Once La’an a Time and Knowing How the Story Ends

I have a complicated relationship with fairy tales.

Not actual fairy tales. I am perfectly happy with those. Give me a castle, an unreasonable number of candles, a dragon with boundary issues, and someone wandering into a forest despite every available indication that this is a terrible idea.

I am talking about the kind where I know the lesson before anyone has even located the enchanted sword. So when “Once La’an a Time” returned us to the Elysian Kingdom and introduced two versions of La’an, one carrying what the other has spent years trying to contain, I had a fairly immediate reaction.

I know where this is going.

And I did. Mostly. That bothered me more than I expected.

“The Elysian Kingdom” worked for me because it was strange and playful and surprising. I had no idea what Strange New Worlds was doing until I was already following it into the storybook. This time I could see the path almost as soon as we started walking down it.

La’an has spent much of this season wrestling with parts of herself she does not entirely understand or trust. Now there are literally two of her. They fight, begin experiencing each other’s emotions, and eventually discover that neither can become whole by defeating the other. Light cannot simply defeat darkness because both belong to the same person.

I get it, and more importantly, I think La’an needs it. But I kept waiting for the episode to make me stop knowing where we were going.

Fortunately, there is plenty happening along the way to keep things weird. There is another Enterprise crew running around the planet. Shadow Una and Ortegas are a couple, and yes, I saw that kiss. Shadow Pike and Spock eventually wind up drinking together at the bar aboard the Enterprise, which may actually be the healthiest response anyone has ever had to discovering your entire reality is a fantasy construct.

Evil Queen Uhura turns into a giant red dragon and flies into space to fight the Enterprise, which I don’t remember happening in Cinderella. And then there is Prince Dashing.

Of course Prince Dashing is Jim Kirk. If a magical fantasy world needed to manufacture a handsome prince specifically designed to complicate La’an Noonien-Singh’s emotional life, apparently it took one look at James T. Kirk and decided no further casting call was necessary. Fair enough.

The thing is, Kirk being there makes sense beyond the joke. If this world is forcing La’an to confront everything she normally keeps under control, wanting something she might lose absolutely belongs in the story. That was when the episode started getting closer to what interested me about La’an in the first place.

She is very good at surviving. That has never been the same thing as being okay.

Her control has protected her for most of her life. She knows how to contain fear, grief, anger, and desire. She knows how to put the difficult thing somewhere inside herself, close the door, and keep moving. For La’an, strength has often meant keeping that door shut.

Then she meets herself. Literally, because apparently doing this metaphorically would be insufficiently weird for this season.

Shadow La’an carries the things the La’an we know has spent so much time trying to manage. Anger is there. So is pain. But so are desire and vulnerability and the parts of herself that still want things even when wanting them creates the possibility of losing them. Which brings us right back to Kirk.

Shadow Kirk loves her, but what interested me more than the romance itself is that he sees the version of La’an she fears might make her impossible to love and loves her anyway. That lands differently when you think about what La’an has learned about attachment.

The universe has been remarkably consistent about teaching her that loving something gives you something to lose. Family, safety, possibility, even the version of Kirk she met in another timeline. There is a logic to protecting yourself after enough of that. If you never let someone close enough to see everything, they cannot decide everything is too much, and if you never reach for something, you never have to watch it disappear.

That was when the two La’ans started making more emotional sense to me than they had when I was simply looking at them as light and darkness. Christina Chong helped enormously with that. She has been carrying this tension inside La’an for years, and now she has to put it on both sides of the screen. The two women need to feel distinct while still feeling like pieces of the same person, and Chong lets us see each one begin to absorb something from the other.

The nicer La’an doesn’t defeat the angry one. They begin carrying each other’s feelings. The edges blur, and somewhere in there La’an becomes a little more gray, which I mean as a compliment.

We spend a lot of time talking about light and darkness as though healthy people eventually collect enough wisdom to evict one of them. I have never met one of those people. Most of us are walking around with fear and generosity and anger and kindness and grief and joy sharing a studio apartment somewhere inside us, occasionally arguing about who forgot to buy coffee.

Maybe being whole isn’t about getting the right tenants. Maybe it is learning how to live with everybody already on the lease.

I like that idea. I also knew we were going to get there, and that was the thing I couldn’t shake.

I was enjoying Chong. I was enjoying the absurdity. I was apparently watching Uhura turn into a dragon and fly into space, which is not a sentence I expected to write this week. I understood what the episode wanted La’an to learn, and I agreed with it. So why did I still feel like something was missing?

Then Pelia picked up a pen.

And that is when the episode finally surprised me.

Pelia has been moving through this whole situation with the advantage of being Pelia, which means her relationship with human history is considerably more personal than everyone else’s. The Enterprise crew gets a fairy-tale kingdom. Pelia gets something closer to historical perspective.

But then the episode makes her responsible for writing the next chapter and calls her Duchess Benny Russell.

Oh, that is good.

Benny Russell carries particular weight in Star Trek. “Far Beyond the Stars” gave us a writer imagining a future the world around him was unwilling to accept, and the name was already woven into “The Elysian Kingdom.” But this time there is Pelia with the story actually in her hands.

She has to change the ending, and that is when something clicked for me.

Maybe I had been paying attention to the wrong kind of predictability.

Because La’an knows something about knowing how the story ends. Pain arrives. La’an survives it. She closes another door and keeps moving. Eventually pain arrives again, and she survives that too. Do that long enough and you don’t have to wonder what comes next because you already know.

That is useful when you’re surviving. I’m not sure it is as useful when you’re trying to live.

Suddenly Pelia writing a different ending and La’an confronting another version of herself felt connected in a way the light-and-dark metaphor hadn’t quite managed for me. Pelia has a story that no longer works. She has to write something that isn’t already on the page.

Maybe La’an does too.

That was the thing I hadn’t seen coming. The part of the episode that had been bothering me became part of what made me reconsider it.

The story was predictable. So, in a way, is La’an.

Not because she is boring or simple. Quite the opposite. La’an has survived by becoming very good at anticipating pain. She knows what happens when you care. She knows what happens when you lose. She knows what happens when you let someone close.

At least she thinks she does.

Maybe that is the story she actually needs to rewrite.

Once I started thinking about it that way, the ending landed differently for me. La’an doesn’t leave the fantasy world cured of anger or grief, and I’m glad the episode doesn’t make it that easy. She doesn’t defeat the part of herself capable of darkness. She carries it differently.

Then she does something considerably scarier than fighting a dragon. She tries to get the guy.

For La’an, that might actually be the bigger act of courage because reaching for Kirk means accepting something she has spent years trying to avoid. She doesn’t know how this story ends.

Neither do we, although I know enough about Star Trek continuity to have questions. Many questions.

I am choosing not to solve those for the episode because, for now, what matters to me is that La’an chooses to walk down the road without knowing where it leads. She reaches for something she wants instead of deciding in advance how losing it will feel.

And apparently the universe decides this emotional breakthrough also requires a dog, which I fully support.

Runa may not be the subtlest symbol for someone learning to make room in her life for attachment, affection, responsibility, and the terrifying possibility of loving something that cannot be controlled. I also do not care. She has a dog now. Let La’an have the dog.

None of this completely solves my problems with “Once La’an a Time.” The return to the Elysian Kingdom still feels somewhat forced to me. Sometimes the fantasy machinery becomes louder than the emotional story it is supposed to reveal, and forty-eight minutes goes quickly when you have two La’ans, an alternate Enterprise crew, multiple romances, dragons, an Iron Dragon that happens to be the Enterprise, and Pelia contemplating a significant life change.

Pelia is where I felt that last part most. She spends the episode writing a new chapter and then decides to step into one herself, remaining with the Elysian people to explore their technology and a relationship with the Queen’s cook, Max. I like that symmetry. I just wanted another beat or two to feel her decision rather than simply understand it.

Maybe that is the best description of my relationship with this episode. There are things I understand more than I feel.

I understand the light and darkness. I understand what the two La’ans represent. I understand why Kirk matters. I understand why Runa matters. Then Pelia becomes Duchess Benny Russell, picks up a pen, and suddenly I feel something the episode has been trying to tell me.

I went into “Once La’an a Time” thinking I already knew the story. Light meets darkness. They fight. Eventually everyone learns they need each other. Roll credits.

Pelia made me wonder what happens when knowing how the story ends becomes part of the problem.

That doesn’t make the episode less predictable or the Elysian return feel less forced to me. I still wish some of these ideas had been given more room. But I also don’t need the episode to solve those problems for Pelia’s pen to stay with me.

La’an has very good reasons for every wall she built. The episode doesn’t ask her to pretend otherwise, and it doesn’t erase the things that taught her to build them. She has simply reached a point where knowing why the walls are there doesn’t necessarily mean they should keep deciding what happens next.

Pelia gets a pen.

La’an gets a dog, a possible date with Jim Kirk, and the deeply inconvenient realization that emotional growth does not come with an off switch.

I’d say the Duchess got the easier assignment, except Pelia has also fallen for a cook named Max and is staying aboard an enormous fantasy ship to study impossible technology.

So perhaps everyone is making choices this week.

The difference is that La’an doesn’t already know how hers ends.

I think that may be the point.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.