“Once La’An A Time” is a really strong capstone to a season of TV we didn’t quite get. In as much as season four has had an ongoing character throughline, it’s been La’An’s struggles with her augmented DNA activating. But the specifics of that dilemma have shifted from week to week. It was first introduced as a superpowered medical issue. Then it became fodder for horror-movie violence. Then it got tied up in her dynamic with Spock. (It’s wild how much screentime their relationship got in retrospect.) Now this fairy tale-themed revisit of the season one episode “The Elysian Kingdom” recontextualizes it as the struggle between two sides of herself: her outwardly grumpy demeanor and her whimsical, emotional inner child. It’s an intriguing idea—one that Christina Chong plays really well. I’m just not sure it’s paying off specifics we’ve actually seen onscreen.
It doesn’t help that while the silliness of “Once La’An A Time” might have felt like a breath of fresh air in a heavier season, it comes on the heels of a very comedy-heavy run. Watching the cast romp around The Elysian Kingdom is a little less novel after we’ve already seen them romp around the Planet That Makes You High, a soap-opera parody, and a wacky puppet dream. Less is more when it comes to comedy and that would be a lot of silliness for a 22-episode season, let alone a 10-episode one.
Yet I would be lying if I said I wasn’t ultimately pretty charmed by this episode in the end. While it starts at an absolutely frantic pace (more on that in a second), it settles into a more balanced tone by the end. The production values are some of the best the show has ever delivered—it feels like the team devoted a huge amount of the season’s budget to this episode’s fantasy costumes, dragon special effects, and a very cool looking prosthetic werewolf. And the cast clearly love returning to their Elysian alter egos in a way that’s pretty infectious. It’s just that enjoying this episode to its fullest means imagining it exists in a different, more intentionally plotted season, and that’s a big ask.
Part of the issue is that I genuinely think this episode suffered from some major post-production overhaul. There is some very noticeable ADR when the crew first land on the mysterious cone-shaped planet that houses the expanded Elysian Kingdom—you can literally see Pelia’s lips saying different words than we’re hearing before the camera clunkily cuts to a wide shot for the rest of her dialogue. The entire monologue where M’Benga suggests the planet may be there for La’An seems like it was reworked in post and doesn’t really make any sense, even on an “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” level. And while it’s certainly possible The Princess Bride references were always there as a nod to Carol Kane’s role in that fantasy classic, part of me wonders if they were added in reshoots, as a tribute to Rob Reiner. (Filming on the season wrapped a few months after Reiner and his wife Michelle were killed.)
Admittedly, that’s just conjecture on my part, but the fact that the ADR calms down in the second half makes it seem plausible there was some hefty reworking of this story’s initial setup. Still, if there’s any episode that can get away with that kind of meddling, it’s this one. The point of “Once La’An A Time” is to let the cast have fun while La’An gets a moving emotional arc, and since those two elements work like gangbusters, a threadbare plot doesn’t hugely matter. It’s incredibly impressive that Anson Mount and Ethan Peck are able to play Pike and Spock as Sir Rauth and the wizard Pollux and Rauth and Pollux as Pike and Spock while making those feel like two completely different, equally funny things. Ditto Chong playing defensive La’An and emotive Princess Thalia before flipping their personalities to highlight La’An’s gentle emotionality and Thalia’s anger while still making them distinct people.
Perhaps the most unexpected scene-stealer is Paul Wesley, who gets a better showcase here than he did in last week’s Kirk-centric episode. His himbo take on Prince Dashing is clearly heavily inspired by Chris Pine’s work in Into The Woods, which I guess we can chalk up to some kind of multiversal Kirk connection. Regardless, it’s a fun change of pace and a great way to highlight his chemistry with Chong beyond the more professional dynamic they tend to stick with on the Enterprise. Given that Kirk and La’An’s connection began in an alternate timeline in the season two episode “Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow,” it’s fitting that their next relationship shift comes thanks to another alternate universe.
Once the ADR settles down, there’s real charm and verve to the second half of the episode, as Una and Ortegas’ alter egos smooch; La’An and Dashing dance their way across a masquerade ball; and La’An and Thalia experience what it’s like to live with each other’s emotions. The idea that La’An needs to let her hair down and embrace her inner princess is kind of basic—and could maybe have felt a little offensive if it weren’t handled correctly. But given all the Gorn-related horrors she survived as a child, it makes sense that a woman forced to grow up too fast would need an extra push to re-embrace the innocence she lost. Plus, discovering that Thalia loves Dashing even though he’s a werewolf is an effective metaphor for her own fear of the potential darkness inside her. In that way, the fairy tale setting makes way more sense for this story than puppets did as a way for Spock to process his Vulcan identity.
It all winds up feeling simple but pleasant, which isn’t a bad mark for Strange New Worlds to aim for, really. Of all this season’s comedy episodes, this one does the best job of evoking the spirit of The Original Series, which loved to strand its crew on planets that made them act out of character. As a long-time Kirk/La’An shipper, I was happy to see this episode end with them finally just going on a date. And as a fan of Chong getting to spread her wings as an actor, I like the idea of getting to see her play La’An 2.0 for the final seven episodes of the series. The specifics of “Once La’An A Time” may be a bit of a mess, but revisiting past episodes to forge a new future for our heroes feels like the right energy for Strange New Worlds to embrace as it heads into its homestretch.
Stray observations
- • On the one hand, this is a genuinely great Pelia episode with some of Kane’s funniest line deliveries. (“Yup, that’s me and also, I’m a duchess” really made me laugh.) On the other, seemingly writing her off the show with a handwave about how she’s going to pilot the Elysian Kingdom home is strangely anticlimactic. Surely she deserved a goodbye with Scotty! Oh well, I hope she and “Miracle Max” have fun storming the castle.
- • It’s been long enough since the episode aired that it probably doesn’t matter, but M’Benga retcons “The Elysian Kingdom” to be about a nebula forcing him to confront his difficult emotions when it was actually about a lonely nebula befriending his equally lonely daughter. Also, I have no idea how he knows Rukiya is gone from the planet now, I thought she became immortal in the nebula.
- • It’s very Strange New Worlds to spend so much time on the Pollux and Rauth subplot and then just give it zero resolution. I guess the implication is that Una takes them back to the planet. Hopefully she did the same with Queen Neve after beaming her to the brig.
- • There’s no hard and fast rules for this kind of thing, I guess, but it felt odd to me that Pollux’s magic works on the Enterprise and the dragon could do real damage to the ship.
- • The show usually likes to pair La’An with Una and Uhura with Ortegas, but Una and Ortegas have great romantic chemistry as their alter egos and Uhura and La’An have very cute friendship chemistry in that scene where La’An adopts Thalia’s dog, Runa!
- • The biggest costuming talking point here is probably the physics of La’An’s corset, but I was also shocked by the moment Pollux puts on Pike’s gold uniform and I suddenly realized just how swole Ethan Peck is.
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