Strange New Worlds' Fairy Tale Sequel Is the Most Star Trek the Show Has Been All Season

The fairy tale episode of Strange New Worlds that a chunk of the internet is calling gimmicky is, from what I can tell, the season running the single oldest play in the Star Trek playbook, and it does it on the one character on the bridge whose ending nobody has written yet. Once La'an a Time, the season 4 sequel to season 1's The Elysian Kingdom, sends La'an Noonien-Singh into a real planet built out of a storybook, complete with a dragon, a wizard and doppelgangers, and I think it is the cleanest proof yet that the people using the word gimmicky have the shape of Star Trek backwards in their heads.

Before I get into it, I need to clean something up. Last week I sat here and had a problem with what the show did to Kirk, and I've decided that wasn't the writing, it was me. I have loved that character since I was a kid, and I let that love sit in the chair where the argument was supposed to be. People came into the comments with actual evidence from the episode, the canon and the production, and they were right. It's embarrassing because what they were telling me is something I had already been saying for weeks, that these episodes are the events that are making these characters into the people we know, and I forgot my own argument the second it was Kirk's turn. This week the show pointed the silliest premise on the board at somebody else, and this time I didn't flinch.

Once La'an a Time Sends La'an Into the Sequel of The Elysian Kingdom

Strange New Worlds season 4, episode 9 is the fantasy one, the sequel to the storybook episode from season 1, The Elysian Kingdom. Except this time the kingdom is a real planet you can fly to. There's a dragon, there's a wizard, and there are doppelgangers. If you've been anywhere near Star Trek discourse this year, you already know the word waiting for this one: gimmicky. That's been the word all season for the puppet episode, the soap opera episode, the noir one, and the episode that closed on a needle drop. Now a fairy tale planet with a princess on it reads to a lot of people like the show ran out of ideas in its second to last season.

The Original Series Was Already This Strange, So Gimmicky Misreads Star Trek's History

Go pull up the original series, the one everybody is defending when they say a fantasy episode isn't real Star Trek, and start counting. The Enterprise finds a planet that is, for no reason anybody can explain, 1930s Chicago gangsters. They find an obelisk that throws people back through time. They meet a super being in a ruffled shirt, essentially a spoiled child with the power of a god, and they have to play along with him for an hour. They go down to a planet that manufactures whatever you're thinking about, so a man gets chased by a knight and another finds his college rival waiting in a field. There's an energy creature out in the middle of nothing that eats a ship, and there's a planet where the adults all died and the only survivors are the children. That's before you get to The Next Generation, where a godlike being drops the entire senior staff into Sherwood Forest and makes Picard play Robin Hood in tights. As Worf puts it in that episode, "I will not play the fool for Q's amusement."

Those aren't the weird ones. That's the show. If you sorted the original series by how fantastical the premise is, the earnest hard military science fiction hour is the outlier, the exception, the one they did between the gangster planet and the Greek god. The internet isn't wrong for liking serious Star Trek, serious Star Trek is great, but what the people running the show are doing is the format itself. That's the whole method.

Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers Have Said Genre Switching Is the Stated Method

Akiva Goldsman's framing is that the different worlds are really different genres and they use genre as a lens for the storytelling. Henry Alonso Myers has said they try to see every episode as its own little movie. You can call that damage control after a bad week online, but it's a stated method, plain as day, and it's really the same method that was running in 1967.

I trust it because I've watched what it costs them. Anson Mount has said the parts he likes are the ones where he reads the script and thinks, how am I going to do this. Ethan Peck has said he was genuinely intimidated by the puppet episode, worried about playing it truthfully when he didn't know what he was walking into on set. Nobody says that about a shortcut, you say that about the hard version of the job. Think about what it must have felt like to be Shatner or Nimoy, standing on a plywood set in colored tights, looking at a papier mache puppet, being told to sell the most ridiculous moment imaginable like your life depended on it. That was the assignment every week, and this cast is carrying 60 years of it.

The Fantastical Episodes Are Disappearing as the Series Heads Toward the Finale

The two episodes everybody loved this season without controversy were Scotty's and Spock's, and they worked because we were watching somebody turn into a person we've already met. We know where Scotty ends up, we know where Spock ends up, we've known since 1966. Watching the engineer become the engineer is the pleasure of a circle closing, destiny getting filled in, and it's completely safe because the ending was written 60 years ago.

La'an doesn't have that, and this isn't just a fan observation, the people making the show have said it. Goldsman has laid out plainly what he has to solve in the final season: Spock and Uhura have futures that are already locked because the original series locked them, but La'an and Ortegas don't, there's no canon waiting for them, and somebody in that room has to decide what happens to those two from scratch.

They got 10 episodes this year and six next year. Goldsman has said the outlier episodes are getting fewer as they move toward saying goodbye, trending toward a much more singular kind of show. Paul Wesley has said the final season is very serious and very contained, which means the fantastical episode, the thing that's actually the spine of Star Trek, is on its way out, and one of the last ones they had, they spent on La'an.

Pike Catches La'an's Pattern Before the Fairy Tale Even Starts

The setup isn't subtle. Before any of the magic starts, Pike finds La'an in the gym working out her aggression and asks her about a pattern, not one incident, incidents plural. He goes to Dr. M'Benga and asks for a second opinion, which is a captain quietly moving a discipline problem over into the medical column. Her commanding officer has clocked something that she hasn't admitted to herself yet. The fairy tale isn't an escape she stumbles into. The fairy tale is the treatment.

The Best Scene Pays Off a Hug From A Quality of Mercy Four Years Later

The best scene in the episode is two women standing still. You've got La'an and you've got the fairy tale version of her, and they ask each other the same question from opposite ends of it: do you feel this love and emotion I'm feeling all the time, do you feel angry and ready to kill all the time. Neither one has an answer. Then they stop fighting and they hold each other.

That scene sent me back to season 1's finale, A Quality of Mercy. Pike takes the crystal and jumps forward seven years to 2266, into a version of events where he dodges the accident coming for him, and in that future he runs into La'an, except she's a commander on the Farragut, in command gold instead of security red, healthy, warm, whole. When she sees him, she hugs him, and Pike says out loud, "I don't remember her being much of a hugger." That aired four years ago, two episodes after The Elysian Kingdom.

I didn't sit down with a wiki to find that connection. I was watching the scene and my brain went, that's the one, that's the woman from the Pike future, in real time, unprompted. That's a piece of seeding that was planned four years ago doing its job on the exact viewer it was aimed at. This is the show building an ending for the only person on that bridge who doesn't have one, using the oldest tool in the box.

It also answers something that's been sitting in the back of my head for years: how did the 1960s crew handle the completely absurd with so much grace, gangsters, gods, a planet that reads your mind, and Kirk and Spock and McCoy just rolled their sleeves up. That unflappability is more than how things were written. It's the entire resume. They got that way because they survived the ridiculous over and over until the ridiculous stopped being able to break them.

The Craft Shows in a Transporter Effect Pointed at a Painting

Season 1's Elysian Kingdom was a bottle show. I don't say that as an insult, I say it as a fact about the budget. They dressed the standing sets, put the cast in costumes, and the whole thing lived on the ship, and reviews at the time said it was charming but hurt by being so obviously the cheap one. This time they got money and you can see every dollar of it. The kingdom is a floating planet, which is going to warm the heart of every flat earther watching, and it's a beautiful image. They went out to a real forest location and married it to a rendered world past the treeline, and that seam holds, which is harder than it looks.

The small detail is where you can tell who knows what they're doing. When the queen sends them into the tapestries, everybody watching sees magic. I saw a transporter effect, an overlay with a mask that shrinks in a particular way, the camera moves, and then it reveals the second version of the tapestry. They almost certainly built the tapestry twice, with the energy on top selling the transformation. That's not a knock, it's the compliment. They had the money to go over the top and they didn't. Same restraint with the dragon form, gorgeous and not on screen for 11 minutes showing off, and same with the wizard.

Playing a Fantasy Version of Yourself Is a Hat on a Hat, and the Dog Is Real

Every one of these actors is playing their own character meeting a fantasy version of their own character, which in Star Trek terms is a doppelganger episode and in acting terms is a hat on a hat. Years ago I was hired to replace the narrator on the British version of Mythbusters for a 10 month gig, and one script direction said to do my best American accent, except the voice I was doing was already a character, so now I was an Englishman trying very hard to sound American, thinking in two layers at once and letting the audience hear the seam on purpose. That's the single hardest note I've ever been handed, and that's what Anson Mount and Ethan Peck are both doing in this episode, with Mount doing it while making it look like nothing.

Christina Chong spent this season taking horse riding lessons, doing fight rehearsals, and studying digital mock ups of puppets all at the same time, and the sword fight she has with herself in this episode is what those rehearsals bought. Rebecca Romijn is back as the Huntress and Melissa Navia's Ortegas is back as the knight, and the musical cues from season 1 return too, the kind of thing you only do if you actually care about the thing you're sequelizing. The princess's dog in the episode is Christina Chong's own dog. Nobody smuggles their own dog into a cynical episode.

My Only Complaint Is a Callback That Didn't Need to Be Tied So Tight

I have one complaint, and I'm honestly not sure where I land on it. They handwave the connection back to the season 1 episode, doing the work to tell you why this fantasy world relates to the one the alien entity built inside the ship for a dying little girl. I don't think they needed that. I think they could have taken this exact script, made it a brand new fantasy premise, connected it to season 1 thematically and nowhere else, and I'd have been just as happy, maybe happier. The thing they reached back to grab wasn't even the crown jewel, it was the cheap one everybody liked, so I don't fully know why the rope had to be tied that tight. It's the only note I've got, and it's a note about a seam, not about the episode.

The craft holds all the way down to a transporter effect pointed at a painting, and the payoff lands on the one character on the bridge whose ending nobody has written yet, with a hug from four years ago waiting on the way there. That one seam it didn't need to tie is the only thing standing between this and a 10, which is why Once La'an a Time lands at a 9 out of 10 for me. This episode is about a woman who lost her ability to feel anything but the fight, who couldn't see it, whose captain had to see it for her, and we spend all week calling it a gimmick. We're her, folded arms, deciding Star Trek is serious science fiction and unable to remember the kid who couldn't breathe when Trelane showed up.

If this episode did to you what it did to me, which one broke you open first, Shore Leave, Trelane, the gangster planet, or Picard in Sherwood Forest?