Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 9 sends La'an into a fairy tale where her prince has Kirk's face
In ‘Once La’an a Time’, the Elysian Kingdom anomaly from season 1 returns with dragons, wizards and doppelgängers, and La’an finally talks to the real Kirk.
Here we are again, barreling into the tail end of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, and frankly, things have taken a turn for the delightfully bizarre with episode 9, ‘Once La’an a Time’. The show’s always been up for dabbling in a bit of genre-hopping — but this week, they’ve gone full fairy tale. Yes, really. Dragons, wizards, doppelgängers — the sort of stuff you’d expect from Game of Thrones or maybe Once Upon a Time, not your usual starship fare. Throw in some overt nods to The Princess Bride and, well, welcome to Star Trek’s latest mood.
‘Once La’an a Time’ is the penultimate episode of Season 4 and throws the crew into a storybook fantasy world, riffing on everything from classic Trek to pop culture fantasy.
La’an and Her Inner Demons (Again)
The episode kicks off with Spock, Uhura, and Ortegas all whispering about how La’an Noonien Singh’s acting even weirder than usual. For those keeping score: her bloodline traces back to actual supervillain Khan Noonien Singh, so angst has rather been her brand right from season one. She’s genetically enhanced but absolutely terrified she’ll go off the rails like old granddad. This season’s made a meal of it — she started turning a bit Romulan and violent back in ‘Four-and-a-Half Vulcans’, then came under some proper cosmic horror influence in ‘The Griffin Incident’, which actually led to her stabbing Captain Kirk. She’s since called it quits on her awkward not-relationship with Spock and reverted to her classic, emotionally blocked-off self.
When Star Trek Met Fairy Tales
The plot this week? Pike, Spock, La’an, and Pelia beam down to a supposed planet that by rights shouldn’t exist and discover it’s gone full magical-kingdom. This isn’t brand new territory: fans might remember the sentient nebula from Season 1 (‘The Elysian Kingdom’), which created a fantasy world for Doctor M’Benga’s sick daughter, Rukiya, based on her favourite book. Apparently, the nebula’s up to it again — this time, it’s cooked up an entire realm with all the trimmings. Unicorns, magic, the works.
The Elysian Kingdom anomaly has returned, conjuring up an independent storybook world that’s both physically real and suspiciously familiar to Star Trek regulars.
Doppelgängers, but Not How You Remember Them
Episodes like ‘Mirror, Mirror’ have played the duplicate-crew card before, but here the logic is even more surreal. Back in ‘The Elysian Kingdom’, the crew’s personalities flipped into fantasy versions; this time, the anomaly’s literally spat out separate physical beings — so La’an can bump into Princess Thalia, who looks just like her but with added sparkle. Even more confusing: these duplicates are genuinely independent characters, not puppets. M’Benga and Hemmer were the only ones to remember the last episode’s switcheroo, for what little comfort that is.
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‘Prince Dashing’: Why Is Kirk Here?
One of the more eyebrow-raising turns is the sudden appearance of a Kirk doppelgänger, ‘Prince Dashing’. Thing is, Kirk didn’t even join up with the Enterprise crew until Season 2, so how’s there a fantasy version of him? The episode tries to rationalise it: M’Benga muses that this experience is tailored to teach La’an something, and the anomaly’s dabbling with her subconscious. Basically, when she beamed down, the magic realm grabbed the ‘face of the man she loves’ to slap onto Princess Thalia’s fairy-tale love interest. It’s weird, but it’s at least thematically neat.
Tech or Magic?
If you’re wondering where Star Trek is on the whole ‘is magic real?’ spectrum — it isn’t, and never has been. The dragons and wizards are just super-advanced tech that Starfleet doesn’t understand yet. They even bother to quote Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. See also: the MCU’s Thor logic. None of it should be taken literally, though as magic-starved fun goes, it’s enthusiastic.
The Elysian Kingdom ‘Planet’ Explained
That planet causing all this mess? Spock says from the off that it ‘should not exist’ — because it’s not an actual planet, but a ship with its own power source, drifting through deep space like something Douglas Adams would write. Pelia plans to stay behind and poke at its engineering, possibly to get it back to that original nebula. Whether it’ll show up again down the line for more chaos is anyone’s guess, but this Mirror Universe-with-magic detour is very much its own thing.
An Obscure Princess Bride Nod
At the end, there’s a bit where M’Benga teases that Pelia has been on ‘very intimate’ terms with the fantasy realm’s cook, Max — a background name that’s pretty much a direct nod to The Princess Bride. Turns out, Carol Kane (Pelia) was Valerie, on-screen wife to Billy Crystal’s Max, in the original film. It’s daft but sweet, and slightly meta, but whether or not Pelia is sticking around long-term is another question.
La’an’s Family Trauma Rears Up
The final minutes have La’an quietly showing off a locket from her father, who died painfully along with her mum and brother when the Gorn went on a killing spree. She survived, everyone else didn’t, and her prickly temperament is more or less explained by lifelong survivor’s guilt. She’s wary of getting close to anyone, which — considering all of Star Trek’s chatty optimism — is a real note of darkness.
That ‘Classified’ History with Kirk
Over drinks, Kirk tells La’an he knows they’ve got some ‘classified’ history together, though he’s not been briefed on what that actually is. If you’re keeping up: in Season 2’s ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’, La’an ended up time-travelling to 2020 with an alternate-universe Kirk, they flirted with love, then he promptly died. The proper-timeline Kirk has no memory of any of this — and La’an can’t even talk about it, thanks to a timeline cop warning her that triggering a paradox is bad for everyone’s health. All the same, Episode 9 marks the first proper attempt by La’an to build a new bond with ‘her’ real Kirk.