YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S 1 E 22 "Skin of Evil"

• Awesome Music: "Tasha's Goodbye" by Ron Jones.
• Broken Base: There are some who actually enjoy Tasha's death due to avoiding a cliche glorious sacrifice, as well as teaching the audience and characters that in space, people can die and often there is nothing you can do to stop it. Others feel her death was too cheap and that Tasha deserved far better.
• Growing the Beard: The death of Tasha Yar is credited with giving the show a pathos in subsequent episodes that it didn't have before, especially since the death was senseless and abrupt. Which ultimately is extremely ironic because Denise Crosby left for exactly the reason she wasn't feeling challenged enough.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The holodeck program◊ where Tasha Yar's memorial service is held looks a lot like the standard wallpaper◊ of Windows XP. Do remember that the episode predated XP by well over a decade.
• It Was His Sled: This is well known as the episode where Tasha Yar dies.
• Jerkass Woobie: Armus, especially if he ever got free. He's a black liquid of pure evil made of the discarded negative emotions of an ancient race of highly advanced aliens, but he had no choice in his own creation and his constant state of undirected rage and hatred actually pains him as well. He wants nothing more than to be reunited with his creators for leaving him on a dead planet for millennia, but he will never get the chance. Both Picard and Troi express their pity for him while acknowledging his malevolence, but he angrily rejects it.
• Narm: The presentation of Armus is often a failure of drama due to several factors; the fact that his dialogue sounds like it was recorded in a tin can, the fact that his anguished screams sound more like an overgrown child having a tantrum and the hokey (even for 1988) special effects.
• Retroactive Recognition: Chief Engineer Leland T. Lynch is played by Walker Boone, who would later voice Mario in The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Armus would probably be much scarier if it wasn't so obvious he's just a guy in a suit covered with oil. This didn't look convincing even in 1988.
  • Not helping in Tasha's death is that the only sign of what Armus has done to her is a purple-ish splotch on her cheek that looks more like the old Nickelodeon splat logo than anything more like an injury.

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