10 Star Trek Characters With Wasted Potential

The character of Sela was, in fact, created by the very person who played her (and her mother): Denise Crosby. Having enjoyed reprising the role of Natasha Yar for The Next Generation season three episode Yesterday's Enterprise – still cited as one of the best and a turning point for the series – it occurred to Crosby that perhaps not all of the crew of the Enterprise-C needed to die at The Battle of Narendra III when the ship was sent back in time to fulfil its original purpose. Maybe some of the crew were captured by the Romulans instead, and (alternate) Yar fell pregnant to one of them. Producers loved the idea and so half-Romulan, half-human Sela – the best of the most underrated of baddies – was born.

The problem was that, for a character with such an epic backstory, she didn’t really go anywhere. For Sela's first shadowy appearance in TNG's The Mind's Eye, she was simply referred to in the script as "Unseen Woman". When she is properly revealed to the audience at the very end of the TNG season four finale cliff-hanger Redemption, the script goes one better by calling her "Mysterious Woman". ("And humans have a way of showing up when you least expect them." *Nudge nudge, wink wink*) Denise Crosby is, in reality, only credited as Sela in Redemption II and Unification II. These were great episodes, but this character could have been so much more. What was she up to around the time of the Romulan supernova, for example?

In SFX magazine's February 2023 issue, Star Trek: Picard season three showrunner Terry Matalas also refuted rumours that Denise Crosby was making a return, stating, "There's definitely a reference to Tasha Yar. But it's not beyond that".