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One such example is a story told to Volk-Weiss by Denise Crosby, the actor who played the Enterprise’s Chief Security Officer, Tasha Yar, in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Tasha Yar was exactly the sort of tough, action heroine character that was supposed to separate The Next Generation from its 60s forebear, but the first season saw her character woefully underwritten.
Disappointed with the lack of development her character had received, Crosby had decided to leave the show, and Rodenberry saw it as a chance to do something he had never done in the Original Series – kill off a member of the main cast.
This happened in the episode ‘Skin of Evil’, and most Next Generation fans will remember seeing Tasha Yar knocked out by an evil tar pit before dying on Doctor Crusher’s operating table. But what you may have missed is what happened in the last episode Crosby actually filmed, which aired the week before.
“I’ve seen that episode six or seven times and I never noticed that,” Volk-Weiss tells us. He recounts the story as Crosby told it to him.
“She shot her penultimate episode, and before that she’d shot her death. So, there’s a shot in her second-to-last episode where Picard and Deanna are walking out of a giant cargo bay, and all the way in the back, 500 to 1,000 feet away, you see Denise jump up and wave.”
Episode 22 of Star Trek: The Next Generation is ‘Symbiosis‘, which is as pure a by-the-numbers ‘Picard agonises over whether to break the Prime Directive’ episode as you can get.
Source: Den of Geek
