I’m here with all the news you have to hear about this week’s episode, and it’s definitely one to remember. It’s hot on the heels of last week, where the traitor Una Chin-Riley was put on trial, an alien who’d been trying to impersonate a human for so long. One of the best courtroom procedurals I think I’ve ever seen, especially when they indicted her and ultimately protected the best interests of the United Earth Fleet, as well as Earth itself. Or such as it is, because if you’re a fan of the original series then you obviously know about Earth and its poor, untimely demise. They’re not going to retcon that, I know that much.
So this one focuses on Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise. They encounter a Vulcan ship with Captain Spock, a Vulcan commander who’s seeking help. I guess they think we’re foolish or whatever. He’s asking because the Romulans are about to beat them, and I’m like, well, of course the Romulans are about to beat you guys. Kirk unfortunately can’t help. That’s when this unknown girl shows up claiming to come from something called Starfleet. She’s got an almost identical uniform to the ones we know, and she claims there’s been a change in the timeline.
Okay, obviously I’m having a little bit of fun. But that’s the kind of hijinks we got this week on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2, episode 3, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” a really great, cool time travel episode.
The Man in the Suit
You start the episode with La’an, the head of security, from her perspective. What you see is that she’s getting bored, a little humdrum with everything. She’s also still reeling from last week, where it was revealed, at least privately to Neera, the attorney who helped defend Una, that she has some of the markers that made up Khan Noonien-Singh within her. So she’s got some of those modified genes and she’s still learning to live with it. We find out she didn’t go to the celebration dinner while she’s having this really great exercise match with M’Benga.
Then she’s walking through the halls and we get to the scene you all saw in the clip they dropped last week to promote this one. She encounters a guy in a suit, and he’s got blood on him. He opens up his little hologram thingy and it’s very clearly time travel stuff. If that kind of time travel stuff looks familiar to you, that’s because you saw it originally over in Voyager back in the day. There’s a time agency that hasn’t been created yet, and that’s where this is pointing. Let me not get ahead of myself.
He has this device, he sets it for a certain time frame, and he tells her she’s got to get to the bridge. She assumes it’s the bridge bridge. When he dies he fades away, and the entire ship changes in a flash.
A World Without the Federation
La’an runs up to the bridge and it’s not Pike anymore. It’s Captain Kirk. Different symbol, and the same goes for everybody in the crew. Ortegas is still there, but Spock is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Una.
It’s the first time we’ve seen an alternate timeline at least since Picard season two, and at the same time it’s different from an alternate universe like “Mirror, Mirror.” I really dug this peek into another world, and it’s a very different world. You find out this is a place where certain things didn’t happen. Humanity wore out the planet. The Federation doesn’t happen, but the United Earth Fleet does. There’s a moment where you see that Spock is a captain in the Vulcan Empire, the Vulcans are at war with the Romulans, and the Romulans are at war with the humans. Everybody seems to be having very unfriendly relationships with one another. It’s a very xenophobic era. Not very Starfleet at all, because this isn’t Starfleet.
La’an asks Kirk if they can talk in private, and she goes for broke and explains the whole thing. He’s like, you want me to believe this? He goes to look at the device, and while she’s trying to wrestle it back she accidentally activates it.
Hot Dogs in Canada
When they land, they’re in what is, relatively speaking, the present. They do a wonderful thing here and address the fact that in original series canon, 1992 is when the Eugenics Wars are supposed to happen. So the two of them are tracking what’s supposed to go on and trying to find out what’s different, and there are these really fun encounters along the way, including the one you saw in the clip.
This Kirk is very different from the Kirk we know. This Kirk was born on the USS Iowa, because when mankind went to the stars they populated Mars and the moon and some other places. Earth itself is a husk, so a lot of people live in space and are born there.
They’re already starting to drop hints of chemistry between the two of them. And you get this moment where he basically looks at her and says, listen, I might have missed a few temporal mechanics classes, but as far as I know I just have to sit back and chill, enjoy me some hot dogs, and relax. Because at the end of the day, you’re asking me to help erase my universe.
He’s not wrong. He’s totally not wrong. But when she begins explaining how things are where she comes from, he comes to the realization that maybe her universe is a little better than his.
First off, they’re in Canada. Big ups to Canada, because these are literally the same sets and buildings we saw in Supergirl and The Flash. I know because there are a couple of set pieces in this where I clearly remember having seen scenes play out at these locations. They’re interesting locations. So the fact that they’re actually in Canada, and they say as much, I think is pretty cool.
The Bridge, the Watch and Pelia
Then there’s an explosion on this giant bridge. The girl with the camera they keep running into, the photographer, talks about a fusion reactor underneath it. She’s a total conspiracy theory nut, and they look at her with pity, like it’s sad that she’s so close and yet so far. But Kirk does remember something. In his timeline, a fusion bomb goes off here. Now we’re getting somewhere. They realize they have to track it down.
At the very beginning of the episode we had a brief moment with Pelia, where they’ve recovered these antiques from the archaeology department and she says, oh yeah, I still have a cache of things in my home in Vermont, where I used to live. It’s the classic story trope. We’re going to drop this hint and it’s going to be important later. They basically pull a Guinan, and those of you who watch Star Trek know what I’m talking about.
So when the question is how you find something in the past, La’an immediately says, I know an engineer who lives here, let’s go to Vermont. They travel to Vermont and talk to Pelia, only to find out she’s not an engineer yet. In fact, a lot of what La’an does may very well key her into becoming an engineer in the future. What they don’t necessarily tell us is whether she remembers. There’s a look they share later that may or may not have been recognition, hence the whole Guinan aspect.
They end up with a watch. It’s really loose, let’s throw it away science, and I’m okay with that. The watch has this radiation type stuff in it that glows when the thing they’re hunting is present. A little hand wavy, but I’m down.
The Noonien-Singh Institute
The watch leads them to the Noonien-Singh Institute. They’re at the birthplace of the Eugenics Wars.
If you watched Picard season 2 and you understand the whole relationship between the Soongs and, later on, Khan, you know there’s always been this confusion. We’re in 2023. Clearly the Eugenics Wars never happened. So how do you reconcile that with old style sci-fi? For a long time they never tried. Voyager had a few different time travel episodes that tried to sort of subtly explain it. This episode gives us the single best explanation of what this whole thing is about.
La’an puts her hand on the door pad. It scans her biometrics, registers her as Noonien-Singh DNA, and opens for her. And the girl with the camera sees it happen. She’s a time traveling Romulan agent who’s been there for 30 years, which effectively puts her arrival in the 1992 or 1993 area. Her job has been to stop the Eugenics Wars and push back when they happen. Hence why we haven’t gotten them. That’s the explanation, and I’m totally digging it and I’m down.
The point is that we need that dark time, the dark ages of the Eugenics Wars, in order for humanity to eventually usher in the utopia that is the Federation. So she didn’t show up to cause the fusion explosion. She showed up to kill baby Khan. And sure enough, what do we see when they go through the doorway? A door literally marked Khan.
It’s cool. I was a big fan. I thought they did this very, very well.
“And Me”
So what choice are you going to make? Even the Romulan agent is asking, what are you going to do, he’s the worst killer there is. And La’an says, well, yeah. My ancestor’s legacy is genocide and torture and murder, all these horrible things. And then she says, “and me.”
I literally, as she said “and me,” said “and the Federation.” Because the truth is, it’s much like the Roman Empire, which led to the Dark Ages, which eventually leads to a civilized industrial age. You need the dark times of the Eugenics Wars to eventually usher in a brighter era. The Earth gets tired and fed up and wants utopia.
Oh, and by the way, Kirk dies. The Romulan says she’s going to shoot him. He says it’s going to set off the alarm. She says he might be bluffing, and he says no I’m not, prove me wrong. She shoots him and kills him.
So La’an’s ticked off. The agent forces her through the door and talks her through it, and La’an decides, I am not going to do that. She turns around and she fights, and she fights hard. The Romulan agent loses, and she pushes this suicide button on her neck that makes her disintegrate.
Then La’an meets a young Khan. He says, are you here to kill me? She says no, and she wipes the Romulan blood off of him from when the agent was shot. As the guards are finally coming, the light on the device from the future time traveler guy turns from red to green. She pushes it and returns to her own time.
She immediately rushes up to the bridge. There’s Pike. There’s Una. There’s Pelia. And Pelia gives her a look, that Guinan look I was talking about.
Then she goes back to her quarters and makes a call. She calls Lieutenant Kirk. She finds any excuse, something about wanting information on his brother Sam’s file, and they joke for a little bit. She gets off the call and immediately bursts into tears, because he’s alive.
I hope that’s proof there’s going to be some sort of relationship in the future. I think it’d be really cool to see that.
Where I Land
Strange New Worlds “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” is a good episode. I like the time travel shenanigans. I like the explanation.
Two things sit with me. They keep giving us dabblings of Kirk, but it’s never the real him, and I’m like, bro, just assign him to the Enterprise and be done. Why are we having this exchange?
The other thing that occurred to me is, how come everybody knows about Khan? I get it. But in “Space Seed” he was supposed to be, yes, a historical figure, and still. I don’t know. It’s one of those inconsistencies that sits with me weird sometimes.
I’d love to hear what you think, especially on whether La’an and Kirk have a future after this one. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
