Star Trek: 10 Character Reveals That Didn't Have To Go THAT Hard
1. An Eye For An Eye, Eh Icheb?
Sometimes, a character is revealed to have died off-screen. It's never a satisfying reveal - well, almost never - but it does serve to finish that character's story. In that, we the audience can commemorate them in peace and all that.
Then there are those times when Star Trek showed us a flipping eyeball being pulled out of a skull and didn't pan the camera away. Bloody hell, Picard, what did Icheb do on you?
Skipping past several behind the scenes pieces of drama, the on-screen reveal of Icheb's demise was a depressing end to what was once a hopeful character. In Voyager, Icheb was the slightly uptight, but upbeat, Starfleet hopeful. He developed a close bond with Seven of Nine, standing in as a surrogate son on their journey home.
The reveal that he had been kidnapped, tortured, and dismembered without anaesthetic in Stardust City Rag was a jarring, deeply unpleasant element to Picard's first season. Whether or not it was too much is up to the viewer, but it was certainly full-on, with no prisoners taken.