KILL YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

By: Adam McGovern
November 1, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite killed-off TV characters. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

LT. TASHA YAR | STAR TREK: TNG

Tragic heroes die before their time, but some triumph by dying ahead of it. When Tasha Yar was killed off sooner than Star Trek: The Next Generation had even completed its first season, actor Denise Crosby felt it was already overdue. The Enterprise’s security chief strode into the series as a pioneering badass heroine, then took the two-steps-back still common to females in the franchise in those days, fading ever further into the background; Crosby asked out of her contract and was amicably abandoned. That’s when she became unforgettable.

My Trekker cousin Kathy and I agreed at the time that nothing in Yar’s fictional life became her like the leaving of it; we’d found Crosby’s performances often as stiff and indifferent as her roles were slight, and then she broke the airwaves with a heart-wrenching hologrammic parting soliloquy (prerecorded by Yar before her sudden senseless death). In retrospect it’s easy to see the actor’s dissatisfaction showing through the increasingly uninspiring material she was given, and what she could have given back.

But regret is immortal, and both series and actor could not quit each other forever. Callbacks to her brief time on the show were many, from an encounter with her estranged sister (and revelation of her full life story), to the holographic effigy of her that Data kept in his quarters. Meanwhile, Crosby had quietly lobbied to reappear on the show.

The first result was many people’s favorite episode, which aired two seasons later (“Yesterday’s Enterprise”). The Enterprise-C, a predecessor ship from over 20 years prior, jumps through a time-rift into the show’s present-day, where “our” Enterprise-D has suddenly shifted into a gloomy, militarized shadow of the semi-utopian Federation space we know, due to the earlier ship’s removal from the timeline, where it would otherwise have made a heroic sacrifice that guarantees a more peaceful galaxy.

On this Enterprise-D, Yar is still alive, but ends up going back with the doomed crew to its time, sensing that her only choice is to die with more meaning. Yar returns, or rather the show returns to her, again in what is many people’s other favorite episode, the series finale “All Good Things…” where a time-displaced Picard encounters her before the beginning of Season 1. Both of these scenarios are heavy with the weight of loss and the surreal atmosphere of roads retraced, and Crosby stands tall through both of them.

Dying was a formula that really won for Tasha Yar, but seriously, her renewed existence carried the biggest emotional shock, and seldom has a series been so influenced by a character’s absence, or so genuinely conveyed the consequences we feel in real-world life and death. Crosby recently revealed that her character will have some kind of presence in the final season of Star Trek: Picard; at that point we’ll learn whether or not her previous exit from the franchise left well enough alone. Either way, Yar’s original arc prefigured both the variant-universe themes now becoming omnipresent in pop culture, and the seeming lifetime contracts that reality shows and scripted franchises alike sign their casts to so they can recur and recombine endlessly. Hell, she was even supposed to be Ukrainian. We all remember when Tasha Yar died. But she was as much an omen as a ghost.

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KILL YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

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