Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x3 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" Review

rating: **** (Classic)

the story: La'an ends up thrown into the past, where she and a Kirk from an alternate reality have a chance to prevent the rise of her ancestor Khan.

review: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" is one of those instant classics.  It's arguably the best episode of any Star Trek in the modern era.  It's the kind of creative statement and achievement that speaks to the entire franchise.  

When the character of La'an Noonian-Singh was introduced in Strange New Worlds, her surname gave her immediate recognition in a series that was otherwise set to feature a mix of well-established (Pike, Spock, Number One, Uhura) characters, some less well-knowns (M'Benga), and assorted all-new creations.  La'an represented a mix of all the above.  She herself was brand new, but her distinctive last name meant she was related to one of the most famous, and infamous, characters in all of Star Trek, one who debuted in the original series ("Space Seed") and went on to be featured in two feature films (Wrath of Khan, which many fans still consider the undisputed best movie of the franchise, and Into Darkness).  As the first season progressed we learn more about La'an, including the prejudice she faces, and feels, due to this unusual ancestry, giving her the kind of depth only the best-established characters otherwise enjoyed.  By the end of the season she had become one of the major characters of the series.

Early in this second season, she has taken great strides to outright stealing the spotlight from all of them.  "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" is a monumental achievement.  Like a lot of episodes in the franchise, it hinges on classic time travel tropes.  There was a time in the fandom when the overly familiar was hugely frowned upon, but at the moment fans have grown once more accepting of it, which is why Strange New Worlds exists at all, with the ability to once again embrace the episodic format that dominated most of the rest of the franchise once upon a time.  Early feedback has deemed "Tomorrow" reminiscent of the classic example of time travel in franchise lore, "City on the Edge of Forever," in which Kirk must prevent a drastic change in the timeline by allowing a woman he inevitably falls in love with to die.  The daring twist of "Tomorrow" is that La'an must actually allow Khan to live.

It's impossible to grasp the impact of the episode without spoiling that.  There's so much to talk about, and so much to love, and it all needs discussing.

The Strange New Worlds version of Kirk first appearing at the end of the previous season gets an unexpected chance to shine as part of all this.  Star Trek now has three versions of the character, catching up with Spock in that regard.  Perhaps moreso than Spock, this Kirk is an unexpected revelation.  William Shatner will always cast a huge shadow over the role and the franchise, and will be as synonymous with it as Leonard Nimoy and Spock, and yet Chris Pine has proved to be resilient in the mainstream (this year he just headlined a successful launching of a new Dungeons and Dragons cinematic vision).  Paul Wesley, who made his name in The Vampire Diaries, will probably never be in serious competition with either of them, and yet in "Tomorrow" he gets to give as dynamic and complete single experience with the role as has yet been attempted.  His hustling games of chess, eating hotdogs, even the awkward dynamic with La'an all combine to a show-stealing appearance, if he weren't appearing opposite Christina Chong's La'an.  This whole episode only works if Kirk and La'an are a compelling pair, and for a version of Kirk only making his second appearance, and being tasked with keeping up with someone not named Spock, it's a challenge well-met.

"Tomorrow" tackles big franchise mysteries.  It explains the sliding time scale of when exactly the Eugenics Wars occurred (Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and Picard all traveled to relative contemporary times and didn't seem to have been touched by them), and even contextualizes Enterprise's Temporal Cold War, concluding a mystery that series never got around to doing itself as to why it happened at all, and probably even the identity (or species) of Future Guy (the Romulans, as long suspected).  But most of all, as Kirk in Final Frontier once claimed, "Tomorrow" concludes that you can't fix things by removing pain from the equation.  La'an can't fix herself by preventing Khan's ascension.  It's not that he's a boy when she finds him, but that his evil has to happen for all the good that follows.  

The whole story predicates on La'an needing to fix the timeline when she discovers something changed it and led to a version of reality where Kirk exists much as before, but outside the boundaries of Starfleet, the Federation, where humans never embraced the stars, not in a Mirror Universe kind of way, but without having truly realized their potential.  Kirk's convinced to play along since his brother's dead in this one but alive in the other (in the original series, the episodic format didn't really let him mourn Sam's eventual death in "Operation: Annihilate!").  Turns out temporal agents have been postponing the Eugenics Wars for years (and it's even hinted that the wars lead directly into WWIII, helping explain that, too).  For a franchise that has dipped into the past and the future many times, it's always been reluctant to explain any of this foundational material, in-canon, making "Tomorrow" important on that score alone.

By the end of the episode, the normally stoic La'an finally breaks down, the result of the cathartic experiences she's had.  Pike has struggled with his eventual fate since his appearances in Discovery, and the previous episode had just explained how Number One, Una Chin-Riley, got her own reckoning, while Spock hurdles toward confrontations with his own destinies (the implosion of his relationship with T'Pring, a confrontation with Sybok), and these are expected developments, given presentation.  "Tomorrow," no one could have seen coming.  Her antipathy toward the Gorn will clearly continue to play out, and yet here La'an gets to confront something far more personal, and find some closure from it.

When Star Trek cuts this deep, it's rare for it to play out this way.  Often it'll be a dark experience, but certainly nothing that feels remotely like a romp, which is how Kirk's effect takes "Tomorrow."  The lack of truly standalone episodes in modern lore means it's often hard to pinpoint standout experiences that are comparable to what's been previously achieved, and yet "Tomorrow" not only successfully evokes templates but moves well beyond them, and makes its story deeply personal in the process. 

To top all that off, the episode also makes great use of the new character Pelia, who is deliberately positioned to echo Next Generation and Picard icon Guinan, who put in a similar appearance in the latter's second season, and there's really no question that Pelia's appearance in "Tomorrow" is not only pitch-perfect for the character, but hugely immediately enjoyable, and a welcome distraction in the episode itself.  If this were somehow the only time you see the character, you'd love her for this spotlight alone.  

criteria analysis:

• franchise - "Tomorrow" is a deep cut that speaks to the whole history of Star Trek storytelling.  It revolves around Khan, Kirk, and explaining how the whole timeline works.
• series - Back in the Enterprise days fans always worried how a prequel to make a meaningful impact on franchise lore without breaking it.  "Tomorrow" is a textbook example of how to do it.  
• character - La'an instantly claims what Gene Roddenberry once termed "beloved character status," rocketing her not only in importance to her own series but throughout Star Trek lore in this appearance.  And this version of Kirk gets his best spotlight, too.
• essential - There's not even a question.  It's the kind of experience that speaks to all three other criteria for mandatory viewing, and even if none of them fit, it would still need seeing to believe, if you didn't like Star Trek in the first place, it would explain the whole phenomenon well enough on its own.

notable guest-stars:

Paul Wesley (Kirk)

Carol Kane (Pelia)

Star Trek and the Changing Face of Eugenics

First airing February 16, 1967, the original series episode "Space Seed" introduced the genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh, who would appear twice more in the franchise (1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness).  Khan was described as a product of the Eugenics Wars, a still-nebulous concept in canon material that was supposed to take place somewhere in the 1990s.  In 1967, the term "eugenics" was broadly understood to have Nazi connotations, although it was a concept widely shared in the United States as well.  Eugenics was the idea that a "perfect" human could be engineered through selective breeding.  In Nazi hands it led to a genocidal purge of undesired ethnicities for a "pure" nation.  

Khan was presented as a monster incapable of reconciling his existence with those he found inferior, which was basically everyone else except the goons sent into the same exile as himself.  When Kirk finds his ship coasting in space and revives him, Khan attempts a coup of the Enterprise and is subsequently sent into a second exile, and an attempt at revenge.  

The extent of Khan's genetic engineering was physical as well as mental, so that he represented the idea of perfecting both by bypassing chance, willful education and fitness efforts.  In doing so, he developed a level of arrogance he couldn't see past, what Kirk eventually called two-dimensional thinking.  By taking his abilities for granted, Khan never considered that there was a chance anyone without his advantages could be his equal, much less superior.

In Star Trek lore, his existence and evident threat led the Federation to ban genetic engineering.  The franchise didn't seriously revisit the idea until the Deep Space Nine episode "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" in 1997, a full thirty years after "Space Seed."  In it we learn that Doctor Bashir, a member of the regular cast since the first episode of the series, has been genetically engineered the whole time.  To look at him (a complete inverse of Khan physically, a beanstalk of a man), you would certainly have never guessed, and since this was a fifth season episode, nothing the writers had planned until plotting that episode.  Bashir had always had a healthy ego from his introduction on, a recent graduate of Starfleet medical school who boasted of his high academic achievements and selection of the assignment to a station at the edge of Federation space meant as a challenge he didn't think he'd find elsewhere.  The episode explains how his parents chose to modify his genes after finding themselves with a sickly child of no apparent prospects.

Now, no one will ever argue Julian Bashir to be the second coming of Khan.  Starfleet ends up making a special exception for him (he would otherwise have lost his career), instead punishing his father for making the decision in the first place.  For the rest of the series, the only real effect of the revelation is two episodes where he spends time with other products of recent genetic engineering, misfits whose outcomes weren't nearly as fortunate as his own.

The next time the franchise revisits the concept is the trilogy of Enterprise episodes from 2004, "Borderland," "Cold Station 12," and "The Augments," in which we learn the ancestor of Data's creator, Arik Soong, was inspired by the original Khan project in his work, and in fact nurtured the genetic material left over from it and even raised some of the results to adulthood.  (In later episodes, the series finally answers the question of how Klingons in the original series had such smooth foreheads; the Empire attempted to reverse engineer this work, and it...backfired.)  When Soong is repeatedly stymied, he eventually decides to pursues robotics instead.

Which brings us to the modern era of Star Trek programming and the reason I'm writing this.  Genetic engineering has played a prominent role in three series from this period, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy.  We'll start with Picard, as it most resembles the franchise's historic stance on eugenics.

The second season of Picard features another member of the Soong lineage, Adam Soong, whose efforts in this field of science are meant to create a daughter for himself.  By this time the Eugenics Wars are long over, Khan has been put into cryostasis and shot into space, WWIII has yet to occur, and of course the Soongs have begun their long journey toward the creation of Data, one of the main cast members of The Next Generation, an android with an innovative positronic net powering him.  Adam Soong, although a renowned member of the scientific community, keeps his greatest work to himself, and has failed a number of times at creating a daughter of unlimited viability, genetic flaws continually cropping up and leading to premature death or debilitating conditions.  When we catch up with him, his daughter Kore has no idea she was created in a lab, although she certainly knows she can't stray far from home, since her skin can't withstand UV rays.  Eventually she runs away from home, and the Soongs continually evolve their pursuits.  Adam and Arik Soong are clearly presented as villains, although Kore, like Bashir before her, is an unwitting victim and sympathetic protagonist.  

The same can be said for Strange New Worlds and Prodigy's contributions.  Strange New Worlds gives us Number One, Una Chin-Riley, who has been hiding her Illyrian heritage since Illyrians maintain a regular practice of genetic engineering.  Prodigy's lead character is Dal, and in the 2022 episode "Masquerade" we learn that he's entirely the product of genetic engineering.

At the end of its first season, Strange New Worlds positions Chin-Riley in the same kind of peril Bashir faced when finally exposed, just as Prodigy finds Starfleet forced to reconcile Dal's existence with its ban.  Chin-Riley's case is in the past, before Khan is even revived, while Dal's is after Bashir's.  It seems recent creators are increasingly interested in challenging the moral qualms of the whole concept.  So is this a problem?

I think so.  It's one thing to argue, as Bashir does, that he had no say in what happened to him.  After all, although he knowingly lied throughout his Starfleet career, he didn't think he was otherwise responsible for conditions that ended up violating the ban.  Dal's case is different.  Although a character in a show geared toward kids and constantly presented as someone who just wants to fit in (and therefore it would be tough to come to any other conclusion), it becomes problematic that he's yet another unwitting victim we're asked to accept.  As I write this, the second season of Strange New Worlds has yet to premiere, so there's no way to know if and how Chin-Riley's case is handled, but it seems equally unlikely that she will end up unabsolved, whether by Starfleet or her crew.

I'm not making an argument against modern Star Trek, or these characters.  What I'm saying, here, is that it's a curious development in a franchise that has long been a champion of reason, spending the entire original series questioning basically everything, even the most precious indulgences of the counterculture that has long since been assumed to most closely align with its utopian ideals.  The franchise has also become a beacon of acceptance, in increasingly overt ways, and yet...this might be a step too far.  What some would call inevitable scientific progress still represents a Doctor Bashir who asks his parents, finally, why he wasn't good enough for them as he originally was.  No subsequent depiction of genetic engineering in the franchise has voiced such a thought, nor the cautionary tale (which is the foundation of the franchise) of Khan and the generation of augments that followed him.

This is a dangerous road to travel.  My hope is that someone at the controls realizes this at some point.  We don't need a Khan to point this out.  We certainly don't need another Hitler.  Star Trek is always at its best when it depicts humanity's efforts to better itself.  Through more conventional means.  Moral means.