Denise Crosby beams out of Star Trek in Next Generation's Episode 22 (ST:TNG review)
Skin of Evil
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Episode 22
Written by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer, based on the story by Joseph Stefano
Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan
Stardate 41601.3 (Earth Calendar Year 2364)
On stardate 41601.3, the Galaxy-class Starship Enterprise's Shuttlecraft 13 is returning Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) from a conference when it suddenly goes off course and crashes on the unexplored world known to Federation cartographers as Vagra II. The pilot, Lt. Ben Prieto (Raymond Forchion) manages to send out a distress signal to the Enterprise, and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) orders a change of course to retrieve his two marooned crewmembers on Vagra II.
But when the Enterprise attempts to follow Starfleet standard operating procedure and beam Troi and Prieto up via the transporter, the results are inexplicably futile. A bizarre entity is generating a powerful energy shield which surrounds Shuttlecraft 13 and prevents its two passengers from being rescued.
The entity's name is Armus (voice of Ron Gans), and he is Star Trek: The Next Generation's evil counterpart to Star Trek: The Original Series' Companion from the episode Metamorphosis. Whereas the female entity from the 1960s series acted out of love for Zefram Cochrane (Glenn Corbett), Armus is willfully malicious and enjoys feeling his victims' fear and hopelessness.
Determined to rescue Counselor Troi and Lt. Prieto, Capt. Picard sends an away team led by Commander Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Security Chief Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) down to Vagra II.
This rescue attempt is, unhappily, even more futile and disastrous than the failed effort to use the transporters. Armus blocks every move made by Riker's away team to get near Shuttlecraft 13, and eventually the creature, which can be best described as a mobile oil slick, does something unprecedented on a Star Trek TV series; when Tasha tries to rush toward the crashed vehicle, Armus zaps her with a lethal bolt of energy.
The Enterprise beams Tasha to sick bay within seconds of Armus' attack, but no matter how hard Chief Medical Officer Beverly Crusher tries to repair the damage to the young Ukrainian officer's neurobiological system, it's too late. Natasha Yar dies a death made even more tragic by its sheer pointlessness.
Eventually, Capt. Picard beams down to the planet surface - a practice that is not really encouraged by Starfleet Command - to face Armus on a more personal level. His goal: to understand why Armus is so angry and hateful, as well as to liberate the two Enterprise officers still trapped aboard the crashed Shuttlecraft 13......
My Take: In a review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's Episode 79 (Remember Me), I mentioned that actors Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby were so dissatisfied with the way their roles were underutilized by the writers that they both left the show before the second season.
Of the two exiting cast members, Crosby was the most frustrated and least interested in returning full-time to ST-TNG; the series was experiencing creative "growing pains" due to the scripts' uneven quality, some (alleged) heavy-handedness on the part of executive producer Gene Roddenberry, skepticism expressed by some die-hard "Original Series" fans and turnover in the writing and production staffs.
Not only was the first season marked by some so-so episodes which were made watchable only because the acting was good enough to eclipse their flaws, but the writers tended to focus way too much on the male characters - Picard, Riker, Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner) and the wunderkind Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) - at the expense of the female characters' screen time.
Crosby was very unhappy with this situation, so she - unlike McFadden - asked the producers to have her character killed off. (There are those who believe that Crosby's character was killed off unceremoniously and fired becausePlayboy reprinted - in its May 1988 issue - a 1979 pictorial in which she had posed nude, but Crosby had already left the show by the time the issue was out in newsstands.)
Crosby's unhappiness with ST-TNG eventually faded, and she made several appearances on the series a few years later, most notably as an alternate version of Tasha Yar in Yesterday's Enterprise and the cunning Romulan operative Sela.
Skin of Evil is, like most of its first season littermates, a watchable episode which features good acting, some nifty late 1980s special effects and an intriguing "guest villain" which is far different from the more familiar Romulans, Klingons, Khan Noonian Singh or ST-TNG's omnipotent-but-mischievous Q (John DeLancie).
It is a good thing that scriptwriters Joseph Stefano (The Outer Limits) and Hannah Louise Shearer (Days of Our Lives, Port Charles, Emergency!) are inventive enough with their teleplay that a talking and murderous oil slick (which canassume a humanoid shape as well) is compelling - even though the visual effect used to create Armus looks a bit cheesy now in the early 21st Century.
Here, after all, is a creature so vile, so casual about destroying lives simply because he/it can, instead of a typical antagonist who may not be as ruthless but has motives which Picard and his crew can understand without necessarily agreeing with those motives.
That having been said, the episode has its share of rough spots. The scene which depicts Tasha's pre-recorded "death hologram" is somewhat bothersome because some of the dialogue seems to not fit Tasha's personality as seen on the previous 21 episodes. You have to be a die-hard fan of the show to catch these incongruous touches in a scene which would otherwise have been extremely touching, but some of the lines Crosby was asked to deliver sound hokey and forced.
Recommended: Yes
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Episode 22
Written by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer, based on the story by Joseph Stefano
Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan
Stardate 41601.3 (Earth Calendar Year 2364)
On stardate 41601.3, the Galaxy-class Starship Enterprise's Shuttlecraft 13 is returning Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) from a conference when it suddenly goes off course and crashes on the unexplored world known to Federation cartographers as Vagra II. The pilot, Lt. Ben Prieto (Raymond Forchion) manages to send out a distress signal to the Enterprise, and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) orders a change of course to retrieve his two marooned crewmembers on Vagra II.
But when the Enterprise attempts to follow Starfleet standard operating procedure and beam Troi and Prieto up via the transporter, the results are inexplicably futile. A bizarre entity is generating a powerful energy shield which surrounds Shuttlecraft 13 and prevents its two passengers from being rescued.
The entity's name is Armus (voice of Ron Gans), and he is Star Trek: The Next Generation's evil counterpart to Star Trek: The Original Series' Companion from the episode Metamorphosis. Whereas the female entity from the 1960s series acted out of love for Zefram Cochrane (Glenn Corbett), Armus is willfully malicious and enjoys feeling his victims' fear and hopelessness.
Determined to rescue Counselor Troi and Lt. Prieto, Capt. Picard sends an away team led by Commander Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Security Chief Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) down to Vagra II.
This rescue attempt is, unhappily, even more futile and disastrous than the failed effort to use the transporters. Armus blocks every move made by Riker's away team to get near Shuttlecraft 13, and eventually the creature, which can be best described as a mobile oil slick, does something unprecedented on a Star Trek TV series; when Tasha tries to rush toward the crashed vehicle, Armus zaps her with a lethal bolt of energy.
The Enterprise beams Tasha to sick bay within seconds of Armus' attack, but no matter how hard Chief Medical Officer Beverly Crusher tries to repair the damage to the young Ukrainian officer's neurobiological system, it's too late. Natasha Yar dies a death made even more tragic by its sheer pointlessness.
Eventually, Capt. Picard beams down to the planet surface - a practice that is not really encouraged by Starfleet Command - to face Armus on a more personal level. His goal: to understand why Armus is so angry and hateful, as well as to liberate the two Enterprise officers still trapped aboard the crashed Shuttlecraft 13......
My Take: In a review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's Episode 79 (Remember Me), I mentioned that actors Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby were so dissatisfied with the way their roles were underutilized by the writers that they both left the show before the second season.
Of the two exiting cast members, Crosby was the most frustrated and least interested in returning full-time to ST-TNG; the series was experiencing creative "growing pains" due to the scripts' uneven quality, some (alleged) heavy-handedness on the part of executive producer Gene Roddenberry, skepticism expressed by some die-hard "Original Series" fans and turnover in the writing and production staffs.
Not only was the first season marked by some so-so episodes which were made watchable only because the acting was good enough to eclipse their flaws, but the writers tended to focus way too much on the male characters - Picard, Riker, Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner) and the wunderkind Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) - at the expense of the female characters' screen time.
Crosby was very unhappy with this situation, so she - unlike McFadden - asked the producers to have her character killed off. (There are those who believe that Crosby's character was killed off unceremoniously and fired becausePlayboy reprinted - in its May 1988 issue - a 1979 pictorial in which she had posed nude, but Crosby had already left the show by the time the issue was out in newsstands.)
Crosby's unhappiness with ST-TNG eventually faded, and she made several appearances on the series a few years later, most notably as an alternate version of Tasha Yar in Yesterday's Enterprise and the cunning Romulan operative Sela.
Skin of Evil is, like most of its first season littermates, a watchable episode which features good acting, some nifty late 1980s special effects and an intriguing "guest villain" which is far different from the more familiar Romulans, Klingons, Khan Noonian Singh or ST-TNG's omnipotent-but-mischievous Q (John DeLancie).
It is a good thing that scriptwriters Joseph Stefano (The Outer Limits) and Hannah Louise Shearer (Days of Our Lives, Port Charles, Emergency!) are inventive enough with their teleplay that a talking and murderous oil slick (which canassume a humanoid shape as well) is compelling - even though the visual effect used to create Armus looks a bit cheesy now in the early 21st Century.
Here, after all, is a creature so vile, so casual about destroying lives simply because he/it can, instead of a typical antagonist who may not be as ruthless but has motives which Picard and his crew can understand without necessarily agreeing with those motives.
That having been said, the episode has its share of rough spots. The scene which depicts Tasha's pre-recorded "death hologram" is somewhat bothersome because some of the dialogue seems to not fit Tasha's personality as seen on the previous 21 episodes. You have to be a die-hard fan of the show to catch these incongruous touches in a scene which would otherwise have been extremely touching, but some of the lines Crosby was asked to deliver sound hokey and forced.
Recommended: Yes
Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12
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