“There were those that believed at the end of the first season that they didn’t like the way the character was developing, vis-à-vis Gates’ performance and managed to convince Mr Roddenbury of that,” executive producer Rick Berman recounted. He added, “I was not a fan of that decision.” Patrick Stewart was puzzled by the move, even opposed to it, but was unwilling to propagate dissension. “Gates was offered up somewhat sacrificially, to protect the rest of the show,” Stewart commented. Although he liked McFadden’s replacement, Diana Mulder, who was created in the image of crusty Dr. Bones McCoy, Stewart was VERY glad when the actress returned.
The truths behind McFadden’s leave – and subsequent return a season later – are unclear. Paramount officially announced that she had left “to pursue other career options.” Although McFadden has claimed that the news was a surprise to her. “I got a call from my agent saying that they had decided to go in another direction with the character. And that was literally all I heard.”
Another explanation arises from an April/May 1994 story published in Star Trek the Official Fan Club Magazine. The story claims that McFadden attempted to renegotiate her contract at the end of The Next Generation’s first season. Although this may be a reasonable ploy for an actor on a hit series, Paramount refused to meet her demands and removed her from the program. The article also claims that when McFadden returned to Star Trek, it was at a lower salary than the rest of her co-stars.
Nonetheless, McFadden was gracious in returning. Surprised to be asked back for the third season, she proclaimed, “I certainly missed working with my fellow cast members!” Fans know that the explanation given for her characters absence was that she was off heading Starfleet Medical for the year, and McFadden was comfortable that the scriptwriters “are not making too much of a fuss in the storyline about my reappearance on board the Enterprise. I think the decision has been made to just make it seem very normal that I’m coming back.”
Some avid fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation and particularly of Gates McFadden, have pointed to the enormous letter writing campaign as instrumental in reuniting Dr. Crusher with the rest of the crew of the Enterprise. It is claimed that the flood of letters sent to Paramount protesting McFadden’s removal was surpassed only by the 1968 campaign that prolonged the run of Kirk and Spock’s Enterprise for a third season.
However, the impact of the fan letters was never acknowledged in the announcement of McFadden’s return. “Diana Muldaur is a marvellous actress and it’s obvious I think so because I have used her so many times,” Gene Roddenberry exclaimed. “It’s all just chemistry. Beverly had that little something… Somehow the way the captain bounces off her works well. It works with Muldaur, too, but it just seems to work a little more with Crusher… It was always out intention to leave the door open for her return to the show.”
McFadden, however openly acknowledges the “huge fan support – the hundreds of lovely letters” that clearly had an impact in her being asked back for the third season. During Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season, McFadden refused to attend any of the popular Star Trek conventions held around the country, noting, “I just thought it was going to be a lot of strange people.” However the flood of mail on her behalf changed McFadden’s tune. “The fans wrote such amazing amounts of mail to the studio… It was instrumental in having them ask me back. They suddenly realised that my character was really popular. Since that time, I have felt that maybe I shouldn’t be so afraid of going to these conventions. I don’t like people to know all about the ins and outs of my private life. But, as I started to do it, I realised that nobody demanded that I share anything I didn’t feel like sharing. I used to be a snob about it. But everybody’s got their thing. Some people go to rock concerts. Some people do this.”
During her hiatus from Star Trek, McFadden kept very busy, appearing in The Hunt For Red October as Jack Ryan’s (Alec Baldwin’s) wife, a role that primarily wound up on the cutting room floor, especially, according to McFadden, quite a few hot “kissing scenes.” She also had a significant role in Taking Care of Business, which featured, as her subordinate, actor and good friend John de Lancie, better known to Star Trek fans as Q. She also spent tine reprising her role, again to critical acclaim, in the off-Broadway play To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday and also appeared in the play Emerald City. Variety wrote of her performance in Emerald City, “McFadden creates a warmly attractive woman as she shows how the wife matures from lass to lady under the spell of achievement.”
