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.
Again, they’re both technically the same Harry Kim, give or take a few hours of alternate recollections caused by the scission. But that means part of Harry still died, and he had to just… go about living on with that.
Hogan
Imagine getting stranded on a hostile planet, your ship stolen, and then you almost immediately get eaten by a giant eel creature. And then your skeletal remains go on to spark a religious crisis for an entirely different species of aliens!
Unnamed Subnucleonic Radiation Victim
Not only is this poor ensign (we can tell by the single rank pip on his collar) unnamed, but he’s also the only member of Voyager‘s bridge crew to not survive the ship trying to plow its way through a Mutara-class nebula, bombarding the ship with radiation. Everyone else just gets to wince in pain and have a headache; this dude’s entire face gets burned off.
Jetal
Jetal’s death was already pretty nasty—she was shot by an unknown alien while on an away mission with a devastating energy pulse that worked its way up through her spine and into her brain, causing massive synaptic damage along the way. But the reason she actually died was due to the fact that there was only time for Voyager‘s EMH to operate on one of the two injured crew in the attack… and the other was Harry Kim, whom the doctor picked because he knew better. Sure, it led to the Doctor himself having to explore some personal trauma in the aftermath, but still, dying because the operating medical officer didn’t know you that well is rough.
Burrows
From the Enterprise episode “Daedalus,” Burrows was killed after touching a spatial distortion that was eventually revealed to be a nascent transporter signal from a complex experiment. Encountering the distortion caused Burrows to undergo “cellular disruption,” essentially his body imploding on a cellular level, leaving his face hideously warped upon death.
Connor
Another entry on this list that’s a victim of being spaced, Connor died during the Battle of the Binary Stars in Discovery‘s premiere. But what makes his death in particular grim is the fact that he kind of wasn’t aware of what was going on: injured on the Shenzhou‘s bridge during the conflict, he was sent to sickbay for treatment only to, in a state of delirium, wander into the brig moments before it suffered a hull breach.
Cortez
Another Discovery ensign, another spacing. Ensign Cortez dies trying to stay too long to repair damage to the ship before emergency force fields kick in, preventing his escape in time, but aside from that layer of tragedy, he also gets sucked out into a subspace rift the ship was exploring into a void of nothingness that we’d already seen violently disintegrate a robotic probe.
Niko and Angie
Technically one of these may not necessarily be a grim ensign death, if only because the ensign involved may never have actually been a real ensign at all. Two dating officers who were friends of Beckett Mariner aboard the USS Quito, Niko turned out to be a Harvongian shape-changer, who grotesquely transformed into his true form, seemingly triggered by Mariner joking that he might be a Harvongian shape-changer. Niko devoured his girlfriend, Angie, before being phasered into submission by the Quito crew.
Alvarado
Alvarado’s death is more existentially horrifying than anything else. A soldier fighting on the planet J’Gal during the Klingon-Federation war, he was mortally wounded during combat and, in an attempt to triage limited medical resources, held in a transporter pattern buffer by Dr. M’Benga and Nurse Chapel until a starship with a surgery bay could arrive. Unfortunately for poor Alvarado, a Klingon attack disrupted the medical base’s power supply, necessitating a reboot of the transporter’s systems to get them functioning at all… purging the backlog entirely, including his biological pattern. Death by having your computer’s recycle bin emptied.
Middleton
Is it death if you technically never existed in the first place? That was the fate of poor Ensign Middleton aboard the Voyager-A during the Prodigy episode “The Devourer of All Things, Part II.” Attacked by a transdimensional creature called a Loom, Middleton was eradicated from time and space entirely so that he was completely forgotten, never existing… and only remembered by people wearing temporal discriminators at the time of his death.
Gamble
And that brings us all the way up to date with Ensign Gamble. He’s lucky enough to get a mix of both gruesome death and existential nightmares: the young medical officer, just months into his posting aboard the Enterprise, Gamble is instantly killed when a small orb containing a hostile spirit called a Vezda. This not only gorily explodes both his eyeballs but also leads to him being promptly possessed by the Vezda, killing him and shuffling his corpse around in an attempt to sabotage the Enterprise and gain control over its systems before Dr. M’Benga realizes that Gamble’s no longer home.
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