In some ways, this is the most vacuous and wanderingly pointless episode of the entire first season, yet the one major event of significance that happens in it reverberates through the entire future of the series. Given Yar’s death, it can’t actually be asserted that this episode is pointless—but it sure tries its hardest to earn that distinction nonetheless! Before I get to the meat of my bashing (I mean, critique) of it, though, let me just note that although the final scene (holographic Yar’s goodbye message to the other characters) is delivered quite nicely and manages to be surprisingly moving, it isn’t even close to enough (especially since it’s also fundamentally odd, and definitely strains plausibility) to redeem anything else about this fantastically bad episode.
This one is weird right from the outset. We begin with Troi crash-landing on a planet en route back to the ship from a conference, and the Enterprise having to go rescue her—but all of this is merely setup, and it isn’t in any sense Troi’s episode. “Debris” prevents beaming Troi up, so an away team beams down to the vicinity of her shuttle (which does not, in fact, look to be covered in any debris—a fact that no one ever mentions) and encounters a sadly lame-looking and shoddily animated oil slick (perhaps the crappiest visual effect in the show’s entire run). Said slick turns out to be a malevolent but childish entity who prevents the away team from carrying out its rescue mission for no real reason, and who kills a main character in about as un-dramatic a way as any writer could possibly dream up, also for no particular reason. But although this event does change the tone of the rest of the episode a bit, the focus remains “how do we outwit this irritating oil slick,” not “holy shit, our security chief was just killed!” And while I get that the death of Yar is “meaningless” by design (rather than being heroic or noble in some way), the near-total lack of any drama surrounding it remains puzzling. It happens super-quick, gets reacted to sort of belatedly, and has no appreciable effect on how dangerous or unstable the whole situation on the planet doesn’t feel—and as I noted, the tone and focus of the rest of the episode change only moderately in deference to it. Meanwhile, by the way, no reason is ever given for why the crew can’t just beam people directly to the shuttle’s location, or take another shuttle there, or get around the idiotic oil slick in any one of god knows how many other fairly simple ways. We are simply treated to scene after pointless scene in which the slick toys with the away team, then chats with Troi, who psychoanalyzes it until it gets all huffy and goes back to toy with the away team some more. There are no interesting concepts at play, no suspense, no character dilemmas, not even a heavy-handed moral; basically nothing whatsoever to justify wasting film on the whole charade. In the end, Picard figures out from a quick chat with Troi that the solution lies in pissing the creature off, which proves typically easy to do, and suddenly the plot is resolved. The oil slick itself is “explained” as the cast-off negative qualities of a mysterious alien race (as if this makes any damn sense), but the episode seems to be of two minds as to whether this makes it flat-out evil, or if, rather, it is enough like a normal being to be subject to Troi’s psychological analysis (according to which its bitterness and rage stem from feeling abandoned by those from whom it came). Also a head-scratcher is the issue of how a race of beings who have “cast off their negative qualities” and become perfectly wonderful could then callously abandon the sentient entity that said casting-off created! And finally, whatever the ambiguities about Armus’s nature, Troi does feel some pity (not compassion?) for him/it—yet the Enterprise ultimately abandons it without a second thought once Picard has successfully outwitted it. In a word…huh? I just do not see where the writers were coming from on this one.
I’ve long been of the view, though, that Tasha Yar’s untimely death made the character’s stint on the show considerably more interesting and valuable (retroactively) than it had ever been while she was around. Of course, since none of the characters was written well during this season, to say that Yar was never a very interesting character while she was alive is hardly either fair or meaningful—but that’s not the point. The point is that in future episodes, mentions of Yar always have a resonance that feels poignant and real. Her death becomes a sort of touchstone for the other characters’ history together, helping to bring to life a sense of a shared past and serving to bind them together in subtle ways. Except to the extent that its final scene constitutes an instance of what I’m talking about, none of this is really to this episode’s credit—but it does retroactively lend the episode a certain ironic importance. Not to be overlooked, too, is the fact that Yar’s death created an opening for Worf to actually have something to do as a character—which may well have been all that ultimately saved him from pointless peripherality. After Picard makes him acting security chief midway through this episode, Worf suddenly starts contributing to things for really the first time (aside from “Heart of Glory”). It may be that until he had a clearly defined role, the writers never figured out how to integrate him into stories. In this way, too, then, Yar’s death helped to steer the show toward what it would become in future, better seasons.
None of which, of course, changes the fact that this episode is just really, really bad.