LogFAQs > #932976991

#55 Tasha Yar
"I quit! ...So when do you need me back?"

Tasha Yar isn't an interesting character. And that's a crying shame. Despite Gene Roddenberry's push for picture perfect human harmony aboard the Enterprise-D, which was stupid, Yar's series bible entry mentions that she's from a planet filled with literal rape gangs, so needless to say everything else dreadful is going on there as well. In the third season, we get to briefly explore that planet, via Tasha's somewhat more interesting sister. But Yar herself is long gone -- dead thanks to a salt monster, I cannot make this shit up -- because Denise Crosby didn't think she was receiving compelling enough material to continue. And you know, she wasn't wrong, it's just that hardly anybody was in season one, because the writers didn't just screw Yar up. They screwed the whole shebang.

But back to Tasha. I liken her to the earliest episodes of Stargate SG-1 as the very clearly male writers scrambled to define Amanda Tapping's character, Samantha Carter. Instant verve! Let's give them both diatribes about girl power. Now what? Um, no idea. I got nothing. Stargate SG-1's worst ever episode comes blissfully soon (or awfully soon, if you're trying to recruit friends as newfound fans). It's called "Emancipation" and it's written by a woman named Katharyn Powers. I truly hate to throw this woman under the bus when so few women were writing for television (and certainly not science fiction) at the time but she is an atrocious writer. In "Emancipation", Sam Carter is kidnapped by a sexist backwards warlord who is a person of color and proves her mettle by fighting. In the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which comes blissfully soon (or awfully soon, if you're trying to recruit friends as newfound fans), Tasha Yar is kidnapped by a sexist backwards warlord who is a person of color and proves her mettle by fighting. In both instances, what is intended as a statement against sexism collapses into an ugly racist sentiment with feminism so dense it manages to destroy itself despite its aims.

After Tasha Yar was killed thanks to a salt monster -- again, I cannot make this shit up -- Denise Crosby wanted back on the show so the excellent "Yesterday's Enterprise" was written two years later. This is Yar at her finest, though it's far more memorable for the reactions from the Enterprise crew than Crosby's own performance, which is... fine. Now that Yar's fate was different -- heroic sacrifice, predestined -- Crosby then suggested that Yar survived the incident and was made a slave and concubine of a Romulan officer... because, I guess. Their offspring is Sela, who is Denise Crosby with half-Romulan forehead ridges, and while she's kind of a comically two-dimensional villain I still hate how her last canonical scene involves her, like, running away never to be seen again. She should have gotten something more but I guess these silly ideas meet silly endings.

She also showed up in a downright bizarre skin-revealing outfit to fuck Data.

But enough about plots that would have felt right at home in Star Trek: Voyager.




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Hi! I'm Quinton.
Did you know that Emilia Clarke will be my wife in 2023?