Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - “Once La’An a Time” Review
Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has spent its run attempting an unusual number of high-concept swings – from a black-and-white noir, to Muppets, to a soap opera pastiche – and the season’s willingness to gamble has, for the most part, paid off spectacularly. “Once La’An a Time” is somewhat of an exception, a return to the Kingdom of Elysia introduced in season 1’s “The Elysian Kingdom” that expands on the earlier episode’s structural gimmick – the crew assuming roles within a fantastical, sentient storybook realm – without quite recapturing the emotional urgency that made the original work. Where that first excursion was tethered to Dr. M’Benga’s devastating grief over his dying daughter, this reprisal utilizes its runtime as an impromptu therapy session for La’An’s accumulated season-long distress.
The premise itself has real potential. La’An, still unsettled by her fraught genetic legacy and her unresolved feelings for Kirk following the events of “The Griffin Incident,” is a character whose interiority genuinely warranted excavation. But the episode’s structure – interwoven plot strands involving doppelgangers attempting to seize control of the Enterprise while La’An and a Kirk-doppelganger named Prince Dashing quest – generates a great deal of activity without generating much genuine stakes. Anson Mount and Ethan Peck clearly relish playing against type as the cowardly Sir Rauth and the flamboyant wizard Pollux, and their scenes together are among the episode’s more enjoyable material. Carol Kane also brings her usual delightful strangeness to the proceedings as she portrays Pelia while she pretends to be Kingdom of Elysia author Benny Russell from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “Far Beyond the Stars”.
Where the episode struggles is making any of this feel consequential. The mechanics of how or why Elysia has reappeared, now manifested as a ship disguised as a flat planet, are gestured at rather than explained, and the show leans on Clarke’s Third Law in a way that functions more as an excuse to avoid explanation than anything else. The episode’s emotional climax – La’An recognizing herself in Princess Thalia and resolving her season-long darkness through sword-fighting and ultimately embracing this complementary aspect of her own personality – arrives with a tidiness that undersells everything the show has spent the season building. A character arc this nuanced deserved a resolution with more weight.
The episode does end its Kirk and La’An storyline on a genuinely welcome note, and there's pleasure in watching these two characters finally, actually connect after over a season of near-misses.
But nine episodes deep into a consistently creative and rewarding ten-episode run, “Once La’An a Time” is the rare instance this season of the show struggling to earn the emotional payoff it’s reaching for. However, considering that it took nine episodes out of ten to reach this point, it’s safe to say that season 4 has been genuinely excellent, and all that remains to be seen is how well the finale sticks the landing.