10 Star Trek Characters That Just VANISHED

Martha Hackett did not make her debut in Star Trek as the love-to-hate Cardassian spy, Seska, in Voyager. Though she had appeared in a deleted scene in All Good Things, her true debut came in the third season of Deep Space Nine, in the series opener, The Search. Here she played Sub-commander T’Rul, the Romulan officer assigned to operate the cloaking device aboard the USS Defiant. 

She was gruff, she had no interest in making friends, and she was everything we would have assumed a Romulan officer to be. In short, she was great. A holographic version of her was killed by the Jem’hadar, but her real self was captured, along with much of the Defiant’s crew, and placed in a kind of neural stasis. 

Once released, she presumably took up her post on the Defiant again. Only, she was never seen or heard from after that point. 

There may simply have been a case of too many new characters, as The Search also introduced Michael Eddington to the mix, but the disappearance of T’Rul was a true shame. The fact that she didn’t get along with everyone suited the tone of Deep Space Nine, especially with the gradual softening of Odo, who effectively created the mould that she was poured into. For Martha Hackett fans of course all was not lost, as Seska would debut in Voyager shortly thereafter. 

Perhaps that is our answer. Seska IS T’Rul, and the spy-ception goes further than any of us ever assumed…