Once La’an A Time (SNW)

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SST432: “Once La’an a Time”** is the ninth episode of Strange New Worlds Season 4, and the show’s second trip to The Elysian Kingdom. This time the fairy tale is not a story read over a sickbed — it is a place, grown out of the Season 1 merger between Dr. Joseph M’Benga’s daughter Rukiya and a non-corporeal entity, and populated with doppelgangers of the crew. Two of them beam aboard and start impersonating Pike and Spock. Down on the surface, La’an Noonien-Singh meets Princess Thalia — happy, loving, vulnerable, and, in the episode’s Jungian frame, the half of herself she keeps in the dark.

Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler all expected to hate this one and didn’t. Jimmy puts it within a point of a seven and rates it above the show’s first fantasy outing. Fr. Jason finds it funny in moments and lands on neither great nor horrible. Dom’s reservation is structural: after a whole season of genre-skipping, another one reads as more of the same rather than as a swing.

The conversation opens out from there. Jimmy lays out what a shadow self actually is in Jungian terms — hidden, not evil — and why the ending was visible a mile off once you knew the arc would resolve here, since nobody kills their own shadow. Dom argues that the real break between classic Trek and new Trek is the captain: Pike runs the Enterprise like a team captain or a coach, not a commanding officer, and the men who wrote the original series had lived through a war. Jimmy counters with Lorca, and Fr. Jason points out that Discovery pulled focus off the captain on purpose.

They also work the Elysian Kingdom sequel’s loose ends — Rukiya is brought back and never gets to speak for herself — along with the Princess Bride jokes Carol Kane finally gets to play straight, whether Pelia’s quiet exit is the last we see of her, the Benny Russell callback to Deep Space Nine, a La’an and Kirk romance restarted with six episodes left in the whole series, and La’an’s dog Runa, who belongs to Christina Chong in real life. Then listener feedback on the soap-opera episode.

Two more threads get real airtime. Jimmy floats the fan theory that this world is the technology behind the original series’ Shore Leave planet — it reads minds and manufactures what it finds there — and explains why the timeline is too tight for it to work. And the feedback segment closes with a listener who lost his son four years ago and heard the line “we mourn the loss of a future with them” land differently than the rest of the audience did, which becomes the episode’s real argument: we bring our own history to everything we watch. Next time, the Season 4 finale — “Tomorrow’s Enterprise.”

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