Denise Crosby’s intentional blooper became part of Star Trek lore.
Star Trek is a deep and long-running franchise that has hours upon hours of content to shift through. If you think that’s exhausting as a fan, you should try being the person who edits the stuff. Sometimes things fall through the crack. Other times they leave in mistakes as a rib of sorts. For Denise Crosby, her final shot done as Natasha Yar in season one was a gag. A gag that was left in.
The last episode that she ever filmed was Symbiosis, which was the episode that aired just before Skin of Evil, the episode in which Yar was killed off. Due to production scheduling, the episodes were shot out of order but aired in the correct order.
This allowed for Crosby to slip in a minor easter egg that she didn’t think would make the episode.
Denise Crosby waved goodbye to the fans in Symbiosis
In an interview for The Center Seat documentary, in an exclusive originally posted by SyFy Wire, Crosby detailed her final moment as a series regular. Crosby decided to give the fans a knowing wave and had Yar break character and slip in a distanced wave as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) left that part of the stage.
In the video above, you can see Crosby’s Yar right-hand wave over her head as the two other series regulars leave the set. As Crosby notes in the first video, she believed there’d be a second take of the shot, as is customary to have several takes of every scene. Yet, this was a one-and-done situation. It was supposed to be Crosby’s last shot as Yar and either the executives on the show didn’t catch it or left it in for posterity.
Either way, it made for one neat little easter egg for fans to look for.