Star Trek Retcons a Next Generation Character's Origin Story

Star Trek just retconned a Star Trek: The Next Generation character's origin story. SPOILERS follow for Star Trek: Defiant Annual #1 by Christopher Cantwell, Ramon Rosanas, Lee Loughridge, and Clayton Cowles follow. Sela was a villain played by Denise Crosby in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and she has a convoluted origin story. Crosby had previously played Tasha Yar, the Enterprise's security chief, during most of Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season. Following Crosby's decision to leave the show, the alien Armus killed Tasha in the episode titled "Skin of Evil." However, that wasn't the end of Tasha Yar's legacy.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 3 episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" involved two different timelines after the Enterprise-C accidentally avoided its fate – destruction while attempting to defend a Klingon outpost under siege by Romulan force – by falling through a temporal rift and arriving 20 years into the future. This changed the present to one where the Federation was at war with the Klingon Empire, and Tasha Yar had not died. By the end of the episode, the Enterprise-C returns to face its destiny and reset the timeline, and Tasha Yar is aboard when it does. Following the battle, she's taken prisoner by the Romulans and, while imprisoned, later gives birth to a half-Romulan child, Sela.

Sela's Star Trek Origin Story

As the story goes, Tasha later tries to escape with young Sela. However, sensing that her mother was trying to take her away from her Romulan father, Tasha cried out, alerting the guards to their presence and costing her mother her life. However, Star Trek: Defiant Annual #1 reveals that the story isn't the truth.

Star Trek: Defiant Annual #1 sees Sela thrust backward through time to correct her mistakes while trying to regain favor with Romulan intelligence. Instead, she meets Tasha Yar – not the alternate timeline version that would become her mother, but the one who would appear in Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 – during the mission where she first meets Jean-Luc Picard before she's assigned to the Enterprise-D.

In this unintended crossing of paths, Sela sees her mother as something other than the prisoner she'd been in Romulan custody. She's brave, capable, and willing to sacrifice herself for others. By the end of the encounter, Sela is forced to recognize her mother's sense of altruism in herself after she dives at Tasha to protect her from phaser fire.

The meeting forces Sela to reevaluate and confront memories she's long since buried. Sela did not have a relationship with her Romulan father before her mother's death. She didn't cry out during Tasha's escape attempt out of fear that she would be taken away from her father but out of simple, childish fear of being asked to do something dangerous.

With no other parent but her Romulan father left and feeling deep shame at having cost her mother her life, Sela threw herself into working for the Romulan Empire and rewrote her history in her mind. Serving the Empire was a choice, not an inescapable situation. Her mother was a coward, not a hero whose death was the result of a child's entirely understandable fear.

Sela's Star Trek Future

Sela built walls up around the truth, but those walls have come crumbling down. After being thoroughly shamed for her cowardly behavior, so unlike her mother, by Beverly Crusher during "Day of Blood," and being forced to realize that the Romulan hierarchy would never accept her entirely, Sela concludes that she has been trying to follow in the footsteps of the wrong parent. She defects and begins seeking out Worf and his "rogue" Defiant crew.

Sela was always presented as an over-the-top and flatly sinister villain on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek: Defiant Annual #1 has given her much more complexity and made her a more compelling character than ever before. What happens next for Sela will presumably be seen in the ongoing Star Trek: Defiant series. Star Trek: Defiant #1 is on sale now.