7 Star Trek Actors Who Were Fired

6. Jennifer Lien

It's virtually impossible to talk about Jennifer Lien's exit from Star Trek: Voyager without using some arrangement of the words Nine, Seven, and Of given that Kes departed the very episode after the Scorpion two-parter that introduced her Borg colleague. Despite how obvious a straight-swap seems, everyone involved has always maintained there was more to it than that.

In a version of events that's backed up by writers, producers, and even Lien herself, Kes' time on the ship had just naturally come to an end and there was no other way to really explore her arc. Brannon Braga specifically regards her exit as a fault on the part of himself, saying; "it was a creative decision and it was a failure of imagination on the writers' part. We were running out of things to do with Kes. We had to make room in the budget for a new character in the cast so there was a pragmatic reason but it was primarily a creative decision."

By letting Kes go the show removed the headache of how to write more material for her while, at the same time, avoiding any pressure from the network to streamline a show that they already felt had "too many characters" in it. She would, of course, briefly return for the episode Fury but once Seven arrived on the scene she was pretty much straight out of the airlock.