Lots of people die in Star Trek, and do so pretty horrifically. Boldly going is deadly business, but there’s always something particularly grim when tragedy strikes at the lowest rung on Starfleet’s officer ladder: the lowly ensigns that keep any good starship or space station humming along as they try to survive long enough to eke it out to lieutenant junior grade and beyond. In last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds, we got to sadly see poor Ensign Gamble pay the ultimate price in a particularly awful way, so to… celebrate? We’re taking a look back at some of his fellow ensigns who’ve also met similarly grim fates.
O’Herlihy
The original Star Trek may have the reputation that gave us “redshirt” as a broad cultural term for an easily doomable support character, but really, the show didn’t kill off a lot of ensigns. Instead, it much preferred killing off crewmen, the enlisted rank below ensigns, and did so with suitably reckless abandon, regardless of division.
Anyway, that brings us to an actual TOS-era ensign death in the form of Mr. O’Herlihy, who got immediately vaporized by a Gorn disruptor as one of the first Starfleet casualties encountering the species (well, in years, given Strange New Worlds‘ Gorn adventures). Fun fact: O’Herlihy was played by Jerry Ayres, who would return to Star Trek—to be killed off again—as Ensign Rizzo a season later in “Obsession.”
Sito Jaxa
Perhaps one of the most famous ensign deaths at all—to the point it became a pivotal emotional crux for Lower Decks, a show almost entirely about the plight of ensigns—and definitely grim. Sito Jaxa, from the famous TNG episode “Lower Decks,” was an ensign assigned to an incredibly dangerous covert mission after being put through the wringer by the Enterprise-D senior staff. Assigned to assist a Cardassian defector re-enter Cardassian space, the young Bajoran was ultimately detected by Cardassian operatives and killed while attempting to return to Federation space in an escape pod.
Dern
A conn officer aboard the Enterprise-D, Dern was found mauled to pieces during the episode “Genesis,” in which the crew began to devolve into grotesque monsters through a viral outbreak. Not only does that mean that Dern was mauled at his station by a member of the crew, but Data confirmed, scanning his corpse, that Dern himself was in the early stages of the infection, to boot. Oof.
Harry Kim (Duplicate)
Voyager found as many ways to kill Harry Kim and undo it as it did to stop promoting him beyond ensign, but those largely got undone for the most part… except for that time where Harry actually died and then was replaced by his own quantum duplicate during the events of “Deadlock.” Voyager‘s encounter with a spatial scission resulted in two versions of the ship, both the “original,” trying to exist in the same space but out of phase with each other. One Harry Kim dies, sucked into space by a hull breach, while the other, alongside the newborn Naomi Wildman, goes over to the “other” Voyager while one of the ships self-destructs.
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