‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Bosses on Killing Off [Spoiler]: ‘It’s a Love Story’
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Where No One Has Gone Before
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 3 “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”]
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds sends La’an (Christina Chong) back in time to mid-21st century Toronto — and to an alternate timeline — and she has quite the encounter with none other than James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley).
In the process of trying to figure out what she’s trying to stop, the two (eventually) bond (oh, do they!), she faces her past (and the associations with her last name, Noonien-Singh, because of Khan), and he’s killed. Yes, a Star Trek show just killed off a James T. Kirk. (But remember, it’s an alternate timeline, and probably the only way that could happen on Strange New Worlds right now, executive producer Akiva Goldsman agrees.)
“It’s a love story. That’s really what’s important about this episode,” Goldsman tells TV Insider. “We did this in order to create possibilities for our characters, and that’s what we’re always doing. We’re trying to find real human or alien emotion in interaction. That’s our whole job. We’re using all the toys that people created before us — we go right to the toy box — but they are in service of relationships. Our show is relationships in space.”
And so in this case, it was all about how what happens in the past would affect La’an. “Fundamentally, what you have is the opportunity for [her] to really go deeper and then experience a different kind of loss and begin — obviously she’s on a journey of trying to open [up] and that’s important for her,” the EP continues. “And it lets us have a kind of privileged view of Kirk and also reconcile timeline issues. So for us it’s just a way of making people want each other and lose each other and then fight each other and lose each other, which is basically our whole job.”
Adds executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, “It’s funny. It was a moment that we sort of found as a writers room because we were trying to find where the natural place for this story to go was. The unique opportunity of this was to give La’an a real emotional connection to a classic character. And we had opportunities to do things with this particular character because he’s from a different timeline that we’ve never seen with Kirk.”
And now we have the opportunity to see what this means for La’an going forward, especially after she reached out to her timeline’s Kirk at the end of the episode. That could get interesting.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+
