How many times did Tasha Yar actually die? I remember as a kid freaking out when I saw an episode where she died. And then later down the line saw her die an entirely different way in a different episode. She's like the Kenny of Star Trek.

Although my memory might be wrong. That's just what I remember from watching lots of reruns of TNG as a kid.

One incident you should have been listed was ST:TNG Conspiracy, the one with the insects infecting a load of Star Fleet personnel.
From memory-alpha.org:
The flesh is vaporized off his [Remmick's] face, and then his head explodes. After Picard and Riker let up their phasers, a giant wound forms in Remmick's chest, and the mother creature erupts wailing from the hole. Picard, with a disgusted look on his face; fires at the creature with Riker following. The two Starfleet officers kill the mother creature, and all that is left of Remmick is his sizzling body and several dead creatures strewn about nearby.
Quite icky, really, here is a picture from the episode.
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/8/8e/Alien_parasite_mother.jpg

Surely you're putting Enterprise into total discontinuity if you think (the admittedly horrid) Voyager was the worst Star Trek series...

I'd put Edith Keeler's death lower on the list because a) she HAD to die to save the future, and b) it was an exceptionally difficult decision for Kirk to make to let her die so that the timeline could take it's proper course.

Shitty for her, yes, but good for countless others.

Oh my gosh, I felt so bad for Ilia. It would have been so easy for them to rewrite the script so that V'Ger just takes control of her body and she is the one that merges with Decker, the love of her life, at the end. Instead she just gets snuffed out and xeroxed. And then the copy gets her man!

bort: I always thought it was later implied (retconned?) that the Ilia/V'ger hybrid became Borg Queen...

Ooops, when I made my post yesterday, I handn't noticed the 'Women' bit in the title (although the alien parasite was technically female). My Bad.

What about the failed teleport in...was it the first movie? I thought that was incredibly disturbing.

Oh wait, I think that was a guy. I have the dumb today.

I think hhe Ilia/V'ger thing was a Roddenberry idea wasn't it?
Y'know one of those ideas he pitched and then th producers looked at him and smiled and said "Sure Gene, sure..."

I'm surprised Duras getting a Bat'leth through the throat/chest didn't make the list. I mean it wasn't that gruesome but I can think of better ways to go out than being Worf's bitch...

Oh come on now! In a future of gender-equal quasi-military space exploration agencies, surely women are going to die alongside their gender counterparts. That's not misogyny, it's statistical averages. And male Starfleet crew members have had some pretty grizzly ends as well including death by salt vampire, plants that shoot needle darts, vaporizing robot drones, Borg and then shot up by their captain, having their brains explode by floating space-faces, etc. etc.

Terry Farrel and Denise Crosby were putzes when it came to contract choices so you can hardly blame Star Trek for the deaths of their characters.

oh on the above post I made... Yes I know Duras wasn't a woman but you can't deny, as far a society that believes in honor and glory by death in combat, Duras was definitely a bitch...

See, I wondered about Gaila myself, but I wouldn't count her out. As far as I know, we didn't hear her ship assignment...so it COULD have been Enterprise. She waves 'bye' to Uhura, who at that time was assigned to another ship until she pulled the chain she has on Spock's balls to get her reassigned to Enterprise. Granted, we never see or hear from or about Gaila after that, so it's either way, but I'd like to think, until proven otherwise, that she's still knocking boots at the academy.

And as for Tasha Yar, I think technically her death count on TNG was 3: once for the one mentioned in the list, another mentioned in an episode with Sela (her half-Romulan daughter), and third in "All Good Things..." as the Enterprise D was destroyed trying to stop the anomaly caused by Picard. At least she wasn't hacked up in a refrigerator.

Voyager may have been a horrible show, but like all Trek-related shows (besides the original series and fucking Enterprise), the opening theme always tugs on my heart strings and makes me get all gooey. I'm not sure why that is.

Curiously, though, on the old show, wasn't Uhura's outfit red? Technically she was a red shirt and yet she survived. hmmmmmm.

Maybe she was more of a redskirt.

Wow! This is going to sound really sleazy but the first thing that caught my eye when I looked at the pic of Lt Mayter was that it must've been really cold on that deck.

OK, now I have to make a point that was made to me a few years ago by a friend of mine about Leslie Thompson. Two people are turned into those cubes in that scene: an attractive white woman, and a black man who is also just lucky enough to be wearing a red shirt. The alien picks them up, shows them to Kirk, then crushes one. The other one he tosses on the ground, and then reconstitutes.

Now, keeping in mind this is the mid-1960s, the same decade as the civil rights movement, who was REALLY expecting for the black man to be the one brought back to life? The Shatner's face when it happens is priceless: "How could they kill her? I didn't even bone her yet! I can't bone a dude!"

To me, Leslie's death made a political and social statement for the time. In Gene's eyes, we were all equal, and more than that, there was no discrimination in the future. Even if it was just a fantasy, it's a pretty damn nice one.

By the way, you can't fault them for giving a character a horrible death when they want to be written out of the show. Just think of what that does to a series! They should feel lucky they weren't written out of the series like Chef was on South Park.....

GUMBERCULES is right, both Terry Farrell and Denise Crosby asked to be let go (Farrell didn't renew her contract for one more season and Crosby opted out because she hadn't been given good stories at that point).

And as for Edith Keeler, she was an inadvertant Nazi sympathizer, so I'm almost willing to give that one a past, since we all know Nazis are never good.

I'm surprised that Varria from TNG episode "The Most Toys" wasn't included. She was an assistant to Fajo, an intergalactic collector, who had acquired Data. When she helps him to escape, Fajo kills her with the Varon-T Disruptor, which "tears the body apart from the inside out, resulting in a relatively slow and excruciating death" (wikipedia). So yeah, NOT exactly the best way to go.

Joe: Main cast members are immune to the red-shirt curse, generally. Note that Scotty, Picard, Riker, Worf, etc. ALSO wore red, and although bad stuff happened to all of them (as well as other mainstays of yellow and blue shirt colours), but they always got better.

Jadzia Dax still burns.

@RexSplode
I wasn't sure if redshirts still applied literally on TNG since, yeah, everyone wore red, but I totally forgot about Scotty.

Beam me up a brain.

Someone may have already pointed this out but, "10 of the Most Horrible Deaths by Women in Star Trek" should be "Deaths of women in Star Trek". Death "by" women would be women killing people and that could be a totally different and very interesting post all by itself.

Gumbercules, Chef was written out of South Park because of the episode on Scientology. He disagreed with it, asked Matt and Trey to change it. They refused, he left.

As well, 'redshirts' doesn't really apply after TOS: sometime between TOS and TNG the colors for ops/command swapped (command track in Kirk's time wore yellow, in Picard's they wore red). There were a LOT of yellowshirts that died in TNG as opposed to redshirts. I'm guessing it's nature's way of making sure there aren't too many command officers flying around :D

Just want to put this out Orion women ARN'T slaves the men are, they just pretend so wend they are "sold" they use pheromones to make their "owner" become her slave.

And yeah, might as well do the top 10 most horrible male deaths in Star Terk as well because this is Star Terk and the genders are equal.

Stuff like this always come off as "a women getting killed = sexist) granted many are poorly done but those that are done right tend to get lumped in with the crap.

@ 715

The Orion slave girl thing... That's "Enterprise" retcon crap, and it totally shits on TOS's concept of Orions. No surprise, as B&B were shitting on continuity left & right on that show. Most of us who DIDN'T watch that crappy show don't consider the major changes it made to continuity to be true canon... They were misrepresentations.

It's especially easy to ignore them when the show did not even have the words "Star Trek" in the title, which technically makes it a non-Star Trek show, and more like a spin-off, what-if, pile of self-indulgent B&B garbage that's only based on Star Trek.

In my mind, "Enterprise" isn't canon.

@ZeroCorpse

I find it kind of funny that in the current continuity, Enterprise is the only trek tv series that is canon.

Yeah, agreed.

Who wants a tv show that takes time for character development, or thought provoking ideas? I'd much rather see more Captain Proton.

one thing about the list it proves that star trek is equal when it comes to stupid death woman or men. though woman seem to get the worse in trek. and surprised Edith death did not rank a little higher. as for tasha she died twice the other in the episode yesterdays enterprise

I'm glad you included Lt. Mayter. Watching as a teenager I remember finding the whole scene with her cut off scream quite disturbing and a bit terrifying. Not a nice way to go at all.

@ MattK: Wasn't Galia in the audience during the ceremony at the end of the movie? There's definitely an Orion with red hair in the second row, and I thought it was the same actress.

@ J.H.: Duras' Bat'leth to the throat was bad, but what about K'Ehleyr? It's been awhile since I've seen the episode, but didn't she get _beaten_ to death? That sounds pretty horrible to me.

@ Listy: I'm with you on this. I had trouble watching that episode after that. Just thinking about having your lower half just gone... *shudder*

What about the female crewperson in Charlie X that got her face eraced by Charlie? She had no nose or mouth so how could she breathe?

No. Voyager wasn't the worst Trek series. You're drunk. :P

Two exclusions:

1)Lyndsay Ballard, a Voyager Ensign who died, then was "resurected" by an alien race that salvages dead people in order to procreate. She went so far as to question Captain Janeway as to why she was basically sacrificed for a pithy mission Sorry, but those moments of her new life plus her losing her memories? I'd call it a pretty horrible death.

2)And yes K'Ehleyr, the Klingon ambassador, Worf's mate, brutally murdered by Duras. Over a stupid power struggle.

I don't think the female deaths are misogynistic. They die just as much as men!

Nice article ... but WTF dude Voyager was awesome and not the worst Trek TV, that goes to Enterprise, which I can't bring myself to watch.

You forgot the real reason behind Yar's death:
Denise Crosby to the producers: "I've made a mistake. My character is terribly underwritten and this show is going nowhere. I want off the series."
(At least the producers didn't kill off Gates McFadden for having a similarly underwritten character!)

Two years later, when TNG is the #1 syndicated show, Crosby says "I've made a mistake. I want to come back onto such a great show." So the producers fit her in as best they can: an alternate timeline, a flashback, and so on.

I'm gonna argue a hard case: Lal, Data's "daughter".

Okay, technically not human, but the entire point of Next Generation was that DNA isn't what counts, it's heart.

And her death WAS nasty; I think the technical term is "neural discombobulation". Whatever, her brain melts.

That's not what makes hers a horrible death, though. She was, unlike most of the women on this list, a civilian. These other women chose a military life and the risks that it entailed. Lal was born on board and died there with no chance to opt out.

I know it was mentioned above but I'd like to second the transporter incident in ST:TMP for #1 spot.

The idea that you're completely aware of yourself mid-transport and can scream in horrid agony as your body is reformed into something out of Altered States makes me cringe to this day when I see it.

The death of Worf's half-klingon wife from TNG should make the list, if not for the fact that he makes his pussy of a kid stare at her dead body and to remember death.

The transporter-malfunction also gave us one of the best cheesy sci-fi lines ever: "What was left didn't live long...FORTUNATELY." Ouch.

I'd expect to see Amanda Grayson on here. Yeah, she also died eventually in prime continuity, but considering her role in new Trek was, like Uhura, just about making Spock feel better about himself, it kind of sucked more.

one error: Orion Slave Girls are not slaves...they enslave me by use of their pheromones.

You probably don't think of women, since Trek has a pretty decent history of female empowerment, even making Kathryn Janeway the captain of a starship, albeit in the worst Star Trek series ever made.

If you honestly believe that VOYAGER is worst than THE ORIGINAL SERIES or ENTERPRISE, then I see no reason to take this article seriously.