Tasha Yar’s death near the end of the first season of TNG was the first step of the show growing the beard. Tasha Yar was an okay character and Worf makes much more sense as Chief of Security than as helmsman or whatever he was doing in the first season. So I’m sympathetic to the plight the writers had landed themselves in at the end of that first season: Tasha Yar had to go to make room for Worf’s character to grow, and that had to be some kind of plot point. Having her die was a good idea to make it clear that being on an away team wasn’t necessarily safe, particularly since, at her rank, it wouldn’t make much sense to transfer away from the Enterprise unless she had some kind of strong personal reason to prefer a different mission, which slams us into the problem that Tasha Yar’s backstory is dumb and offensive. It was close to being cool – a refugee from a wartorn failed state who joined Starfleet after they evacuated her.
Unfortunately they decided that the defining feature of the failed state was going to be “rape gangs.” Which are gangs assembled for an indefinite period of time primarily for the purpose of rape? Or is this the only planet in the galaxy whose gangs commit rape at all? Both are dumb and just the words “rape gang” are so overly edgy that I feel second-hand embarrassment on behalf of the writers just repeating them. Like, rape gangs exist in places with extreme violent crime problems, but they’re not a career path the way gangs that focus on smuggling and extortion are. They’re more like a fucked up hobby club.
Refocusing away from “rape gangs” and onto general violent chaos could’ve salvaged her character the same way Riker got salvaged further down the road. That would take time, though, time during which Worf is left on helm, so given we need to get rid of Tasha in one episode and the less said about her backstory the better, easiest thing to do is to kill her.
The problem is the monster of the week selected for the killing is a pile of black goo who’s having a real rough time in tenth grade. Plus they lean a lot on Tasha’s pre-recorded funeral speech at the end to see the character off. Data’s moment with Picard where he asks if he missed the point of the funeral because it seemed to be more about the living than the dead was pretty good, but Tasha’s recorded speech itself was mediocre. General pattern of the first season, really, Data, Geordi, Picard, and Dr. Crusher are already firing more-or-less on all cylinders, but Riker, Worf, Tasha, Troi, and Wesley are all dragging things down. Some of these characters would be salvaged, others would be cut. Cutting Tasha was the first step along that path (bafflingly, this was soon followed by cutting Dr. Crusher, who was a perfectly good character even in season one – I’m guessing this was something to do with the actor’s career, but I like to imagine Crusher got hit by splash damage when they nuked Wesley who, narrative cockroach that the character is, survived the explosion). Shame about the execution, though, because she was one of the more salvageable of the dud characters. Presumably that’s why they killed her again in an alternate timeline episode. Tasha practically turned to camera and declared she was determined to have a cooler death than the one she got in the Alpha Timeline.
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