Sela (Star Trek)

Sela is a fictional character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the daughter of Tasha Yar and a Romulan official. She was most of the time played by Denise Crosby, who also played Yar.

The circumstances that led to Sela's birth are somewhat convoluted. Her mother, Tasha Yar, was born in 2337 on Turkana IV and in the "normal" timeline died in 2364, killed by Armus on Vagra II. But in an alternate timeline, seen in the episode Yesterday's Enterprise, Yar either survived or avoided the confrontation with Armus and continued to serve on the Enterprise-D until 2366, when the Enterprise-C came through a spacetime anomaly. It was determined that the accidental time travel of the Enterprise-C drastically altered the timeline after its disappearance, and that the original timeline should be restored by sending the ship back. After Guinan informed Yar that she will die in the normal timeline they hope to restore, she volunteered to serve on the Enterprise-C, which went back in time to 2344 in the "normal" timeline to complete a mission involving the Klingons. Some personnel from the Enterprise-C were captured by Romulans, and Yar agreed to become the concubine of a Romulan official only to save the others. This union led to the conception of Sela, possibly in 2345, while elsewhere in the galaxy Yar was barely eight years old.

Yar attempted to escape with her daughter in 2349, but the young girl did not want to go and Yar was discovered and executed. Sela grew up to become a Romulan operative. Sela's first appearance was covered in shadows, and played by another actress, in the episode "The Mind's Eye", in which she supervised the brainwashing of the recently captured Geordi LaForge. In the episode "Redemption, Part II", she meddled in the Klingon civil war by providing weapons to the house of Duras. In the two-part episode "Unification", she coordinated a plan to invade the Vulcan homeworld using a holographic falsification of Ambassador Spock describing the Romulan convoy as being peaceful in character.