And what didn't it show up again in the show?
Why did the creature known as Arumus kill Tasha?
- Thread starter SailorLadyGaga
- Start date
It killed Tasha because it wanted to entertain itself and torture the others. It didn't show up again because the writers knew it just wasn't a compelling villain.
The randomness of the killing was pretty much the whole point. They were acknowledging that sometimes death is arbitrary and doesn't have some melodramatically noble purpose to it. It was basically a redshirt death, but made the focus of the entire story because it happened to someone we knew well and cared about. Which was an inspired idea, but it was totally screwed over by "Yesterday's Enterprise" and its romanticized, wish-fulfillment fantasy of a "noble death." Which was then subverted anyway when it was established that alt-Tasha had lived, been enslaved and raped by her captors, and then been murdered failing to rescue her baby, which is a far more ignominious death than the original received.
Armus had a great backstory and there was some cool scenes with Picard telling him that true evil is to submit to him. Armus would never return because the producers were embarassed by how he looked on screen.
Yes! I remember being quite shocked when I first watched it. I kept expecting it to do some kind of reversal, like maybe Armus has the power to restore life, or Q shows up and takes pity. But then... nope! She was dead. And, to the credit of both 'Yesterday's Enterprise' and 'Legacy', the pointlessness and stupidity of her death are both mined to good effect because it makes people angry that such a warrior would have died in such a random way.
And I resent the idea that her death was pointless. Armus killing her was pointless. Tasha's death was an attempt to save a life, and that can never be pointless. Saying her death was meaningless or unworthy just because she didn't succeed is an insult to every firefighter or rescue worker or police officer who's ever given their life in the line of duty. The meaning is in the fact that she was willing to try, no matter the risk.
Blame Guinan, she was the one that said Tasha's death was pointless (or "empty" I believe her exact word was).
I don't blame Guinan, I blame the writers who made her say that.
I thought he looked great. Very scary.
He killed her so Denise Crosby could pursue the wildly successful movie career that she definitely had.
The backstory was fine, but how much mileage can you really get from a creature whose core motive is hostility for the sake of hostility?
I think Skin of Evil was one of Star Trek's most dramatic and risky episodes and Armus is the most unique creature. The fact that Counselor Troi's shuttle happened to crash on a mysterious planet solely inhabitated by such a malovolent creature really gave the audience a sense of the danger of outer space, which was a nice element of early TNG. I also liked the look of Armus and thought black slime was a original and striking approach. He still looks so unique amidst all the aliens the Enterprise has encountered. Dr. Crusher asks what he is made of, and the crew can't register Armus by any measurement of life on their tricorders. The story suggests that Armus's slimey appearance and form was the physical manifestion of some kind of spiritual cleansing, where an alien race cast off all that was evil within, thus creating a single new creature. It is better left a mystery of how such a thing could happen.
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I thought there was some potential in the idea that Armus felt resentment about being rejected and abandoned by its people. It was basically sort of a Lucifer character, the fallen one from a race of angelic beings. Western civilization has gotten a lot of mileage out of that premise over the past couple of millennia.
I used to wonder if we'd ever encounter the race that sloughed off Armus. Its backstory seemed like a natural seed for a followup about that species. Heck, maybe we'd already met them. Could they have been the Organians, or the Metrons? Probably not the Q, since they're hardly free of darker impulses. Although I always imagined them being some new race. Armus did have a sort of vague "face" structure, and I always envisioned its creator species as having a similar head shape in white, or in clear crystal, or something like that.
"Monster of the week" is an apt allusion, but not in connection with The X-Files. "Skin of Evil" was plotted and co-scripted by Joseph Stefano, who was the head writer/producer on season 1 of the 1963 The Outer Limits -- the original "monster of the week" show. TOL was intended by its creator to be a smart, sophisticated science fiction anthology, but it was sold to network execs who associated sci-fi with B-grade monster movies for kids, so it was required by the network to include a scary monster in every episode.
When I first saw "Skin of Evil" and saw Stefano's name in the credits, I felt that it played very much like an Outer Limits episode, in that it used a weird rubber-suit monster to dramatize a philosophical concept. Although the idea of Armus being somehow a physical embodiment of a species' distilled dark side was rather fanciful for TOL, more a Twilight Zone sort of thing.
And, very possibly, to dissociate from outmoded roles like the one she played in Code of Honor.
Anyway, Crosby was a stone cold fox in Yesterday's Enterprise. A more than welcome return.
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