I don’t know whether this is an unpopular opinion or not but I actually think that the way Tasha Yar died gave the show much higher stakes throughout it’s entire run. Here is the chief security officer, main bridge crew, tragic back story, potential love interest for the robot character just slapped down by the monster of the week. It made all the subsequent dangerous situations seem much more dire because “they were willing to kill off someone in the main cast”. I also think that Yesterday’s Enterprise was an awesome send off for that character that let them have a heroic ending for her after all.
It was a shame because I think Denise Crosby could have been awesome as a recurring character and in my opinion, we didn’t get a great strong female character in the main cast (until DS9 which is an embarrassment of riches in that department). But I maintain that casually killing off Tasha Yar made my first watchthrough of TNG much more exciting.
I don’t however like the additional stretch of her half-romulan daughter. It’s pretty soap-opera-ish in my opinion and tarnishes the heroic sacrifice of her character.
There was a real threat that Picard would get killed off in Beat of Both Worlds.
That was entirely dependent on Stewart’s contract negotiations, though, rather than anyone wanting to kill off Picard.
I think the fact she got lightning-bolted by a sad puddle sort of ruined the dramatic impact of her death.
The execution of it was pretty lackluster.
Soap-opera-ish is completely right - killing off a character is meaningless if you establish your writers will stoop to a fakeout or a never before mentioned sibling/twin (or clone or mirror universe version, since it’s sci-fi).
Okay, but that’s not really what they did with Sela.
Sela wasn’t ‘Tasha returned’ - she had nothing in common with Tasha (in terms of personality or her role in the show) except for being played by the same actress. She clearly wasn’t just a backdoor soap opera route for Tasha to return.
Also she was only actually in four episodes (on the first of which the character wasn’t identified and Denise Crosby was an uncredited voice only). Sela’s brief appearances were so memorable that we tend to forget how minor her role actually was across the span of TNG - Tomalak had a bigger role, for example.
Definitely all true. But the implication that she was made into a Romulan love slave, especially after having established her backstory always rubbed me the wrong way.
@Deebster
And it was good for the development of Data and Worf. I wonder if Daystrom Android M-5-10 still mourns for Tasha?
They killed her because they wanted to fire her, right? At least that’s what I seem to recall.
They didn’t want to fire her, but she did want to quit. She wasn’t happy with the direction they were taking her character. I wouldn’t be surprised if she also had issues with the same guy McFadden did. Jadzia was killed off because Berman wouldn’t let Farrell switch to being a recurring rather than a regular, which may be what you’re thinking of.
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I don’t know if this is unpopular, but I wasn’t a fan of her character or the writing. Not sure how to describe it. But the whole first season was kinda off.
The show runners of Discovery have talked about wanting to create a feeling that no one, not even series regulars, were safe. They referenced Game of Thrones in that discussion, but Yar is a great example and probably would have gotten a little more love from the community.
It would be nice if the show was not afraid of killing named characters in general. Whenever someone dies it is almost exclusively a random character brought onto that episode just to die. Tasha Yar dying is more of an anomaly and never made the show feel like it had high stakes for me.
I agree completely. And Yar was a boring character anyway. The Romulan storyline was also pretty dumb.
Oyster was full of great female characters and it came out before DS9
