10 Star Trek Characters You Totally Forgot Existed
7. Lt Carey
A huge part of the initial set up for Voyager, Lt Joe Carey was Voyager's replacement chief engineer for a brief period.
That changed once Janeway appointed B'Elanna Torres in the role and Carey was immediately side-lined. For such a prominent character early in the show's development, Carey is shunted to the background from that point onwards, only appearing in alternative timeline episodes after Season 1, before being unceremoniously killed in Season 7 a mere 4 episodes before Voyager actually makes it back to earth.
In Friendship One - where his prominence in the early scenes should have alerted viewers that something was amiss - he, along with his away team, are taken hostage while visiting an irradiated planet. After some negotiations take place, Carey is permitted to return to Voyager, but not before he's spontaneously blasted through the heart with an anti-matter weapon to send a message to Janeway.
It was an ignoble death for someone who looked, in the early days, like being a mainstay of the show. The revelation that he'd been painstakingly building a ship-in-a-bottle of Voyager was supposed to tug on the old heartstrings, but he simply didn't feel like a big enough deal for it to really matter.