Cheap Star Trek - The Next Generation, Episode 22: Skin of Evil (Video) (LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Gabrielle Beaumont, Robert Becker, Cliff Bole, Timothy Bond, David Carson, Chip Chalmers, Richard Compton, Robert Iscove) Price

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Customer Reviews of Star Trek - The Next Generation, Episode 22: Skin of Evil

Moving ending, rather ineffective getting there
This episode is memorable only for the demise of Tasha Yar and the holodeck scene where she says goodbye to her friends. A shuttle-containing counselor Troi crashes on Varga 2 and the Enterprise rushes to assist. When the landing party arrives on the surface, they are confronted by a mobile oil slick called Armus. He prevents them from reaching the shuttle containing Troi and the pilot and in a fit of pique, kills Tasha. Phaser fire is ineffective against him, so the landing party is powerless. <
> Armus begins speaking to Troi, so using her empathic ability; she is able to learn something about him. Picard beams down to the surface in an attempt to negotiate with Armus, but he does little more than play childish pranks on them. Fortunately, the Enterprise crew discovers that when Armus is angry, the force field that he has created is weakened. Therefore, they frustrate him to the extent that all he can do is scream with rage, which lowers the strength of the field to the point where the landing party can beam off the surface. <
> I consider Armus to be one of the most poorly thought out aliens to appear in TNG. He has no redeeming qualities, apparently he is the evil essence that a species culled from their being and then abandoned on the planet. While the idea of an evil life force does have many interesting possibilities, in this case, it is not well implemented. The idea that a being powerful enough to resist concentrated phaser fire and possessing intelligence would simply stand and scream with rage is difficult to believe. <
> The final scene is a very emotional one, where a pre-recorded holographic image of Tasha says goodbye to her friends on the Enterprise. At the end, Data expresses puzzlement over the funeral, noting that all of his thoughts are about himself and not Tasha. He asks Picard if he perhaps has missed the point of the funeral, to which Picard replies that no, he has in fact gotten it. However, this is not enough to save the episode, and I rank it in the bottom ten percent of the series.

characters go through more development
Some of the plot has more than its fair share of holes in it, but you can see a substantial amount of character development between this and the first episode.

Troi is returning via shuttle from a conference, ready to rendevous with the Enterprise. The Enterprise, the flagship of the Federation fleet, only has one batch of Dilithium crystals, so when they're being aligned, it's tough cookies if you need to go to warp. No back up crystals - very interesting.

Troi's shuttle experiences a systems failure and plummets to the surface on an unihabited planet, Vagra 2. Who names these planets? Vagra is such a good name that you need a Vagra 1 AND a Vagra 2?

Once the crystals are realigned, the Enterprise goes on a rescue mission. They beam to the crash site, only to have a thick oil slick in their path. As they try to walk around it, the oil slick follows them. No readings show up on their instruments, but it's obvious that there is an intelligence there.

An ancient race of titans found a way to extract evil from their society (kinda like popping a pimple) and when all the members of the race had collected all their evil goo together, it made Armus - the oil slick... aka - the "skin of evil."

They abandoned him on the planet - a being that is immortal and cannot die, a being utterly lonely, very powerful (he is able kill with a thought, transport an object from one place to another and he is empathic like Troi), and eager to leave the loneliness of his planet.

Armus claims that his behavior is not merely evil - but that rather he IS evil - the embodiment of evil.

In an act of boredom, he kills Lt. Tasha Yar, regretting later that she did not suffer because her death did not amuse him like he thought it would. Her memorial service is sweet and touching, and elements of this scene show up in future episodes... and Tasha does make a reappearance in a future time-travelling episode.

The goal is to get Troi and her shuttle pilot off the surface, but Armus continues to envelop the shuttle and they are unable to get a lock on the occupants. What's ironic is that Armus can beam (or at least teleport) Picard in and out of the shuttle, but he apparently can't beam Troi or Ben (the injured pilot) out, nor enter it himself. Yes, there are holes-a-plenty in this episode.

Continued dialogue with Armus reveals the nature of his lonliness and desire to leave. His voice is ominous and his flippant attitude toward life is creepy.

Not a great episode by a long shot, but a pivotal one for those who watch a lot of the episodes - this one has important elements for a number of future episodes that refer back to it. Most worthy are character development leaps for Riker and Crusher.