Tasha Yar's death. Since Star Trek started going boldly in 1966, a great many brave Starfleet officers have perished - not all of them wearing red at the time. One of Star Trek's most controversial exits came in The Next Generation season 1's "Skin of Evil." Tasha Yar was the first main character to get bumped from the sequel series, with actress Denise Crosby later revealing her reluctance to hang around in a monotonous role. Nevertheless, Star Trek fans were less than pleased with Tasha Yar's death at the hands of Armus.
Jean-Luc Picard's Enterprise crew left it to rot. The Cerritos pranksters mock Armus from afar, calling it a "big bag of crap" and making the monster comically fall over its own feet.
Star Trek: Lower Decks makes Armus look ridiculous (not a tall order, ittedly) and, in doing so, highlights precisely why The Next Generation fans raised their pitchforks over Tasha Yar's death. Not only was her final scene played entirely for shock value, but losing a main The Next Generation cast member to a big lump of goo even the TOS era would've thought twice about made for a colossal anti-climax. Viewers had grown attached to Tasha Yar, and though Crosby's decision to leave was understandable, her character didn't deserve a lackluster departure to a B-list Star Trek villain who doesn't even have eyebrows.
Boimler, Mariner, Rutherford and Tendi prank calling Armus in Star Trek: Lower Decks picks out the big problems with Tasha Yar's death. The Next Generation's sentient puddle occupies the less glamorous - some might say pathetic - end of the Star Trek villain spectrum. Armus isn't especially strategic or menacing. As Boimler and his friends prove, it's the emotionally fragile, desperately lonely butt of Starfleet's jokes - a powerful entity reduced to the galactic equivalent of an angry old man shouting at clouds. Armus is the type of enemy Star Trek audiences expect redshirts might fall prey to, not a feature character of Tasha Yar's stature.
The Star Trek: Lower Decks Armus gag is a perfect example of what the animated comedy does best. On one hand, reintroducing Tasha Yar's tar-splashing nemesis is a surreal dive into Star Trek lore; an unashamedly juvenile take on a villain originally intended to be deadly serious. Rather than just mindlessly making fun of the franchise's past, however, Star Trek: Lower Decks pinpoints a long-running bone of contention among the fandom (in this case the embarrassing fall of a much-loved character) and lovingly mocks the missteps of the past.