Quite famously, Nichelle Nichols wanted to quit Star Trek. The show didn’t do anything with her character, and she wasn’t getting any support from the studio or the network—they were even withholding her fan mail. Why suffer through it? And then a famous fan of the show convinced her that her just being there was important, and she stayed. And let’s be real that Tasha Yar was not nearly so important a role as Uhura. Still, it’s worth noting that, while they did more with Yar than Uhura, they didn’t do much more, and it was definitely reasonable of her to feel ignored and want out. It also took a couple of seasons for Worf to really become prominent, so there’s no reason to believe Tasha would’ve gotten more to do.
Still, Denise Crosby’s always going to be known for that decision, isn’t she? Whether you agree with it or not, she’s Tasha Yar. And while it’s true that one of her credits is so obscure that IMDb doesn’t know what the movie is about, she also did things like Deep Impact, Pet Sematary, and Ray Donovan. I suspect a lot of her one-shot appearances in assorted science fiction TV shows were based on “she was Tasha Yar,” but she gives fine performances in them. No matter what the role, she seems to be determined to give her best in it.
She really did have reason to expect better of Tasha Yar. There hadn’t really been a chief of security in the original Star Trek, but they were inagurating the role by giving it to a woman. In a way, it’s early Next Generation‘s weird attempts at feminism. Yes, let’s leave in the miniskirt uniforms in the first season, but let’s be egalitarian and have men wear them as well. Which I suppose finally did prove how ridiculously impractical they were, so there’s certainly that. But having a woman as the chief of security proved to at least some extent that women were not seen as “the weaker sex” in the twenty-fourth century.
But they didn’t really give Tasha her due. She did twenty-two episodes up to “Skin of Evil,” wherein her character dies, and in that time we had learned about Data’s origins, Picard and Crusher’s mutual history, Riker and Troi’s mutual history, and how Worf ended up in Starfleet. There had been three Wesley episodes. And, yes, there was a Yar episode—which even at the time was considered kind of racist and had a fight scene ripped off from American Gladiators. She also got to strip into sexy clothes and seduce the android. I suspect she didn’t see better coming, and honestly she wasn’t wrong.
In case you’re wondering, yes, Denise Crosby is Bing’s granddaughter. Her parents were unmarried; her mother pursued her father through the courts for three years to get Denise acknowledged and her father Dennis to pay child support. The family rejected her so thoroughly that she was nineteen when her grandfather died and never met him. Though this may have been for the best, given what I’ve read about her grandfather. What wasn’t for the best was the drama teacher who used her as an example of the terrible nepotism of Hollywood, as if her father’s family had ever done anything for her.
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