Honoring Captain Garrett with a statue seems a fair and honorable thing to do, given what fans of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” know about her. Garrett, as played by Tricia O’Neil, only appeared in one episode of “Next Generation,” but it was one of the more impressive episodes of the series. And, golly, Captain Garrett faced a terrible decision in it.
In “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (February 19, 1990), the Enterprise-D is merrily sailing through space when a rift in spacetime randomly opens in front of them. A damaged starship sails through. In an instant, everything on the Enterprise-D changes. The lights dim, the uniforms change, and the outlay of the bridge alters. Most dramatically, Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) is standing at the tactical station. Lt. Yar had died almost 18 months previous.
The ship that came through the rift was none other than the Enterprise-C, captained by Rachel Garrett. Her ship was being severely buffeted in a vicious battle when a rift opened up and she fled to safety. The rift, however, also brought her and the Enterprise-C 20 years into the future. In disappearing from the above-mentioned vicious battle, the Enterprise-C unwittingly instigated an ongoing war. Thanks to causality, Picard and the Enterprise-D were now fighting in that war, and Starfleet was a much more militant, weapons-forward organization. Only Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) seems to vaguely recall that something has changed about the timeline.
Picard reveals that Starfleet is most assuredly losing the war, and the only way to win it was to send the Enterprise-C back to its own time … to be destroyed and captured, thereby preventing the war altogether. Garrett is killed in battle before she can make a decision.
Her statue can be seen in the above picture. It’s red.