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