Star Trek: Strange New Worlds went back to the Elysian Kingdom for season four’s penultimate episode, “Once La’an a Time,” and the result is one of the most infuriating hours this show has produced. The episode is a direct sequel to season one’s “The Elysian Kingdom,” in which a lonely alien entity built a fantasy world around the terminally ill daughter of Dr. M’Benga and eventually let her leave her body to live inside that consciousness forever. Nobody explains how the kingdom comes back. The crew never interacts with the alien entity or with M’Benga’s daughter again. They simply beam down, see the fantasy playing out in front of them, and accept it. Pike says he wants to explore it, and that’s the one piece of this episode that functions the way Star Trek is supposed to: a crew finding a strange new world and deciding to look closer. Everything built on top of that premise falls apart.
The bigger problem is that the show never lets the audience forget it’s watching a fantasy bottle episode. Kurtzman-era Strange New Worlds treats the premise as a wink rather than a story, and the dialogue carries that self-awareness the entire hour. Classic Star Trek played its high concepts straight. This episode plays like the writers are smirking at the camera the whole time, reminding viewers they know how silly it is instead of building something that earns its own stakes.
La’an turns out to be Princess Thalia in this fairy tale. Pike’s doppelganger, Sir Amand Rauth, is a cowardly villain who impersonates the real captain. Spock’s counterpart, Pollux, plays an evil wizard. Uhura’s counterpart, Queen Neve, rules as the villain and later transforms into a literal fire-breathing dragon to fight the “Iron Dragon,” which turns out to be the Enterprise itself. There’s a prophecy tied to controlling that dragon and winning the throne, straight out of Game of Thrones. None of it gets built with any suspense. The whole conflict plays as a joke from the start, so nothing about it feels real, and the entire hour comes across as stupid and contrived by design.
Strip away the costumes and the actual story is little more than a therapy session. La’an has spent this season dealing with the surfacing of her Khan Noonien Singh genetics, and the show spent that time promising a payoff where those warrior genes would make her genuinely dangerous. That payoff never arrives. Instead, the fantasy princess subplot resolves the whole thread by having La’an accept that she has both darkness and light inside her, and that’s it. Conflict solved. The episode then spends its final minutes having other characters tell the audience how happy she is now, rather than showing anything that earns that happiness.
The therapy-speak starts before the away team even leaves the ship. Pike opens the episode passively listening to a group of women discuss what’s wrong with La’an’s feelings, and he can’t come to a conclusion about his own officer without being told what to do by the people around him. That’s a pattern for Pike across this series: he doesn’t solve problems, he sits back while the women around him run the ship, then reacts once they’ve decided the path forward. His first line of dialogue in the episode is asking La’an if they should talk about their feelings.
Paul Wesley’s fantasy counterpart, Prince Dashing, gets the same treatment. He’s supposed to be the dashing rescuer archetype, and instead he loses his sword almost immediately and needs La’an to fight off the villain herself. His entire function is writing love poetry. By the episode’s climax he’s revealed to be a werewolf, and he has to learn to accept the monster inside himself too, which plays as an obvious allegory for transgenderism that the show undercuts by literally calling the thing a monster.
Then there’s the doppelganger pairing of Una and pilot Erika Ortegas, presented as a couple who share an on-screen kiss. It’s the first acknowledgment of anything outside heterosexual relationships on this show since season one, and it arrives through fantasy stand-ins rather than the actual characters, which is exactly the kind of sly workaround a network note against that content produces. Una has been hinted at as queer in the background before without ever stating it outright, and Ortegas gets the same treatment through nothing more than a half-shaved head.
None of it gets resolved the way Star Trek stories are supposed to resolve. After the big dragon fight, Pike just says it’s time to go, and the crew leaves the planet exactly as unexplained as they found it. Nobody talks to the alien intelligence running the whole simulation. Nobody tries to understand the science behind a floating disc-shaped planet with a livable atmosphere. This is the second episode this season to end that way, following an earlier “Event Horizon” riff that left audiences with the same question: what was the point? Strange New Worlds is supposed to be about exploring the unexplained. That’s the whole premise in the title. This season keeps skipping the actual science.
Defenders will point to “Shore Leave” from the original series or “Qpid,” the Robin Hood episode from The Next Generation, as prior Star Trek fantasy episodes. Both had explanations for what was happening and had the crew actually deal with the consequences before moving on. Neither one packed up and left the mystery behind unaddressed.
The episode even calls attention to its own cleverness. At one point La’an walks through something like the “woods of infinite despair” and remarks that there’s no subtext to it, a line that makes no sense coming from a security officer rather than a literary critic, existing only so the writers can signal they know what a cliché is. The direction leans on the same trick, staging a horror-movie door handle rattle for the werewolf reveal that has no reason to exist inside a Star Trek story. Classic Trek did comedy too. “A Piece of the Action” let Kirk and Spock say ridiculous things while still taking the situation seriously. This episode never takes anything seriously. The crew is written to act stupid throughout, and the fantasy doppelgangers of Pike and Spock who sneak aboard the real Enterprise spend their scenes rehearsing catchphrases, having Spock say “fascinating” and Pike say “hit it” in exaggerated ways that assume nobody watching would notice how thin the joke is.
That’s the real failure of “Once La’an a Time.” A season-long storyline about a woman with dangerous genetics gets resolved with a fairy tale telling her to accept herself, an alien mystery from season one gets reopened and then abandoned again without a word of explanation, and the whole hour treats its audience like it needs to be told how to feel rather than shown a story worth feeling anything about. For a penultimate episode heading into a season finale, that’s not a strong place to leave things.
What does it say about the current writers’ room that the La’an payoff a full season built toward gets settled by a costume party instead of the warrior-gene threat the show spent all year promising?
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It may be me, but it does seem that they want to write everything but Star Trek. They want to write fantasy stories, monster stories, horror stories, anything but feel good science fiction.
I guess we should count ourselves lucky that they haven't written any mirror universe stories yet.
But then, why should they when the whole crew were evil in the fantasy story.
-Drek-