Summary
TheStar Trekuniversehas some of the best and most intricate lore in the entertainment business, but they’ve also been around the longest. In those decades, some memorable characters have joined the voyage to go where no one has gone before, and even with all the exotic settings and exciting storylines, the franchise wouldn’t be as successful without them.
There are so many characters in the lore ofStar Trekthat many of them disappeared afterwhat seemed like a promisingintroduction. A few have been popular enough to return in movie cameos or in the various TV shows that also share the IP, but other than that, some characters vanish without a trace into the vast nothingness of the final frontier.
6Yeoman Janice Rand
Gone Halfway Through Season One
Played by Grace Lee Whitney,Janice Randwas originally intended to have a much larger role in the series as a love interest for Kirk. The official reason for writing her character out was always that the writers, producers, and network execs decided against having a love interest for Kirk, but Whitney herselfcited a more sinister motive.
The character would appear again decades later in an episode ofVoyager,and Whitney has appeared in several movie cameos. However, in these instances, it’s unclear whether she’s playing Janice Rand or just a random Starfleet employee.
5Saavik
A Strong Start That Fizzled Out
Saavikmade a strong start as the acting captain in the Kobayashi Maru scene that started the IP’s most notorious movie,Wrath of Khan. She was described as a protegee of Spock, one of the top students at Starfleet Academy, and seemed to represent the next generation of Vulcans working with the Federation.
Saavik was in threeStar Trekmovies and was played by two actresses before she vanished without a trace from the franchise. She has a small part in the opening scenes of the fourthStar Trekmovie, so perhaps she decided that the spacefaring life was too stressful and decided to retire early on her home planet.
4Charlie X
He Literally Disappeared
With the way that the mysterious character ofCharlieis introduced, it’sas if the writers had more plannedfor him originally, and the narrative of the lost-and-found child is a common science fiction trope. However, it seems that the plot had something else in mind for Charlie that resulted in him disappearing completely.
As the story unfolds, it turns out that Charlie didn’t spend several years in solitude as the only survivor of a crash, but was adopted by an advanced alien race. The powers they gave him enabled him to survive, but alienated him from his fellow human beings, and even though his story ends on a haunting cliffhanger, we’ve never seen or heard from him again.
3Kes
Keswas one of the main characters ofStar Trek: Voyagerin the show’s first two seasonsbefore her initialdisappearance at the end of “The Gift.” It was strongly hinted at this point that she would return, but when she did after a long wait of almost two whole seasons, it wasn’t the happy return that was expected.
When Kes comes back toVoyagerin the episode “Fury,” she storms through the ship as a powerful destructive force that must be fought and defeated as opposed to being a benevolent or even friendly visitor. The only reasons given have something to do with a convoluted excuse involving time travel. She leaves at the end of this episode again, and this time, Kes never returns.
2Sub-Commander T’Rul
Those Secrets Weren’t That Important Anyway
T’Rul,the first Romulan to appearonDeep Space 9,has an impressive buildup in the two-part episode in which she was a pivotal character with a role that was closely tied to the plot. The details of the storyline appeared at first to suggest that her character would have a lot more involvement with the crew of the USSDefiant.
However, it seems that all that character-building wasn’t part of a larger plan after all. Although T’Rul returns to the Alpha Quadrant at the end of the episode “The Search, Part II,” she’s never mentioned or heard from again. The actor who played T’Rul, Martha Hackett, would return as Seska, a character with a much longer story.
Gone Not Once But Twice
Carol Marcusis one of the recurring characters of theStar TrekIP who appears in comics, novels, and other mediums, but she’s best known for her movie roles. She and her team (including David, her son),built the Genesis Project, and that plotline lasted for three movies until it was gone.
There seemed little for Carol Marcus to do without either David or the Genesis Project, which might be why her character faded into oblivion even though it would have made sense for her to appear inThe Search For Spock.The character appeared again in the more recent movies set in the Kelvin timeline but seems to have disappeared again for similarly unknown reasons.
