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A review of this week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Once La'an a Time" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I don't know what a van is...
Alan Sepinwall
We're very much in the Groundhog Day phase of these recaps, where I find myself reliving the same experience over and over again, with occasional relief from episodes like "Off Hour" and "Orders of Magnitude." As was the case with the soap opera episode, I was half-tempted to not finish, or at least to not recap it. But I committed to finish this season out, and also there are some problems that are specific to "Once La'an a Time" that go beyond this Star Trek show's maddening reluctance to be a Star Trek show. So I'll mostly write about those.
The episode's title made clear we would be back in (Not-So) Very Special Episode territory, and most likely in the fairy tale world from Season One's "The Elysian Kingdom." I thus went in braced for silliness, and even briefly felt reassured by the idea that all of our characters understood what was happening, versus Pike being the only one aware of Trelane's soap opera manipulations. But as it became clear that the episode's primary area of interest was to allow all of the actors to once again spend much of the hour playing variations on the characters we already know, I started once again wondering how a show that started out with the hook of "What if we just told old-fashioned Star Trek stories?" had somehow turned into a much less funny version of Community.
But you've read me grumbling about that for much of this season. Instead, let me focus on the episode's larger and more specific failure.