Strange New Worlds Review: Once La'An A Time
Trek goes fantasy. There's even a world shaped like a disc. I'm sure everyone's going to be completely normal about this.
Spoilers below
Let's start negative, shall we? The problems with "Once La'An A Time" are, after all, immediately obvious. It's the fourth out-and-out comedy episode in nine weeks. It continues the genre borrowing that has characterised the season, and it doesn't even do so with originality, being a sequel to a story from the first season. The cast are obviously enjoying hamming things up, but they're all doing so in different ways, which makes this something of a mess, tonally. Every character who meets Sir Rauth and Pollux aboard the Enterprise is made to look like an idiot. It appears this may be the last outing for Carol Kane's Pelia, and yet the response to her being written out off-screen is one of overwhelming relief.
It's not at all difficult to see how this is going to land with broader fandom, then; another shitty "silly" episode, but at least they've gotten rid of one of the show's biggest problems.
And I'm not sure I wholly disagree, to be honest. That said, there's a lot more going on here. "Once Upon A La'An" fits into more patterns than the ones it's going to get flak for. Between this, "...Hourglass", "Level-Five...", and arguably even "Human Best Friend", there's a clear thematic approach here. Characters who are unhappy with the story they tell about themselves find themselves pulled into a completely different story instead; one that litralises the problem, and prompts the characters, one way or another, to move past those problems (or at least start to). Pike ends up in a soap opera because he can't process the melodrama of mourning for a family no-one else knows existed. Spock has to face his feelings over being different to everyone else on the ship, his culturally-enforced need for maximum seriousness and the contempt his ex-fiancee clearly has for the job he performs. This even applies to Scotty and Erica in "Human Best Friend", to some extent, as they struggle with the fact no small part of the tension between them stems from each of them seeing the other live the story they'd originally planned to be theirs.
It's clear how "...Time" fits into this approach - La'An keeps trying to force down her sense of whimsy and romance, leaving only anger and sadness. She has become her own Jungian shadow self (hence why he's namechecked twice this week). The episode both literalises and - it's implied, at least to some extent - resolves that conflict, by choosing a genre filled with whimsy and romance for her to work within: Disneyfied fairy tales.
Within that context, the episode comes somewhere between "Level-Five..." and
"....Hourglass" in terms of success. Mostly this is because the fairy tale world our heroes find themselves in doesn't seem so arbitrary as an infestation of Muppets, but doesn't map so closely onto what Trek has always been as a soap opera.. In some ways, the episode this season it most echoes is "The Griffin Incident". A competent if uninspired example of its chosen genre [1], which doubles as an opportunity to explore La'An's mental state.
Bringing up "The Griffin Incident" is very helpful here, actually, because if we're going to complain about "Once La'An A Time" because it's in a season with three comedy episodes already, we should also recognise how much it's elevated by coming in the seme year as Trek's most straightforward horror episode to date. The two episodes represent the two halves of La'An. There's her terror of who she is and who she could become, and there's her sense of loss about who she might have been absent the tragedy that's shaped her life. Choosing to spend two separate episodes exploring each side of that isn't something I can think of any other show doing before. And again, if we're going to criticise this season for having so many throwaway episodes in a context where there's so little room for the throwaway, it's truly astonishing (complimentary) that the writers were willing to spend 20% of Season 4 literalising one character's internal conflict. Twice La'An a time. The lieutenant herself complains that "there's no subtext at all here, is there?", but the subtext here is very much what matters.
Not that any of the text is that sub, of course. The references to shadows and duality and kind of bathetic exchanges about love and anger are all rather too obvious for my taste. But then dipping into the discourse about this season regularly suggests barely anyone has recognised what the show has been doing, so I guess pushing the subtext closer to the surface is a sensible move.
We should also note the ordering. La'An panics about the implications of her changing physicality in "Valles Marineris", and next episode finds herself aboard the haunted USS Griffin. The implication of those early episodes is that she's heading down a dark path, with potentially extremely concerning consequences. Instead, though, through the power of stories to help us understand ourselves, La'An (almost) ends the season at peace with herself in a way she hasn't since she was a child, if then. She reconciles the two warring parts of herself (a very Jungian approach, this; you want literalisation of Freudian psychoanalysis, you've got Forbidden Planet). This is a much better way to pull these story strands together than some tale about La'An turning villain and needing her friends to bring her back from the abyss.
And if it all comes off as a little cheesy, well; that can happen sometimes when your goal is to be earnest. I'd much rather that than another stab at marking grimdark Trek. My own aesthetics make "The Griffin Incident" the better episode for me, but there's no doubt in my mind which of the two this show is the better for having made.
We could even perhaps extend this approach; seeing the entirety of this season as breaking Trek into its constituent parts and placing them in new contexts; learning about how the whole fits together by investigating how it comes apart. I'm not sure how plausible a read that is, and I'm definitely not sure how successful the endeavour has been even if I've correctly recognised it. But it's something new and well-intentioned and worth a go, and it's resulted in an episode of Trek where the Enterprise got into a fight with a dragon. For all the odd and unsuccessful choices which got us to this point, the franchise is still boldly going, at least for a little longer.
[1] I will say the werewolf subplot was very well done, even if I'm surprised at myself for being surprised by it. The clues are all there, after all. But managing to sneak it a twist which is both wholly in keeping with the genre at work, and which is a clear reference to the broader character themes, unlocking La'An's next character beat? Kudos.
Ordering
1. Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass 2. Orders Of Magnitude
3. The Griffin Incident
4. Once La'An A Time
5. Level-Five Transporter Accident 6. Off-Hour 7. Human Best Friend
8. Valles Marineris
9. A Case Of Chiaoscuro
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