Skin of Evil (S1 ep 23)

Hey everyone, it’s been a long week. Nothing bad happened. Just couldn’t post. I’d written so many of these episode reviews so far in advance that I didn’t think there was any way to have the posts catch up to me during the first season of the show.

Turns out, I can’t write these anywhere near fast enough. I may shake up the format a bit in the second season to see if I can give a review that is more conducive to me getting them out in a timely manner.

But we’re not at season two yet. So I’m trying to keep this up.

And good god, these recaps are getting harder and harder for me to do. It’s like, I can’t figure out why I bother. I’m sure no one reads these, and if they do, they surely skip the recaps. And if they were interested in a recap, they’d probably prefer to read them at mission alpha or somewhere else that gives impartial recounts of the episodes.

But, whatever.

In this episode the Enterprise is having their dilithium crystals reconfigured, rather dramatically, when the shuttlecraft that has Troi on board has a random disaster while in space. And I don’t mean they were hit by an asteroid or sabotaged by a bad guy. Nope. They were just flying along and the whole thing fell apart on them.

Yes, the flagship of Starfleet, less than a year out of space dock, where the crew use teleporters for almost everything, and I think I see why. They don’t have a shuttlecraft that can make a routine flight without it descending into chaos. Could you imagine what it would be like if airplanes just fell out of the sky about one out of ten flights? No one would fly. Ever.

Because I assumed the first time I saw this episode that Armus, the evil being we’re about to meet on the planet Troi crashes into, caused the accident, or at least influenced it. But after rewatching, I don’t think so. It just crashed on it’s own because a new shuttle on a new ship can’t be expected to work in the 24th century, I guess it’s another of those things that people just ‘sign up for’ when they join Starfleet. Who designed that shuttle? They should  be on trial. 

Jesus. The lack of respect of people’s lives is bizarre.

So, I’m not even a little bit sure about what I was talking about here. The shuttle crashed and at least the radio worked well enough to call the Enterprise for help. Of course, remember the drama of the routine dilithium crystal maintenance that is going on. So the Enterprise can’t get there until Lynch pushes a button. He does, but they can only go minimum warp, so Picard immediately orders the ship to Warp 8. Lynch protests, and Picard has them do it anyway.

Again, it’s weird because A) Warp 8 is not ‘minimal’ and B) nothing goes wrong, even a little bit. A perfectly normal shuttle however, it may just explode for no reason (now that I think of it, something about the shuttle craft incident in the episode where Wesley took his Starfleet entrance exams was weird too).

Seriously,  I’m so angry at the poor quality of this show. No one thinks about this stuff. Apparently. 

The ship goes into orbit of the planet where Troi crashed and the Enterprise quickly finds the wreckage.

What proceeds from there is the most bizarre 30 minutes of television history. I’ll try to summarize in one run-on sentence: Riker and away team beams down, an oil slick won’t let them get to the shuttle until an oil monster rises up and kills Tasha and tries to torment the crew with name-calling (Data is Tin Man!) and occasional pranks (stealing Geordi’s visor and moving it around so he can’t get it back or covering Riker in oil) until Picard shows up and acts smug until the oil alien gives up.

There, done. Also, the hologram of Yar has an excruciatingly long scene at the end where she says goodbye to the entire crew. It was uncomfortable for me to watch.

Some thoughts I had while watching:

• Yar’s exchange with Worf in the episode’s teaser is the best Yar moment of the entire series to date. 
• Shuttle had a total malfunction in space. I know it’s TV and stuff like that has to happen, but I just find the whole idea that this sort of stuff happens, and not commented on, disturbing. 
• Chief Engineer Lynch… Jesus. How many have their been so far? I honestly miss Argyle.
• When the oil monster first starts coming out of the slick it actually appears to be scary. 
• Once it’s actually out of the oil - not so much. 
• The Phasers they use, they seem to be poorly designed ergonomically. I mean, wouldn’t that seriously hurt your wrist if you were forced to use it that way for prolonged periods of time. 
• So, Yar died. The splotch on her face while they had her up in the medical bay looked weird. What was that supposed to be? Blood? A bruise?
• Wesley continues to rock that rainbow sweater
• I just realized that Armus - the evil oil alien - sounds just like the College Humor Batman. 
• So, there were aliens that, uh, took all their evil and poured it into some sort of conscious entity and then left. They really had to know an entity of pure evil - which has a great deal of power - would eventually cause trouble for someone. Seriously. That is really dumb.
• Troi is crying again. I’m not sure how many times she’s done it this season, maybe only a couple, but it feels like way too many. 
• Worf's rationale for staying on the Enterprise after Yar dies is really weird. I don't get it. 
• Armus rises dramatically out of the oil four times in this episode. That’s too many. Once was enough.
• The moral dilemma Armus tries to put the crew in would have played a bit better if someone, anyone, acted like they cared. Armus is like, ‘I’ll make the robot kill one of you, but you get to chose who it is’ and the crew are like, ‘we don’t care, whatever.’ Armus gets frustrated. Honestly, I do to. This isn’t how human beings conduct themselves, ever. 
• Data says Armus should be destroyed when analyzing him. I guess the ‘we believe in all life’ stuff isn’t really across the board. I know Armus is 100% evil, but it’s still surprising to see Data’s cold assessment. 
• Per Troi - Armus acknowledging his feelings makes him weak. Uh, what?
• Picard’s solution to Armus’ demands - seriously - is to moralize for a bit and then quote poetry. Is there any situation that moralizing and poetry doesn’t solve? 
• That Picard didn’t melt the face of the planet from orbit is possibly a criminal act. However, he mentioned that the shuttle where Armus had been keeping Troi a hostage in was destroyed, I’d like to think they destroyed it by slagging the entire hemisphere Armus was on into molten rock. So technically, they wouldn't be murdering Armus, they'd be destroying a shuttlecraft. If Armus happened to be on the planet at the time, well, oops. 
• Troi is crying again through Yar’s farewell speech to the crew from beyond the grave. 
• And speaking of Yar’s speech. It goes on for a very long time. It’s cornball in the extreme. 
• Data’s self-loathing at the end of Yar’s funeral is not as well done as I’d have liked. He’s an android that feels he missed the point of the funeral because he’s so darn focused on how sad he’s going to be. 

I’m of the personal opinion that this was an awful hour of television. Yar was killed off in an all but offhand manner (I know this is explored in a later episode quite well, but I’m only talking about this episode, not what may happen in the future) and the production values of the set is comically bad.

In all, this was hard to watch, and despite being a seminal moment of the series, the episode itself is poorly executed. It did have Yar’s best moment of season one, but it’s still an awful display of drama.

My rating?

1 out of 5

Symbiosis (S1 ep 22)

Oh boy - just when I’m starting to think we’re starting to turn a corner something like this comes along. Good god. What a mess.

Seriously, what a disaster.

But first, I’ve been continuing to figure out the muddy timeline of when, exactly, I watched Star Trek, The Next Generation for the first time. After really racking my brain over this, I’m pretty sure I never saw an episode before I moved into the new house we’d built. A house I didn’t move in to until the summer before my senior year in high school. I think.

I say, ‘I think’ because it’s a very fuzzy memory for me. I honestly don’t remember exactly when it was that I moved into the house. It’s possible that we moved when I was off in Texas visiting with my father (my real father, not the fake one I was living with most of the year).

Except, well, I’m not sure. I remember bits and pieces of that time. I remember waking up at a friends house, probably near noon, to a knock at the door. It was my mother telling me that my father was waiting for me at the airport, in TEXAS and I wasn’t there.

Turns out I had the dates wrong for when my trip was. So I shot out of there like a bullet, with my mom, threw some stuff in a bag and was at the airport in less than a couple of hours.

So strange, my dad just told the airline what happened and they moved me to another flight. They just did it. I’m not sure, but I seriously doubt they would do anything like that now. They’d just apologize and ask me to pay for another flight.

But then again, flying commercially before 9/11 was a radically different experience than it is today. Back in the 80’s it was about like taking a bus. If that.

But, my point, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t have when I started, is that that was the summer I moved into the new house, I think. I’ll be damned if I know. It’s just that I lived in the house when I worked at Taco Bell, but that was before I went to my father’s. So that isn’t right.

Wait. I worked as a construction worker on Saturdays before I worked at Taco Bell, and I lived at the new house then too.

Goddammit. I have no idea. It’s frustrating to me because trying to reconstruct a memory is a tricky thing. The mind really loves order, and it will create a narrative for me if I don’t remember the real one. So I’m trying my best to piece together things I know about that time frame and put it all together into one cohesive timeline that is actually accurate.

So I may not have even seen Encounter at Farpoint before ’89, which is two years after it actually premiered. I do remember something quite clearly about that time though. First, I remember reading about the premiere episode in the paper just before it came out. I recall because I was very excited about it. And second, I didn’t see any of TNG before I lived in the new house.

Which means either the my local station didn’t carry TNG until two years after it premiered, or that I’ve gone crazy. Seriously, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past month or two (since whenever I started this blog, I’m on the verge of having nightmares about it) and I just can't piece it together.

So, getting back to this particular episode. Yeah, it reeks of the worst kind of shit. The big problem, I believe, is that it isn’t really a metaphor for anything, it’s just a straight up drug addiction episode. How bad was it? Well.. Check this out -

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- So, yeah, that’s an actual clip from the actual episode I watched, in its entirety. On purpose. For the sake of continuity with my other posts, I’ll try to do a recap anyway. Here goes:

Picard and the crew are really into watching these solar flares in this solar system. It’s dangerous, but they’ve never seen anything like it (weird, as it looks a whole lot like stock footage of solar flares as seen from earth, but whatever) when they get a distress call from a ship that’s in big trouble.

Picard and the gang try to help talk them through the repairs, but the crew aboard the alien vessel all seem a bit moronic. Or, to be specific, they sound like Chong from the old Cheech and Chong movies from the early 80’s - “Heeeyyyy maaaaannnnn. That’s not cool.”

After some frustration, they beam aboard a canister of stuff before finally getting the crew of the vessel aboard just as the alien craft explodes. Turns out that it isn’t Cheech or Chong, but the cast of Star Trek II. Which is really weird. I can understand the one dude (the dealer who played as one of Khan's genetically superior underlings in the movie) but not Kirk’s son, he was clearly noticeable as David Marcus, so I had to wonder, at first, how Kirk’s son ended up so far in his future as a drug addict.

But quite quickly I realized he was an alien, not Kirk’s son, mere coincidence. So, the crew of the Enterprise believe for much too long that they are dealing with morons instead of drug addicts. If that was supposed to be a plot twist it was the worst one in the history of storytelling.

Eventually, Picard and Crusher figure out what’s going on, then Picard trots out the Prime Directive as an excuse to just drop the people off and leave, he and Beverly argue a bit, Picard moralizes (good god, will he ever stop with that?) and eventually, it was might be a slightly clever, if very contrived, twist, Picard refuses to help the drug addicted aliens obtain any future supplies of their drugs through a technicality of the Prime Directive.

The end.

I’m sure that the writing staff eagerly awaited their Emmy for best dramatic series after that baby. Sigh.

Some thoughts on the episode:

• Tasha waved goodbye to the fans in one of the final scenes of the episode. I actually think that was pretty cool 
• Picard and his nonsensical Prime Directive talk. Seriously, considering he was already knee deep in with those aliens, I’m not sure how he can be so hands off while he’s in the middle of interfering with them anyway. 
• Wesley and Yar’s drug talk was difficult to watch. At least if I’m trying to take this show seriously. 
• Riker has gotten zapped by an alien two weeks in a row. Poor guy has become a punching bag for whatever happens to be going on. 
• Speaking of aliens with zappy powers, so, two races, from two different worlds in the same solar system, supposedly have evolved to look identical and have identical powers of zappiness and nobody thinks that's a bit weird. I only bring it up because Tasha said she'd like to know how zappy powers evolved. From there it's a black hole into how ridiculous the whole concept of these people even existing are. She really should have just kept her mouth shut about it.

So, in the end, I don’t know much about the behind the scenes with this, writing wise, like who wrote it, conceived it, or ok’d it. But I feel like I’m watching a 75 year-old man trying to connect with kids in a way that’s cool. Or something. It’s just 45 minutes of being preached at by something that’s supposed to be entertainment. It’s pretty hard to watch. I hated it.

My rating?

1 out of 5