Star Trek: Characters That Just Disappeared

Highlights

• Some characters in the Star Trek universe have disappeared without a trace, despite their promising introductions and potential storylines.
• Characters like Yeoman Janice Rand and Saavik had strong starts but fizzled out, either due to writing decisions or lack of development.
• Even characters like Charlie X and Sub-Commander T’Rul, who had important roles in certain episodes, vanished completely from the franchise’s narrative.

The Star Trek universe has 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 of Star Trek that many of them disappeared after what seemed like a promising introduction. 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.

6 Yeoman Janice Rand

Gone Halfway Through Season One

• Last Seen: Star Trek TOS, Season 1, Episode 12, “The Conscience of the King”

Played by Grace Lee Whitney, Janice Rand was 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 herself cited a more sinister motive.

The character would appear again decades later in an episode of Voyager, 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.

5 Saavik

A Strong Start That Fizzled Out

• Last Seen: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Saavik made 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 three Star Trek movies 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 fourth Star Trek movie, so perhaps she decided that the spacefaring life was too stressful and decided to retire early on her home planet.

4 Charlie X

He Literally Disappeared

• Last Seen: Star Trek TOS, Season 1, Episode 2, “Charlie X.”

With the way that the mysterious character of Charlie is introduced, it’s as if the writers had more planned for 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.

3 Kes

A Dropped Thread That Dropped Again

• Last Seen: Star Trek: Voyager, Season 6, Episode 23, “Fury.”

Kes was one of the main characters of Star Trek: Voyager in the show’s first two seasons before her initial disappearance 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 to Voyager in 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.

2 Sub-Commander T’Rul

Those Secrets Weren’t That Important Anyway

• Last Seen: Star Trek: Deep Space 9, “The Search, Part II.”

T’Rul, the first Romulan to appear on Deep 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 USS Defiant.

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.

1 Carol Marcus

Gone Not Once But Twice

• Last Seen: Star Trek Into Darkness

Carol Marcus is one of the recurring characters of the Star Trek IP 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 in The 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.