Legacy

DVD, TNG S4 (Legacy)

Tasha Yar's presence on the Enterprise and her premature exit made more of an impact than we perhaps realised at the time and has continued to reverberate down through each successive season when she has been mentioned or seen, her memory not forgotten. This time we get to visit her home planet and meet the sister she left behind. It was depressingly easy for Ishara to gain the trust of the Enterprise crew seeing as her leader was such an obvious rogue, but it's telling that they wanted Tasha back so much that they were willing to believe in her as quickly as possible. The manipulation is not as important as what it says about Tasha's loss. It has affected all the characters, but Data has been both the most and the least of all of them. He has no feelings, but he has experienced something unexpected and troubling.

I feel Ishara will be the most altered by the encounter, but her loyalty to the cause she has known most of her life is what drives the course of her life. She had the opportunity to start a new life if she really had decided to leave Turkana IV, but all she could see was the cause and felt that if she was to abandon her comrades she would be like her sister. Except she was nothing like her - Tasha must have seen beyond her little world and escaped, but her sister won't follow that course because Tasha took it. It's a sad story, but the full impact of the place was extremely toned down compared with the few details we'd heard of Tasha's life there. The sets were okay, but it was too basic, the same old humanoid soldiers standing around waiting to be shot, with little of the true sense of life there. Consequently it's difficult to care or even be interested in the rivalry on the planet, so that lessens the depth of the story.

The references to Tasha and Data's lesson make it a watchable episode, and the effects were certainly a positive, with some things not usually shown caught on camera. Phasers blasting into the planet's surface from the orbiting ship was one, as was the phaser in Ishara's hand making a small arc when she is shot and falls backwards onto the ground. For an instant it looked like she was waving a lightsaber, and seeing a moving phaser beam is a very rare occurrence in Trek. The proximity implants also looked pretty good, and there were some pretty phaser strikes, but on the whole the creeping or running about was overly melodramatic. Like the weak effects of The Original Series, people will remember moments like this when they move around a set trying to look hasty, but actually just meandering as slowly as possible so as not to run out of set!

A visit to Tasha's past, on paper, makes for an exciting proposition, as does meeting her sister, but in execution this is the first of the season to fall down and become a bit bland. The place has moved on since those days, but treachery is still at the forefront. There's nothing there for the Enterprise crew to sympathise with, only pity the small world it is, and the violence it perpetuates. Not a legacy to be proud of.

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