How did viewers respond to the death of Tasha Yar at the time?

[TheAdmiralty]

Probably the same place that the rumor I remember hearing at the time did - that she was being let go because of appearances she had made that amounted to softcore porn, and The Powers That Be over Trek did not approve.

I could imagine Berman firing an actress if he found out she did softcore (which I don't think was an uncommon practice for struggling actresses in the days before the internet) but I doubt Gene would have cared and he was still the one running the show at the time.

 

[Sakonna]

This podcast interview with Marina Sirtis

http://www.missionlogpodcast.com/the-one-with-marina-sirtis/

has an interesting anecdote that I hadn't heard before. She talks about how very early on, before they'd premiered, Majel Barrett started pushing her to do as many convention appearances as possible. Much later, Majel confessed that Gene had come home depressed, saying he realized they had one too many women on the show, and they were going to have to fire one (which is absurd, but also depressingly believable), and it was probably going to have to be Marina. So Majel, having already appeared as Lwaxana and personally bonded with Marina, had been pushing her into the convention appearances so she could build her fanbase and escape the ax. And then Denise Crosby quitting saved her job. (And then presumably the additional insistence from Maurice Hurley that they fire Gates McFadden REALLY saved her job... losing all three women after the first season would not have been a good look... though maybe this group would not have cared so much about that in 1988...)

Incidentally, Marina Sirtis also pushes back really forcefully in the interview on the notion that Tasha got no development in season 1. She got all the stuff about an abusive upbringing on a brutal planet, whereas Troi was being written out of shows left and right that season. It was an interesting perspective.

I also like when they talk about Marina originally auditioning for Tasha: "And if I got that part, she would have been on the show all 7 years."

 

[Nebusj]

I've never agreed with the mockery of Tasha's drug speech in "Symbiosis." Okay, granted, re-reading it now, it is somewhat simplistically written. But it always seemed clear to me that she was implicitly admitting that she had been an addict herself, so she was speaking from the heart rather than just being preachy, and we were learning something important about her character.

I agree here. The drug speech is simplistic, but not out of line with most of Next Generation's writing at that point. Compare it to Picard arguing against single-sentence punishment on the Death Penalty Spa World. Also ... well, Yar was talking to a kid who had never imagined drug use before; she had to introduce the concepts. (I'm willing to grant Wesley as that naive a person. I can't say I was much more worldly when I was that age.) I'm not sure it would make the top ten embarrassing Next Generation speeches except that its reputation has grown so.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I agree here. The drug speech is simplistic, but not out of line with most of Next Generation's writing at that point. Compare it to Picard arguing against single-sentence punishment on the Death Penalty Spa World. Also ... well, Yar was talking to a kid who had never imagined drug use before; she had to introduce the concepts.

Apparently, what she had to say made an impression, though...

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(Skip to around 3:05 if you're impatient. )

 

[Christopher]

I could imagine Berman firing an actress if he found out she did softcore (which I don't think was an uncommon practice for struggling actresses in the days before the internet) but I doubt Gene would have cared and he was still the one running the show at the time.

Again -- Crosby did not "do softcore." She did a pictorial in Playboy when she was younger. She wasn't even a Playmate, just one of the other women in the issue.

Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if that pictorial was part of the reason Roddenberry hired her, given how preoccupied he was with women's sex appeal. Here's how the writers' bible described Tasha Yar:

Tasha's (unspecified) Ukrainian descent gives her an unusual quality of conditioned-body beauty that would have flabbergasted males of a few centuries earlier. With fire in her eyes and a muscularly well-developed and very female body, she is capable of pinning most crewmen to the mat -- or being just an exciting sensual and intellectual challenge to males who enjoy (win or lose) full equality between the genders. Neither Number One nor Captain Picard is blind to these qualities in Tasha, but she finds it difficult to treat these "saints" as mere mortals.

Neither of the other female characters had as much written about her sexuality in the bible -- Crusher's bio just mentions she's a beautiful woman and repeats the "very female form" line, and Troi's mentions almost in passing that humans consider her slightly alien appearance exotically beautiful. But we get a whole paragraph devoted to how sexy Tasha is and how much her commanding officers want to bang her. That suggests that Roddenberry's intent was for Tasha to be the primary sex symbol of the show. Or maybe he was just afraid that a physically strong woman would be seen as unfeminine and went overboard insisting that, yes, sure, she'll still be eminently worth lusting over, guys.

Incidentally, Marina Sirtis also pushes back really forcefully in the interview on the notion that Tasha got no development in season 1. She got all the stuff about an abusive upbringing on a brutal planet, whereas Troi was being written out of shows left and right that season. It was an interesting perspective.

I can see where she's coming from, but the thing is, while all that stuff about Tasha was established, it was rarely explored. So the potential went unrealized. We didn't get an episode focusing on that brutal planet until years after Tasha was killed off.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

Again -- Crosby did not "do softcore." She did a pictorial in Playboy when she was younger. She wasn't even a Playmate, just one of the other women in the issue..

I know, I was just speaking hypothetically in regards to if the aforementioned rumor was true.

 

[Sakonna]

Man, that bit from the writer's bible about Tasha is unreal!

I can see where she's coming from, but the thing is, while all that stuff about Tasha was established, it was rarely explored. So the potential went unrealized. We didn't get an episode focusing on that brutal planet until years after Tasha was killed off.

Oh, yes, I'd agree with you. True of so many aspects of the first season... interesting ideas introduced, but not explored effectively until much later. I just thought Marina's view was an interesting counterpoint. That was the real misfortune of the early exit for Tasha -- come season 3, they could have done such fascinating things with that backstory. Though, they did eventually get similar ideas in there with Ro.

It's interesting to imagine the version of TNG that would have had Marina Sirtis as Yar for 7 seasons, and Denise Crosby as a Troi that is killed by Armus after one year. With that actor/role match, eventually getting to a Yar/Worf romantic pairing could have been great. And it's a whole other angle for Riker... I imagine they wouldn't have played it explicitly that often, but he would have always been a haunted character after that.

And you know they would have kept shoving Lwaxana back in there somehow!

 

[Miss Lemon]

Here's how the writers' bible described Tasha Yar:

That is disgusting.

I remember being shocked by Tasha's death. I was in my teens during that time and women in tv series mostly cried for help only. Now this was a women who wore an uniform just like the guys and knew how to hold a phaser. Looking back I may not be too impressed by the actor's acting, but then again I'm not too impressed by TNG season 1 as a whole. I was really happy when they introduced ensign Ro in later seasons.

 

[{ Emilia }]

That is disgusting.

I remember being shocked by Tasha's death. I was in my teens during that time and women in tv series mostly cried for help only. Now this was a women who wore an uniform just like the guys and knew how to hold a phaser. Looking back I may not be too impressed by the actor's acting, but then again I'm not too impressed by TNG season 1 as a whole. I was really happy when they introduced ensign Ro in later seasons.

I still think not getting Ro as a main character in DS9 was such a missed opportunity.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ They asked, but Michelle Forbes turned it down.

 

[Lance]

My own observation about Tasha is that her 'downfall' as a character seems to have been an accident (a happy accident, some might say) that only came about from the late addition of Michael Dorn to the cast. Gene Roddenberry was infamously dubious about the idea of a Klingon officer -- he was pushing back against any suggestion coming his way that meant using old enemies like Romulans, Klingons etc -- but that Bob Justman was pushing just as hard for a Klingon officer, because he felt they'd demonstrate the way in which the new show is unlike the old one, as well as providing the 'alien mystique' that Spock had done on TOS. By some accounts, Dorn wasn't even regular cast on the 'Farpoint' pilot episode, it was only after seeing his performance in that episode that Roddenberry sent the order down to renegotiate Dorn's contract and make Worf a regular character (tellingly, the initial full-cast photographs on the planet hell set omit Worf).

The unintended consequence? Throughout the season, Worf's character clearly caught the imagination of the writers, and he was written into stories which he hadn't originally been a part of -- his role in 'The Naked Now' was fairly generic, but certainly by the time 'Justice' came around, the writers were finding interesting things for him to do. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that Worf was naturally best suited to grunt work, and there are several episodes where he is quick to pull his phaser before Tasha does, or he gets to do the fight scenes instead of Tasha. All of this must have been very frustrating for Crosby.

The nadir was clearly 'Hide & Q', where Tasha is banished from Q's planet within minutes of the episode starting without so much as a by-your-leave, and her role in the episode is demoted to sobbing away about how unfair her life is in Q's penalty box, all the while Worf gets some meaty fight scenes down on the planet with Q's vicious animal things. It wouldn't surprise me if this was the precise moment when Crosby became determined to leave the show.

It seems obvious to me that from the moment Worf was conceived, Tasha Yar became something of a 'fifth wheel' in the cast dynamic.

 

[{ Emilia }]

^ They asked, but Michelle Forbes turned it down.

I know. But just imagine how cool that would've been.
And it's not like Forbes' movie career took off.

 

[RandyS]

I knew of it ahead of time but I don't remember how I reacted.

 

[Christopher]

The unintended consequence? Throughout the season, Worf's character clearly caught the imagination of the writers, and he was written into stories which he hadn't originally been a part of -- his role in 'The Naked Now' was fairly generic, but certainly by the time 'Justice' came around, the writers were finding interesting things for him to do. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that Worf was naturally best suited to grunt work, and there are several episodes where he is quick to pull his phaser before Tasha does, or he gets to do the fight scenes instead of Tasha.
...
It seems obvious to me that from the moment Worf was conceived, Tasha Yar became something of a 'fifth wheel' in the cast dynamic.

I think that's kind of a back-projection, based on the fact that we got used to thinking of Worf as a security officer. But that was never his role until "Skin of Evil." In the first season, he was the bridge watch officer, responsible for filling in at whatever station needed filling, or commanding the bridge in Picard and Riker's absence. Sometimes he filled in at conn, sometimes at ops, and usually he manned the rear consoles that were only used when needed, like science and mission ops. His primary role in the ensemble in the first season was essentially like Chekov's in TOS -- the young officer-in-training, the protege learning from more experienced officers -- only not quite as young and inexperienced as Wesley. (Recall his line in "Lonely Among Us" about how Picard expected his junior officers to "learn, learn, learn.") Yes, he had his aggressive side, but it didn't define his entire character or his duties on the ship. The main reason he tended to be associated with Tasha was because his usual seat on the bridge was behind her, and the main reason he was promoted to temporary security chief in "Skin" was because it was the watch's officer's duty to fill in at vacant bridge positions. If, say, Data had been the one killed, Worf would've been promoted to interim ops manager instead.

Frankly, I think being made permanent security chief was a bad thing for Worf, because it trapped him in the very stereotyped role of "Klingon warrior." That became the only thing that defined him, his Klingon-ness, and he became a caricature of that -- which really didn't make sense given that he'd spent most of his formative years being raised by humans. It wasn't until he became strategic operations officer on DS9 that he was really able to grow more fully as a character.

I realized a few years ago that what they should've done was to make Geordi the new security chief and Worf the chief engineer. Geordi's VISOR would've been a great asset for security work, both as a sensor instrument and a lie detector. And making Worf an engineer instead of a warrior would've helped him avoid being defined solely by stereotypical Klingon traits.

 

[Lance]

Of course its back projection. But it's also backed up by observation of what's on screen (which is what I said -- "my own observation"). In things like 'Hide & Q' and 'Too Short A Season', we already see Worf in roles that might be expected to belong to the security chief. Crosby herself said on tape and on the record that she was annoyed at the scripts not "showing us what this so-called female chief of security can really do". It's supposition on my part that she saw these things happening herself at the time, but it also isn't much of a stretch based on the evidence. Nobody knows for sure except her (and I suspect by this stage she's hardly going to come out and tell us.)

We might never know how the show may have progressed with both Worf and Yar in the cast, especially after the writing team finally started getting their act together from the second season onwards. Scenes like their interactions in '01001001' and 'Skin of Evil' seem to suggest an interesting friendship/dynamic between them. But it feels instinctively like one character kind of pushes the other out of the picture, unless they'd been willing to adjust Tasha's role accordingly. It's also interesting that the episode where they brought her back ('Yesterday's Enterprise'), it's in a universe where Worf isn't on the Enterprise to get in her way.

Alternatively, given the producer's willingness to play with the cast line-up and drop characters between seasons (Dr. Crusher), it's entirely plausible that if Crosby had stayed around, she may have suffered the same fate: being written out between seasons and with Worf simply transplanted directly in her former role. At least the way things went, she got a departure on screen, and became a permanent footnote in Star Trek history to boot as the first regular character to be killed off and not brought back. I'd call that a good legacy, considering the alternative.

 

[Christopher]

Of course its back projection. But it's also backed up by observation of what's on screen (which is what I said -- "my own observation").

But that's exactly my point -- our observations are filtered through our expectations, so having preconceptions can lead us to see things that weren't intended. We have to be skeptical of our own point of view in order to be careful observers; we have to be aware of the ways that our biases could be distorting our interpretation of our observations, and try to filter out those biases and consider alternative ways of looking at the evidence. When I was a history major, one of the first principles drilled home was to resist the temptation to impose a modern interpretation on a past phenomenon. We were trained to try to understand how people at the time would've thought and perceived things, and to view things through that context.

Although I was actually there at the time, watching in first run, so I'm speaking from personal memory. I'm trying to remember how I experienced the first season at the time it originally aired, before Worf was in security. Thinking back on it, I think maybe I did sometimes feel he was being treated more like a de facto security officer than he was actually meant to be -- but since human memory is fallible (mine particularly so), I can't be sure if that's what I actually experienced or if it's just what my mind is projecting onto that memory because the idea has been put in my head by this conversation. The past is treacherous terrain. But I do know that, even if that's where he ended up, it's not where he was originally intended to be, and I dislike it that he ended up getting stereotyped as a "warrior" above all else.

For that matter, I hate the idea that "warrior" and "security officer" have anything to do with each other. A security officer should be a protector. If they're doing their job right, they should prevent violence from breaking out in the first place, not just react to it after it happens.

It's also interesting that the episode where they brought her back ('Yesterday's Enterprise'), it's in a universe where Worf isn't on the Enterprise to get in her way.

But that episode came after Worf had been security chief for a couple of seasons, so in that context it makes sense to see them as competing for the same space. So it isn't really applicable to a discussion of the situation before Worf was officially in the same role as Yar.

 

[Greysun]

Yes, I'll never forget seeing that episode and the fateful scene where she was blown away by a gooey alien for no reason.
I shrugged and moved on with my life.

 

[Prax]

I saw it airing or a year or two later. I can't remember. I was very, very young, but I remember being shocked that she died, and terrified of the crude oil monster.

I would never have shown this to my own kid when she was the age I was seeing it.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Yar had been given horrible lines in horrible stories, just as most characters had been at this point in TNG. The only reason I watched TNG at all was because it was Star Trek and I had been a huge TOS fan for years by then. If TNG had been in any other sci-fi franchise, I would have bailed after the first few episodes. My god, first-season TNG was racing with 3rd-season TOS for the bottom, right out of the gate!

The best part of "Skin of Evil" was the funeral. That was actually kind of sad. But the rest of the episode was awful, tedious, and pedestrian.

I always thought that there was some potential in the character of Armus. However, the most interesting aspect of him, his origin as the residue of evil supposedly cleansed from a race of Titans, was only spoken of, in violation of the maxim of story-telling, "show, don't tell." That helped make the episode a yawner. We should have seen those Titans, and they should have been gloriously beautiful, but their careless abandonment of such evil, leading to evil, is itself quite arguably evil. Picard should have been able to confront the Titans regarding their arrogance and their failure to have cleansed themselves.

 

[Refuge]

I remember thinking that Worf suited the role of Security better than she did. Let's be honest she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. Cringe worthy. I wanted to like her because she was a bit like me in looks but she didn't measure up.