Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Tasha Yar
1. Another Good Yar-n?
Aside from a much later nod as holographic souvenir in Data's seemingly fading mind-palace fighting Lore in Star Trek: Picard's Surrender, Tasha Yar's last appearance in the canon of Star Trek was also her first. All Good Things… must go back to the beginning, with a slightly different haircut. Ronald D. Moore, who co-wrote the TNG finale, commented in The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion that "Tasha was something that would tie us into the past," but, given that Captain Picard was the only one who remembered said past, it was hardly character development for the already underdeveloped Yar.
Although you really had to be on your freeze-frame A-game to spot it during Seven of Nine's personnel file swipe-through in the evil-Earth universe of Picard's second season episode Penance, an alternate "Lieutenant Colonel Tasha Yar" (field officer of the Confederation) existed there too. Years prior, another version (or versions) of Yar had very nearly made it into Worf's universe-hopping episode Parallels, according to Brannon Braga in Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages. In the end, however, Braga and co. switched Yar out for that Wesley cameo so the episode wouldn't feel "too similar" to Yesterday's Enterprise.
Beta canon has been a bit more favourable to the erstwhile lieutenant. Still hooked on alternates, nonetheless, Yar (voiced by Denise Crosby) features in the Star Trek: Online mission 'Temporal Ambassador' in which the Enterprise-C emerges in 2409 rather than 2344 (for the time being), and also in 'Survivor,' which involves Daniels, Sela, and — surprise! — a not-executed-but-still-captive-of-the-Romulans version of Yar. In the fan production Blood and Fire, Crosby (in the flesh) played Yar's 23rd century ancestor Dr. Jenna Yar, and in the 'Tale of the Lost Era' novel The Buried Age, for example, we learn more about Yar's career pre- and up to the Enterprise-D.
It's doubtful that the original, non-alternate version of Tasha Yar will return to Star Trek now. A TrekCulture favourite, let's just hope we haven't said 'see ya(r)' to Sela!