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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has earned acclaim for how it fuses modern storytelling with the essence of Star Trek. While today’s sci-fi tends to prioritize huge emotional moments and flashy visuals, Strange New Worlds does something far more distinctive—it appeals to the heart of what made Star Trek beloved in the first place. And no episode captures this better than Season 2, Episode 3: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”
La’an Noonien-Singh, the Enterprise’s security chief and descendent of the infamous Khan, time travels to contemporary Toronto.
Alone?
Not quite.
Captain James T. Kirk from an alternate timeline is with her and together, they’re off to foil a temporal assassination that places Earth’s future into a precarious balance. This sort of high-stakes premise is what the franchise thrives on.
Underneath the sci-fi aesthetics, the episode tackles themes that Trek has focused on for centuries: exploration of identity, sacrifice, and the weight of history.
For La’an, this mission becomes personal in ways that are beyond her anticipation. Her ties to Khan compel her to deal with the legacy that she bears. And her bond with Kirk lays bare the sympathetic fractures on the tough mask she puts on to avoid feeling vulnerable.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow does not leave the audience in awe; rather, allows them to take in the powerful emotional resonances that linger. It attempts to tell that Trek isn't mere episodes of footage chronologically pieced together portraying battles in the depths of space or interfacing with aliens; the core of the story encapsulating humans making unfathomable decisions in pursuit of something so much larger than life. And La’an's presumed decision is possibly one of the most memorable examples of shocking decisions made silently.
La’an's story reflects Star Trek ’s oldest question
What is so impactful and vivid about this episode is how effectively it integrates La’an’s internal conflict with the broader Star Trek narrative. The woman’s family tree dooms her to an inheritance of annihilation and savagery—with Khan's name evoking a fear that lasts centuries.
Oh, it’s a Macbethian monologue waiting to happen! But rather than luxuriating and rejecting this tangled legacy, the narrative shackles La’an with its burdens and compels her to follow the route of obligation instead of yearning.
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Even with having lost the version of Kirk she cared for, her decision to spare a younger version of Khan’s life is in line of the type of decisions Spock, Picard, and Janeway made throughout the series.
That is the same moral framework that has underpinned the franchise for decades: making the hard decision of doing what is right. Strange New Worlds does not simply pay tribute to the old values—It cements its footing in the timeline of Star Trek history.
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