasis. It probably is worth contemplating how different the show would have been had she stayed, and not in a good way.
My guess is, there would have been more “girls, they wanna have fun” playfulness among the Troika, more Risa-style risquiness. You saw a glimpse of that dark future when the girls laughed at Riker’s disco diaper in “Angel One.” The excellent Michael Dorn would have remained longer in the background… but not forever because, in one of the unwritten rules of SF screenwriting, alien warriors are more fun to write about than rape victims. And writers can handle the character issues better there, too.
As for the rest, a TNG Season 8 Tweet cast it best:
@ 1 bobsandiego
DeepThought and I both shouted at the engineer when ordering him to go faster miraculously forced faster results. Engineering does not work that way!
And yeah, the attempted zombie resurrection is just weird.
@ 2 DemetriosX
I wear contacts, so that doesn’t bother me…
I had forgotten that Yar dies like five minutes into the episode. There’s really no purpose whatsoever to her demise.
@ 3 CaitieCat and @ 7 Lemnoc
Honestly, I’m glad they didn’t go whole-hog on Yar and try to do anything with her. Forget the potential. They basically revamped her character for DS9 as Kira, and that was a disaster. Kira’s hard-nosed and doesn’t take shit from people, which would be good, except that her character is always wrong, and they even gave her a little rape gang planet past of her own, and her mommy had Stockholm Syndrome. And she’s the love object for several other characters and mostly exists to motivate others’ mistakes. But mostly she’s wrong. When Eugene and I watched DS9 a few years ago we realized too late that we should have kept track of the number of times she offers a solution or idea that the entire crew shits on because, well, it’s usually idiotic and motivated by emotions.
I love a good death myself, which is probably why I can tolerate traipsing through the forest enough to love Lord of the Rings. Imagine how much more powerful this episode could have been if Yar had chosen her death.
Time for me to buck the trend, I guess.
I’m a big fan of anti-drama. All main characters should be in jeopardy, at all times, and that can only be demonstrated by offing a few of them now and again. The flaw with this episode isn’t that Yar was offed suddenly, for no reason, and with no preamble–that was the awesome part–but that she got her interminable dying speech anyway.
This felt like a TOS episode, both good and bad, and I was pretty satisfied with it. I never felt Yar needed a “proper” death, and never really cared that much for “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
I suppose if I’d kept up with entertainment news more, I’d have known something about Crosby’s departure, but instead it came as a complete surprise–which is probably the best way to have seen the episode.
Ah, the episode that gave Denise Crosby her best role: playing a holographic image on that little device which Data keeps. Seriously…everyone must know by now that I dislike Lt. Yar and hold Data in utter contempt most of the time, but when he resigns his commission in “Measure of the Man” and pulls out that holographic memento of Lt. Yar for a few seconds, I actually tear up a little bit, even knowing that the basis for Data’s sentimentality is in one of the worst TNG episodes ever made.
I’ve also never liked Dr. Crusher much but she demonstrates a quality in this episode that is lacking both from Dr. McCoy (however much I may adore him) and from his regrettably inferior (but still appealing) copy Dr. Pulaski: she does what I expect a doctor ought to do when a patient flatlines, which is to rush around frantically and do everything possible to save him or her. We joke about McCoy’s habit of saying, “He’s dead,” but really it’s not that funny. I don’t think any doctor worth his or her salt would merely check a dead man’s pulse and pronounce him a goner without at least trying to resuscitate him first. McCoy and Pulaski hardly ever bothered but Crusher, with Lt. Yar, tries everything she can. I like that.
OK, so maybe she wasn’t the best doctor, but…man, I’ll never understand the hatred for Dr. Pulaski. She had ten times Dr. Crusher’s force of personality and so what if she was mean to Data. Someone needed to be mean to Data, considering how everyone else indulged his antics.
I must be the only Trekkie who loathes Sela. She was horrible, sorry. Cursed with all of Yar’s worst qualities–smugness, stridency, wooden line delivery–she was never blessed with anything to redeem her at all aside from that fact that we’re supposed to feel something for her because she’s sort of kind of a renascence of Tasha Yar, complete with the ghostly echo of her affinity for Data.
@9 S. Hutson Blount
All main characters should be in jeopardy, at all times, and that can only be demonstrated by offing a few of them now and again.
That’s true, and it’s something a lot of shows don’t have the guts to do. Even Joss Whedon flinches a bit, but the deaths in Serenity go a long way toward providing an actual sense of danger for the remaining characters in the final minutes of the film. I admire that.
And though I agree wholeheartedly with what everyone else has said about Yar’s farewell speech, I dig the idea that crew members have recorded these messages because they could be killed at any moment. Though I did wonder how often she had to update it. That’s one of the tricky things about lumping all the messages together.
@10 etomlins
I must be the only Trekkie who loathes Sela. She was horrible, sorry. Cursed with all of Yar’s worst qualities–smugness, stridency, wooden line delivery
Ah, but those traits are perfect for a Romulan security officer! I didn’t like Sela exactly, but I was intrigued by her and like what she represented to the Enterprise crew.
@10 etomlins
Sela remains aggravating because of the might-have-been factor: despite all that setup, they decided to make her a buffoon. I don’t have the same antipathy for Denise Crosby that seems to be prevalent here, but she in no way compared to Andreas Katsulas’ Tomalok for scenery-chewing awesomeness.
Actually, watch Pulaski in “Unnatural Selection” and you will see the fiercest ever dedication and sacrifice a doctor ever made for the life of her patient(s).
Hate to say it, but one of the things that probably made Pulaski shine as a character was she was older and therefore ipso facto not a sex object, and therefore the writers could focus on things other than her boobs and hair. They actually had to treat her as a person—you know, have a conversation with something other than her chest—and they did.
You’re not alone there. All of the wood and clumsy delivery, unredeemed by any sort of humility and joy the Good Guys are required to emit in order to be, uh, good.
Sela’s story arc just heaps more dung on the bio of Tasha Yar. The rape camp victim did not die an honorable death after all, but was captured alive (presumably allowing the Enterprise C tech to fall into the hands of the enemy) and forced to copulate with her captors and bear their seed. Again, horrid.
@11 Eugene
Yes, it’s something I and my friends do for one another all the time. I’ve found a Tumblr blog works really great for the constantly evolving declarations and obit ;-)
@ Caitiecait
Of course Yar could have been a good or even great character, but not with this writing crew.It didn’t help that Ms. Crosby was at best a mid-level talent and so given horrid lines she couldn’t save the character from becoming nothing more than a joke, but the prinicple fault lies in the lines and not the star. You can still have the anarchy world background, but you have to think what does that mean to the character and how would it color her view of people?
No one would survive on such a planet without a group. period. Loyalty to the people who have your back would be paramount, not to ideals, but the concrete people guarding you while you sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. Anyone outside of the group is always suspect. Treason is the greatest sin. No one is innocent. Eat well today because tomorrow you may starve. Be proactive, because those who wait are lost. These are some of the things someone like Yar would have learned very early on.
Now take her out of that envirnment and put her in Starfleet. SHe’s unlikely to be super dedicated to the ideals of Starfleet, but more loylal to her crew and even to the particualr crew memebr who mentally map to her gang. She’s going to be more suspcious of strangers, more questioning of the state motives of those encountered, and more of a prove it to me kind of person.
@Bob #15
Yes, yes yes yes yes and yes. This is a huge flaw in the writing of this show — it never bothered to think about things. It was just “BAM! Rape gang planet! Okay, backstory done, now she does whatever the plot requires this week… just like everybody else!”
Another index of the weak writing in this episode is something we’ve been seeing as a theme for the last several episodes this season — the writers have no idea what to do at the beginning that isn’t filler. We had the space light show last week, now this week we get to Thrill! as Routine Starship Maintenance Happens At An Inconvenient Time! Maybe next week the check-engine light will come on and the Enterprise will stop to have some transmission repairs before the plot starts. Seriously, why is this in the episode? I’ll tell you why — because these writers’ idea of “character” was to have Picard shout at people, and because they had no idea whatsoever what story they were trying to tell. It was just some stuff that happens anyway, so why not put some nonsensical tech the tech crap at the beginning? Nonsensical, by the way, *on its face*, because you don’t stop and overhaul anything when you’re on the way to meet someone. Why would you do that.
In light of all this, while I suppose Tar could’ve represented a great genre-transgressing opportunity for the show, in reality it just wouldn’t have played out. Whether the writing or the direction or who knows what, Dorn was already taking stage from Crosby, and with the amount of fat in these episodes we just wouldn’t have had enough actual events to develop anyone without getting some of the characters off the bridge. In the hands of better writers, absolutely, Yar could’ve been a tremendous asset; but it just didn’t work out that way, and it’s entirely to Dorn’s credit that he’s able to make a character out of practically nothing and really start to shine.
I mean, this stuff goes all the way down to the level of direction and blocking. Look at how the away team fans out after they’re first thwarted by Arnis. You can almost see them walk to assigned positions because they were told to stand there so they’d all be visible on the cameras. Nothing is happening organically, and it’s a miracle that this show survived long enough that it eventually started to.
@2 DemetriosX
Hey, don’t you go dissing The Outer Limits. The original was a great show and Stefano wrote some decent episodes for it.
I was more making fun of the fact that Armus looks like a throwback to the monsters on that show, but I never felt the stories compared favorably to The Twilight Zone. I keep meaning to re-watch The Outer Limits, though.
I’ll also say that thsi is not my idea of stroy telling either. To me a story about a character making a decision, one that cannot be revoked once made. How does th character change in the lead up to and in the aftermath of making that decision? This is the heart of story and drama, all else to me are puzzleboxes. That’s what this was, a puzzlebox. How do you get past Armus. It would have made a medicore game session and it made a very weak story.
No ONE made in hard calls here, no one at all.
To be fair, I think TV storytelling was going through a bit of a transition in this period. You had the earlier period in TV storytelling where nothing happened that did not further the main plot, and a later period that presented A & B (and even C & D) parallel storylines to mix it up and keep viewers guessing. Then you have this period with a bit of misdirection, before the plot narrows and settles down to the main storyline.
The Simpsons have often made fun of this, moving from story trope to clichéd story trope (on the way to spend the night in a haunted house we got stuck in the car wash and won the state lottery. Oh, look, a cat stuck in a tree!).
And I imagine that, this early in the series, the writers were actively (desperately?) planting seeds and hooks for future stories. And some of this stuff (very little, but more in Season Two) does evolve into future plot points. You can’t do that stuff at the end of the story, and you really shouldn’t do it in the middle when the plot is developing and underway. So that leaves only the beginning.
All that said, none of the writing here seems particularly taut, and there’s a kind of torpor throughout this season.
Honestly, the only reason this series survived was because we at the time were starved and grateful to have it! I mean, we had shit like “Man From Atlantis” and “Bionic Woman” and “Greatest American Hero” passing itself off as the pinnacle of the highest aspirations of science fiction.
@17 Eugene
Nah, Armus isn’t anywhere near the quality of the monsters on Outer Limits. Armus isn’t anywhere near the quality of the monsters on Lost in Space. For me he falls somewhere between the Horta and the rock monster. Or maybe down around that awful gorilla-robot hybrid from Robot Monster. Janos Prohaska couldn’t have saved Armus.
Comparing Outer Limits and Twilight Zone is almost apples and oranges. Or maybe it’s more like the difference between a story for Analog and one for F&SF. TZ came to rely a little too much on the twist, which actually can lead to a lack of surprise for a critical viewer. OL had some terrific stories, including 2 by Harlan Ellison which are fantastic. The first season is better than the second, but both are worthwhile. Stefano also wrote a little film called Psycho. I’d love to see what the original script for this abomination looked like. I bet it was miles better.
@20 DemetriosX
It does seem very much like an Outer Limits kind of story, though. You have the “bear” Armus, who is depicted as terrible and terrifying through most of the episode, and then everything is inverted and the bear is suddenly a pitiable creature trapped in conditions not of its making. You can almost hear the voiceover as the ship departs, delivering whatever moral can be gleaned here.
Yes, yes, could have been much better, much more dimension, but it does follow that OL pattern of surprising us with suddenly human monsters. What it’s lacking, that OL was excellent at, is presenting us with a human antagonist that is the story’s true monster. Maybe that’s what got ripped out, as you suggest, of the script and rendered it without a center.
“That’s true, and it’s something a lot of shows don’t have the guts to do. Even Joss Whedon flinches a bit, but the deaths in Serenity go a long way toward providing an actual sense of danger for the remaining characters in the final minutes of the film. I admire that.”
You want meaningful and surprising deaths for characters? You need go no further than the Ron Moore version of “Battlestar Galactica” which I very much liked. I was expounding the virtues of the show to my then boss, and loaned him the first season while the third was airing.
Although I didn’t want to give any unintentional spoilers, I did mention to him as he borrowed the second season from me ( he and his wife watched the entire first season in two days! ), “Not to give anything away but don’t get too attached to any particular character.” That series was just brutal with making you care for a character then unexpectedly offing them. I can’t think of any SF series from even less than a decade earlier that was so unflinching and cavalier about killing off main and supporting characters. In a way it was brilliant, as it really made you care and worry about the fate of these people. When a lead was wounded or in danger, by god, they really COULD die. They even resisted magically curing the Laura Roslin character’s cancer…even though they led you to believe they might.
Anyway, back to this pointless exercise. I was reading articles and fan mags about the show when it originally aired, and Denise Crosby’s leaving the show was one of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood. In fact the news was leaked so far in advance of the actual episode that I was tuning in to each episode for weeks, even a couple of months, wondering if “this one is the one where she dies”. Her sudden death had very little impact on me at the time. I did get a bit choked up by the memorial scene, but I too thought it was hokey, and a bit too warm, fuzzy and sentimental. I kept wondering when she actually spent that much time with these people to get so attached to them.
As for Pulaski’s bad rap; it’s not that she was unlikeable, it’s because she was so obviously a dead-on McCoy clone. If she had held ANY other position than chief medical officer I think she would have been more accepted. I liked her okay, but I cringed at the too obvious McCoyisms ie: not getting along with Data/Spock, Being afraid of the transporter, being stubborn and unafraid to stand up and call the captain on his bullshit…etc.
Why not give some of these traits to the other main characters and liven things up a bit? Why make her the only cantankerous main character? I understand they needed a new medical officer, but why replace a woman doctor with a female “Bones”? To me it’s almost sexist to replace a departing female character with another female. It’s like replacing a black actor with another black actor, just to keep the ratio in balance. That’s not progress…it’s tokenism.
Imagine if Pulaski had come aboard as the permanent no-nonsense chief engineer ( would have sucked for Geordi, but… ). Wouldn’t that have been a nice message for young girls watching the show? You don’t have to be a ‘caregiver’. You can aspire to do something technical and be good at it too! Of course, if they’d done that, she probably would have been Scottish and drank too much too.
I watched the Bolero part of Allegro Non Troppo then The Fifth Element to prepare for this. (The animal nature of Man and the Ultimate Evil) In the Bolero part, Man’s nature is mocked but only at the end after we see what has come of his turning to a different path while the rest of life marches on. In Fifth Element, the Perfect Being calls Mankind’s worth into question (and much of what we’ve seen and laughed at to that point supports her question) but she comes to see that Mankind – with flaws – is better than ultimate Evil and is worthy of being saved. See. Stories dealing with the dark side of human nature can work and be entertaining.
Then we have this episode. I dislike this episode so much that I’ve taken to calling it Skin of Awful. We have this pool of evil cast off by someone, it holds someone hostage, it kills someone and the rest have to figure out how to get away from it. That’s not a good story idea, that’s only a weak collection of story elements. The three main questions these elements lead a thinking person to ask are “Who shed this evil?” “Why did they just leave it out like this?” and “What happened to them?” Not addressed. Bringing these into the mix could have sparked some life into this story.
I don’t see the Organians as being the source of the mess that is Armus. And who they were didn’t have to be all that important if the writers would have looked to the TOS episode The Enemy Within to develop the answers to the second and third questions. The people who shed Armus left it out because they no longer had the drive or will to harm it. Their civilization declined – weakened with indifference – then passed into obscurity. Imagine the conversation Kirk would have had (knowing this) with Armus. Armus becomes confused then calls out “Norman. Please Coordinate.” Well, maybe not that line but you get the idea. Armus could have become confused or could have become more arrogant. Either way, it could have added something to the story.
Instead, we got this annoying skin of awful.
I’ve been thinking about McCoy’s simple “He’s dead, Jim” and the statement that this is the only time we see Crusher attempt to revive someone. As for McCoy, that probably says more about the state of medicine in the mid-60s than anything else. Closed-chest, portable defibrillation was still pretty new and certainly wasn’t part of the general consciousness. The expectation was likely still that once your heart stopped beating, that was it.
As for Crusher, this may be the only time we actually see her working on someone who is apparently dead, but there are several times she calls for an emergency beam out to sickbay. There may not be screentime for it, but there is at least an implication of extraordinary measures. And we do see her fight for patients who are in life-threatening situations, sometimes even having to fight against the patient himself (like Worf).
@dep1701 #22
You want meaningful and surprising deaths for characters? You need go no further than the Ron Moore version of “Battlestar Galactica” which I very much liked.
I have to say, I don’t think I can agree with this. I recall only two or MAYBE three “meaningful and surprising” deaths; one of those was a minor player, another was actor-initiated (the performer in question wanted to leave the show to pursue a movie career), and the third [spoiler redacted]… I mean they kill off a lot of Cylons starting right from the beginning, but the whole point of Cylons is that they come back, so those deaths aren’t meaningful.
…but I think I’m digressing a bit…
I vaguely remember that heroic measures were employed to save the life of the Russian physicist Lev Landau, who clinically died at least once after he was smashed up horribly in a motor accident in the ’60s some time. I can’t remember where I read about it though.
There are economies to be taken in teleplays, I realize, so for a Star Trek doctor to pronounce someone dead after doing nothing–or perhaps after making a single hypospray injection of go-juice–is perhaps just a way of speeding the story along. All the same, it contributes to the problem of depicting futuristic medicine when you get the inadvertent sense that an ordinary 20th century sawbones would strive harder and employ better tools to save a life than the supposedly more civilized and medically advanced doctors of the future.
On a different thought: I’m more of less a fan of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” despite its flaws, e.g. using Guinan as all-purpose plot glue. But it should have been enough of an answer to the question of Tasha Yar’s shabby exit from the show–if it was shabby. I never felt myself that the mode of her death was particularly insulting; it’s not like she was killed by a random accident, she was killed by a genuinely powerful and dangerous being. And Lt. Yar at least died in the line of duty. Yet “Yesterday’s Enterprise” plays into the whole idea that Yar’s death was a joke. Was it? I honestly don’t see it.
Ick. There are so many things wrong with this episode, especially for someone who really wanted to see Yar go away. I actually disliked her even more than Wesley and I’ve never been a fan of the show bringing her back. Yesterday’s Enterprise is, for me, much the lesser for it. And I hate her Romulan spawn.
So despite my lack of appreciation for either the character or the actress, I still think the death is crap. The thing is, all the other main characters at one time or another (often several times) have “died” in exactly the same sort of senseless manner and have been deus ex machina’d back in one way or another each time.
And the funeral service hologram thing always irritated me. It’s a little like being drowned in syrup.
Otherwise I kind of think an entity that’s composed of evil isn’t all that terrible an idea. It might have been interesting if they’d done it completely differently. And I thought the swallowing Riker alive bit had the potential to be kind of freaky if I were actually capable of taking the episode seriously.
Oh well.
@26 Deep Thought
“I have to say, I don’t think I can agree with this. I recall only two or MAYBE three “meaningful and surprising” deaths; one of those was a minor player, another was actor-initiated (the performer in question wanted to leave the show to pursue a movie career), and the third ”
Well, maybe I was wrong by referring to lead characters. But it seemed like BSG would flesh out supporting players ( particularly the pilots and technical crew ) and then just as we got to know and/or recognize them…WHAM. They’d be gone. Look at Cally ( who I generally found whiny and annoying ). She went from being Chief Tyrol’s subordinate and friend, to his wife and mother of his child, then she’s killed by Tory. Then there was Billy ( the one who wanted a movie career…hmmm doesn’t seem to have gone much of anywhere ), Dualla (aka Dee, whose suicide really shocked me ), Gaeta, the president’s spiritual advisor, Jackhammer, Kara’s hotshot rival pilot ‘Kat’, Ellen Tigh – before she’s revealed as a cylon, and so many others whose names escape me at the moment.
To equal that body count, “Next Gen” would have had to kill off Barclay, Ro Laren, Nurse Ogawa, the Bolian barber, Robin Lefler, the ensign who spilled hot chocolate on Picard, Guinan…hell, pretty much everyone of any significance except Picard and Data. TOS would have had to kill off everyone from Scotty on down to Yeoman Rand.
My point was more that when the characters died on Galactica, you cared more because they had had some fleshing out, and recurrent screen time and a lot of the time you didn’t see it coming. Yes, they were at war and casualties were to be expected, but you usually didn’t see that kind of carnage on SFTV, unless they were nameless extras, who might have had a line or two.
Yar’s death was barely affecting at all and she had been there, promoted as a main cast member, for nearly an entire season. She was little more than a cipher. Even if Yeoman Rand had been killed off on TOS, rather than just disappearing without an explanation, her death would have had more of an impact than this death scene did.
@27 “Otherwise I kind of think an entity that’s composed of evil isn’t all that terrible an idea. It might have been interesting if they’d done it completely differently. And I thought the swallowing Riker alive bit had the potential to be kind of freaky if I were actually capable of taking the episode seriously.”
While I may have a bit more sympathy for Yar ( and like her return and sacrifice in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” ), I agree that the gothic horror aspect of an entity composed of pure evil is an interesting idea.
What might have made this episode more compelling would have been if Yar had been the one sucked into Armus. Then we could have seen the being absorbed into her, basically taking her over ( shades of “Lights Of Zetar”, I suppose ). Then she/it could have still been as absolutely nasty, uncooperative and evil…still exerting force to keep Troi and the pilot trapped. Then through some clever writing ( I know, asking a bit much at this juncture ) have the only way to defeat the alien and save Tasha from an eternal hell of being manipulated and ‘owned’ Armus be that one of the Enterprise crew have to kill Yar themselves. Perhaps Tasha could even assert her desire to die rather than live that way.
Then you would have had moral dilemma, guilt, drama, sacrifice, and shock. things Roddenberry wasn’t allowing at this point. I know it would have been a cliched story ( “Lights Of Zetar” with a pinch of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” ) , but it might have been more meaningful than this episode.
Of course I’ve been wrong before.
Man, Lights of Zetar used to scare the HELL out of me when I was a kid. That creepy voice, and the face making that weird croaking noise, and changing colours, and dying? Guh…*shudder*…it scared me more than the weird monster that was sucking people under it in an Eagle on Space:1999 once…
@31
“Man, Lights of Zetar used to scare the HELL out of me when I was a kid. That creepy voice, and the face making that weird croaking noise, and changing colours, and dying? Guh…*shudder*…it scared me more than the weird monster that was sucking people under it in an Eagle on Space:1999 once…
I’m with you. the possession effects in “zetar” used to creep me out too ( as did the ‘erased face’ bit in “Charlie X’ ).
LOL. that monster in “Dragon’s Domain” nearly got “1999” banned in my house. When the series was first being aired in ’75, my youngest sister wanted to come in my room and watch “1999” with me. Just so happened that “Dragon’s Domain” was the episode that was being aired. Since it was a first run show, I had no idea it was going to have those graphic effects in it. She ended up having nightmares that night, and I got in trouble for letting her watch it!
Funny thing is, I’d probably LOL at the creature in Dragon’s Domain (thanks for that, btw, I didn’t know the name obviously), but it had me freakin’ and peakin’ for a few weeks.
That, and some giant spikey turtle monster in a Japanese monster movie, that I saw walk up concrete steps in an apartment building or something, and then HATED EVERY FIRE ALARM EVER AFTER THAT. And since we lived in the projects where pulling the alarm was more or less the best form of entertainment we could afford…;)
I’ve been conducting a re-watch of Doctor Who alongside the Star Trek franchise, and this episode feels like it would have played better as one of the Doctor’s exploits. He’s always facing down ancient evil and monsters of the week.
As for Yar, I think the randomness of her death would have been less of an issue if the episode didn’t seem to be all about killing her off. If they’d cut the space cpr scene or whatever that was and replaced the silly hologram goodbye with a briefer standard Starfleet funeral, this episode wouldn’t have been nearly as bad for me. It still would have felt pointless, but that’s better than awful.