On a recent rewatch of TNG season one, it suddenly occured to me just how sidelined the character of Tasha Yar was. And to notice just how meteoric was the rise of Michael Dorn's character Worf, from effectively being just a cool looking background guy who was intended to only be in a handful of episodes, to being effectively one of the top tier characters by the end of the first season.
But the most interesting thing is how his character's increasing prominence effectively neuters Tasha as a character. It's as if the writing team came the conclusion after the first four or five episodes that with Worf on board, Yar didn't actually have a dramatic purpose. There are a number of episodes where this becomes very obvious. In "Hide and Q", for example, the arrival of Q on the bridge sees Worf's warrior instincts taking over, as he jumps over the horseshoe rail and levels his phaser immediately. By contrast, Tasha -- the supposed security chief aboard the Enterprise, let us not forget -- takes a good ten seconds longer to react to the intruder, eventually unholstering her own weapon and meekly wandering into the background of the shot to offer Worf back-up. Likewise later in the episode, where Worf is given a superb little scene where he takes on seven of Q's vicious animal things single-handedly, while Tasha (whose role, on paper, should have seen her doing more of that kind of thing) is relegated to sitting around crying on the bridge of the Enterprise, ignored and forgotten.
Those are only two examples that come to mind, but there are many others. I know Crosby had a bit of a beef about her character apparently not being given as prominent a role as she expected -- perhaps a touch of the prima donna coming out in the actress, or perhaps a wholely justified reaction to Worf's character increasingly being written into the scripts in roles that by rights should have probably belonged to Tasha.
So what do you think? Do you reckon that the series simply could never have sustained both characters for a long period of time, no matter how hard the writing team tried? It always seemed to me that Worf's very presence alone was enough to make Tasha, as a character, irrelevant.
But the most interesting thing is how his character's increasing prominence effectively neuters Tasha as a character. It's as if the writing team came the conclusion after the first four or five episodes that with Worf on board, Yar didn't actually have a dramatic purpose. There are a number of episodes where this becomes very obvious. In "Hide and Q", for example, the arrival of Q on the bridge sees Worf's warrior instincts taking over, as he jumps over the horseshoe rail and levels his phaser immediately. By contrast, Tasha -- the supposed security chief aboard the Enterprise, let us not forget -- takes a good ten seconds longer to react to the intruder, eventually unholstering her own weapon and meekly wandering into the background of the shot to offer Worf back-up. Likewise later in the episode, where Worf is given a superb little scene where he takes on seven of Q's vicious animal things single-handedly, while Tasha (whose role, on paper, should have seen her doing more of that kind of thing) is relegated to sitting around crying on the bridge of the Enterprise, ignored and forgotten.
Those are only two examples that come to mind, but there are many others. I know Crosby had a bit of a beef about her character apparently not being given as prominent a role as she expected -- perhaps a touch of the prima donna coming out in the actress, or perhaps a wholely justified reaction to Worf's character increasingly being written into the scripts in roles that by rights should have probably belonged to Tasha.
So what do you think? Do you reckon that the series simply could never have sustained both characters for a long period of time, no matter how hard the writing team tried? It always seemed to me that Worf's very presence alone was enough to make Tasha, as a character, irrelevant.
