TNG Deathmatch Episode 22: Skin Of Evil vs Bloodlines

Okay, let's get Bloodlines out of the way. It's a sequel to season one's The Battle, in which DaiMon Bok tried to drive Picard mad and frame him for murder as revenge for the death of Bok's son in battle. Now, six years later, the disgraced Bok returns to...exact revenge for the death of his son in battle. This time, he's going to do it by killing Picard's son, whose existence is news to Picard.

Turns out Picard had a brief romance with a woman named Miranda Vigo twenty-something years ago, and Jason Vigo is his son. Jason is a bit of a one: he's a feckless, directionless petty thief, but it's totally okay because he comes from a harsh world. (The harshness of the upbringing is needed to establish how different Jason is from Picard, and to provide a barrier for them to overcome in order that something should appear to be happening in this episode to generate drama. There is no drama.) His mother moved there to open an orphanage and, naturally, she was fridged murdered a long time ago, all the better for not being around to conveniently pop up and tell Picard that Jason isn't actually his.

Yes, it turns out that Bok altered Jason's DNA temporarily so that Picard would be convinced Jason was his son, thereby making his revenge more fitting than if he just killed a random nobody, because I suppose he thinks Picard would be perfectly blasé about the death of anyone he wasn't related to by blood. How a disgraced Ferengi ex-DaiMon managed to find out about Picard's ex-girlfriend, let alone alter someone's DNA convincingly enough to trick the sophisticated diagnostic systems on the Enterprise, the episode makes little effort to get into in any detail. The answer is almost certainly, "We're tired, and the audience must be able to make up its own technobabble by now".

So, it's a villain everyone had forgotten about, popping up to rehash a thirst for vengeance that was already dealt with in a previous episode six years earlier, a family member we've never met before (who turns out to be fake anyway) - it's just an empty, empty shell of an episode.

Skin Of Evil gets a lot of flak but I actually have a soft spot for it. It's famous for being the episode that kills off Tasha Yar, the first major character to die permanently, the first to die a death worthy of a redshirt, i.e. a quick and pointless death due to the caprice of an evil alien. I suppose in the first season, that had some impact - knowing that characters were expendable (provided that their actor wanted to quit the show). Other than that, this is the episode where the crew encounters Armus, an oil slick composed of the psychic residue that was created after a race of superbeings extracted all the evil from themselves and cast it away. Armus is concentrated evil, a seething mass of resentment, bitterness, absolutely no finer feelings whatsoever, and he takes possession of an Enterprise shuttle when it crashes on his planet, trapping Troi and a wounded pilot inside.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first: Armus is not as frightening as he ought to be. His voice is a caricature of a heavy when it ought to be sinister. The extent of his powers is ill-defined, and it's not even clear how he has powers - why would an animated puddle of discarded psychic reside be capable of telekinesis? 

Yar's funeral, which occupies a fair old chunk of time at the end of the episode, is another of those first-season indulgences that was supposed to seem futuristic but is just silly. When did she record these tributes to her crewmates? What would have happened if she fell out with someone shortly after recording a tribute to them, or made a new friend before she had a chance to record one for them? Were there no other friends who wanted to attend her funeral? Does every crewmember record their own funeral service in this way and update them regularly? It's a weird idea and I would have preferred the usual Star Trek toast to absent friends, or a scene where they got together to talk about her, or a sombre report in Picard's log - anything else, really, other than this sugary oddity.

It's a shame Denise Crosby felt unable to stick around for the show to get better. Obviously, she had no idea that it could. A lot of fans slam her as a bad actress based on the first season, which is hugely unfair - it's not as if the first season gave anyone a chance to excel. They all did the best they could with what they had, and what Crosby mostly had was a character written as emotionally unstable at best.

Yar was originally conceived as a copy of Pvt. Vasquez from Aliens, and it pains me to think that we lost a potentially great character there. Of course, it's not great that they saddled their bad-ass marine rip-off with a horrifying backstory filled with rape and abuse, any more than they conceived of Crusher as having a "stripper's walk", but Yar had potential and so did Crosby. The frequent criticism of TNG's approach to its female crew members - that they were both in "the caring, nurturing roles" of therapist and physician - doesn't work so well with a female security chief in the mix. (I tend to think that those roles are really only seen as caring and nurturing because they had women in them. Nobody ever calls Dr McCoy nurturing. TNG had a lot of issues where sexism is concerned, but I don't necessarily think that's one of them.)

Anyway, Armus messes around with the crew a bit, dunking Riker in goop, stealing Geordi's visor, trying to make Data kill someone, but because he's characterised so broadly it doesn't really work. He's not sinister, he's just a giant pain in the arse. If he'd been less cartoonish it might have been creepier. The best scenes are those in which he envelops the shuttle and tries to taunt Troi about how he won't let her friends help her: it's not exactly Hannibal, but having Troi actually try to analyse Armus, try to empathise and also find something that will render him vulnerable, is a good use of the character.

And then Picard beams down to confront Armus personally, and delivers a very not-TNG ending that I'm not sure how I feel about. See, in the idealised TNG universe of diplomacy and understanding, I can envision Picard beaming down and agreeing to take Armus to be reunited with the people who discarded him. It seems a very Trek solution - I can imagine Kirk, certainly, being outraged that anyone should try to deny their own nature by physically extracting it, let alone abandoning it when it turned out to be a separate, sentient lifeform. Armus has been savagely mistreated, after all. It's not a stretch to think that Picard might agree to find the aliens responsible and force them to take responsibility for creating and abandoning Armus, but he doesn't. Instead, having angered Armus enough to weaken him (so they can beam the shuttle crew away), he condemns Armus to remain alone on that planet forever.

On the one hand, I appreciate the ending because it shows us that Picard has a ruthless side - he has been confronted with this supposedly ultimate, irredeemable evil, and he responds accordingly. On the other hand, it's really not in line with his behaviour in most other episodes, where diplomacy, talking, understanding, is what triumphs. Star Trek doesn't really allow for the existence of purely evil, irredeemable characters. People are destructive, they can have different goals, they can be motivated by hatred or vengefulness, but they're rarely just evil for the sake of it.

I suppose they had to make Armus so evil to justify Picard's leaving him there, but it really comes across a little bit like Picard rejecting Armus specifically because he killed Tasha. If it had been some nameless security guard that Armus killed, I wonder if the episode would have ended differently? I'd kind of like to see a version where they did agree to take Armus home. I can imagine a horribly ironic Trek-like ending where the civilisation died off or was conquered, or found that actually you can't remove your negative aspects permanently, they regrow like a tumour and have to be excised again and again until eventually you've hollowed yourself out completely...

Anyway. Yeah, it's not perfect but it's better than Bloodlines.

 

WINNER: Skin Of Evil