10 Star Trek Characters You Totally Forgot Existed
Blinked and missed them or were they just not that interesting to have around?
Across the ever-expanding Star Trek universe there have been more main and guest characters than fans would dare to count.
Those that shoot to prominence one day could well be out of the picture the following week or only see a season before mysteriously getting a transfer. Some could well be erased from the memories of the colleagues while other Star Trek characters appear brought in to spice the action up only to be gone just as fast.
Yet in amongst all those guest appearances there are some absolute gems that fans will kick themselves at forgetting and could well have impacted the franchise in a much bigger way. Indeed, there are some that only a paused blu-ray and a frantic internet search will remind you that they were in that episode and yes, they were that significant. Now, we're not talking about Operations Officer 1 or background actor number four. These are genuine cases of named persons!
So here we shall plough through the debris fields and travel the darkest wormholes to find those characters that left their mark on Star Trek for albeit brief period but deserve more recognition than they may have been given over the decades. Within these the path may touch on main cast as well as guests but each has a story to tell and in all cases there's the opportunity missed for more.
10. T'Rul
Ladies and gents, Deep Space Nine now has a new starship. It's called the USS Defiant and it's super fired up, armoured to the ends of the earth and has a Romulan cloaking device on loan from the Empire.
Because of this minor fact, the cloak will have to (emphasis on this) be operated by a Romulan. No ifs, no buts.
Which would be brilliant if it were not for the fact that the on loan factor is rarely brought up - but not as little as the disappearance of a Romulan from the bridge of the Defiant.
Appearing in just two episodes, Sub-Commander T'Rul was set to be an essential part of the series thanks to the Defiant's cloak but never appeared again. Luckily for actress Martha Hackett she would drop into Voyager as Seska and the rest is history.
But even if Hackett did traverse to the Delta Quadrant it's amazing how fast the significant presence of a Romulan on DS9 was cut. Never again would there be a Romulan on the Defiant as part of her contingent and activating the cloak would be down to the regulars once The Search was completed.