Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Tasha Yar

Before Denise Crosby could leave, Gene Roddenberry wanted to kill off Tasha Yar "with a 'senseless' but typical sudden death befitting a security chief," according to The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion. Now everyone else just had to figure out how to make that work. As Skin of Evil co-writer Hannah Louise Shearer aptly put it in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years,

There had been two or three drafts, and everyone seemed to have a different feeling about how it should go. I had to refashion it in a way I could live with, and Tasha could die with.

In general, few in front of and behind the camera were pleased with the episode. Yar was quite literally tossed aside by a moody oil slick. Rumours also abounded, as related in Trek: The Unauthorized Behind-The-Scenes Story of The Next Generation, that it was lawyer for Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Maizlish, who — apart from making Armus look like a teddy bear — had in fact devised, and insisted on, a speedy dispatch for Tasha.

In the 24th century, the holograms still worked, even if some of them were see-through (oooo, look at the pretty clouds!), so everyone could pop to the holodeck to be forever psychologically scarred by the vision of the life-sized copy of the dead lady giving her own eulogy.

In the TNG season one DVD extra Memorable Missions, Crosby recalled that, when it came to filming Yar's holographic farewell, all the crew arrived wearing black armbands, and she had come to set in a "little funerial black hat with a little veil." Crosby further praised the writing of the scene for creating "a magical moment" in which the "words of the character were actually mirroring the words that [she] might say as Denise."