- Title: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
- wiki: link
“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” offers the usual pairing of Lieutenant La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and an alternate timeline version of Captain James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) who end up in the 21st Century searching for someone or something that has altered the timeline to prevent Starfleet from ever being formed and led to a darker future for humankind. We get the usual Star Trek bits of working to fit into the time period and making use of current technology, and the episode helps explain the addition of Pelia (Carol Kane) to the crew earlier this season as her long life allows La’an to go to a younger version of the character for help (and leaves someone other than La’an with some knowledge of what happened).
Although other characters make appearances at the beginning and end of the episode, it’s really a two-character piece highlighting Chong and allowing Wesley to play a very similar version of Kirk than in his appearance last season. The episode plays on La’an’s genetic history offering up a Star Trek version of the classic conundrum of whether or not you should kill Hitler before his rise to power. Finding a defenseless child and learning that his rise and the terror that would come out of it are necessary for the Federation’s birth, at least according the Romulan spy, offers a plot point that can both weigh on the character and possibly give her some closure about her family tree.
In terms of continuity the episode does run into a big of a snag when it assumes the Federation knows what Romulans look like (they don’t discover that until “Balance of Terror“). The return of the Department of Temporal Investigations is a nice twist, showing the group be a little more action oriented rather than only the bureaucrats we met many years later in “Trials and Tribble-ations.” Given that the Kirk from the alternate timeline died (and then ceased to exist) and La’an is ordered not to share her experiences with anyone else, she’s left with a secret to weigh on her as well as the loss of a man she had come to see as a friend and possibly much more (although we see the possibly a potential job opportunity with the Department down the line if the show wants to write her off prior to Kirk eventually taking command). The last note is the rather unsubtle final shot on the watch from the past that remains in La’an’s quarters. Whether it’s just a reminder of her experiences, or a thread to pull on again in a later episode, we’ll just have to wait and see.
