Cast changes are part and parcel of making a TV series, whether because actors want to move on, characters outstay their welcome, or it's just time for a show to hit the refresh button. Most of the time, to maintain a sense of reality, writers will work these exits into the storyline in some form, even with just a line or two of dialogue if a cast member leaves abruptly. Sometimes, however, internal consistency is tossed out the window; a character simply walks off-screen, and nobody sees or mentions them again.
There are all kinds of potential explanations for this, ranging from some kind of fallout between the actor and producers behind the scenes to a character simply being so disliked that nobody ever bothered to come up with a reason for their disappearance. There are plenty of characters who vanished into TV limbo over the decades, but these are some of the most egregious examples, whether they hail from classic network shows from bygone years or contemporary streaming-era hits.
The Buffyverse had a lot of cast members coming and going, but the franchise is known for its superb character development, so generally the writers cared enough to write them out in style. That's not the case with Kate Lockley, however, who vanished from Angel after its second season, despite being the show's most significant recurring character for its first two years.
Played by Elisabeth Rohm, Kate is essentially the Commissioner Gordon to Angel's Batman; she's an LAPD detective who serves as the vampire private eye's contact on the police force. For the longest time, Kate was unaware of Angel's true undead nature, but in the second half of Season 2, she discovers the supernatural's existence and completely spirals. In her last appearance, Kate hits rock bottom only for Angel to save her life, and it's suggested they will become allies once more. As it happened, Kate was never seen or even referenced again.
The reason for Kate's sudden disappearance is that Rohm landed a regular role on Law & Order, which necessitated a move from Los Angeles to New York, making her continued involvement on Angel unviable. The writers' planned arc for Kate in Season 3 was instead handed to a new character, Justine, a young woman who falls in with vampire hunter Daniel Holtz.
Every Star Trek fan knows that the main characters of The Original Series are Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, and (from Season 2 onwards) Chekov. Initially, though, the show's female lead was supposed to be Yeoman Janice Rand, as played by Grace Lee Whitney. Rand was intended to be Kirk's ongoing love interest, and there's certainly something brewing between the characters in the eight TOS episodes she features in.
And yet, halfway through Season 1, Rand is removed from the Enterprise and never seen again. Behind the scenes, Whitney was fired from The Original Series very suddenly, to the extent that she had already been written into the next episode and her lines had to be given to another character at the last minute. The explanations for Whitney's dismissal vary, with some sources saying it was due to budget cuts, while others claim producers wanted Kirk to remain unattached. Or maybe some combination of the two.
Thankfully, while she sat out the rest of TOS, Whitney was later welcomed back into the Star Trek family in a big way. She has cameos in four out of the six Kirk-led movies and even dropped by for an episode of Voyager. Even so, a reason for her sudden absence from the Enterprise has never been provided in Trek canon. These days, Rand is remembered fondly by fans as a popular, if sadly underutilized, character, and all are agreed that Whitney's treatment behind the scenes was disgraceful.
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