10 Times Star Trek Should Have Known Better

Our head canon is always - no body, no death! We even have lists on the topic so that we can live in our land of make believe. In that happy place, Commander Ro Laren is alive and well, perhaps with a nice, cushy office job at Starfleet Security. If we are to take Star Trek: Picard’s third season as gospel however, Ro is most certainly not in a comfy office chair. Instead, she was trapped aboard a hijacked shuttle, sacrificing herself to help the Titan-A get away from the USS Intrepid. 

However. Michelle Forbes’ return to Star Trek was a wonderful moment in the show, though her exit left a sour taste in our mouths. This character had last been seen in Preemptive Strike, one of the final episodes of The Next Generation, wherein she left Starfleet to join the Maquis. In Imposters, she says that she left them before the Dominion wiped them out (that was lucky) and earned her commission back. She rose through the ranks, eventually starting to suspect the Changeling infiltration of Starfleet.

Her arrival aboard the Titan-A is to seemingly investigate Jean-Luc Picard for his culpability in the rerouting of the ship to the Ryton System, as well as the rescue of Beverly Crusher. However, after some truly emotional scenes between the characters, she leaves - only to be immediately betrayed by her two aides, revealed then to be Changelings themselves. There is a bomb placed aboard her shuttle, but stopping to allow the Titan-A to rescue her would put it at risk of destruction. She pilots the shuttle into the bussard collector of the Intrepid, exploding along with her shuttle. 

At which point, Riker immediately turns to Captain Shaw, using Ro’s death as proof of their tale. Shaw relents and the Titan-A warps out. To be clear, the term ‘fridging,’ coined by comic book writer Gail Simone, originated after the release of the Green Lantern comic in which Lantern Kyle Raynor’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt was killed and folded inside a fridge as a warning to him. It has come to mean the deliberate killing of a female character so that a male character will understand the stakes.

Ro deserved better and no amount of ‘she was in the original script for the finale’ can fix what was presented on screen.