“Once La’an a Time” Recap: SNW’s Fairy Tale Sequel Can’t Stick the Landing

This Once La’an a Time review comes with a warning: Strange New Worlds went back to the well this week, and the well had a “Do Not Disturb” sign on it that nobody bothered to read. The episode is a direct sequel to the season one fan-favorite “The Elysian Kingdom” — the one where the Enterprise got transformed into the setting of a kids’ book to entertain M’Benga’s dying daughter Rukiya. That episode worked because it wasn’t just cosplay Trek, it was Rukiya’s own headcanon fanfic playing out with the senior staff as unwitting actors. This time around, the crew gets pulled back into the Kingdom of Elysian with zero memory of the original trip (aside from M’Benga, who has to catch everyone up), and the results are a mixed bag that leans more “mixed” than “bag.”

The Setup: Deja Vu All Over Again

If you’ve been keeping up with our Strange New Worlds season 4 coverage, you know this season has leaned hard into one gimmick episode after another — which makes it a little funnier that the show reached back to its own back catalog for this one. The Enterprise gets yanked back into fairy-tale mode, this time with the mystery entities apparently focused less on Rukiya and more on giving La’an a therapy session disguised as a quest. Christina Chong pulls double duty as both La’an and her Elysian alter ego Princess Thalia — sword fight included — and it’s genuinely one of the episode’s better swings. Paul Wesley steps in as the new Prince Dashing (filling the gap left by Mitchell’s absence this season), playing him as gloriously, aggressively inept. If you’ve seen The Princess Bride, you’ll clock the Westley cosplay and the “As you wish” callback immediately — down to a trip through the Swamp of Infinite Death that’s about as subtle as a photon torpedo.

What Works

Give the episode credit where it’s due: the character-actor swap game is fun, and mostly everybody gets to play both their normal selves and their fantasy-world counterparts, which is a step up from some of this season’s gimmick episodes. Pike gets to drop a cute Deep Space Nine nod, name-checking Pelia as “Benny Russell” (the Far Beyond the Stars author credited with writing the original Kingdom of Elysian book) — a nice bit of universe-stitching for anyone who’s been paying attention since the ’90s. Ethan Peck is doing some of his best work of the season here too, toggling between Spock’s dry disbelief at being cast as the wizard and fake-Spock Pollux’s exasperation with his cowardly “captain.” And yes — the Enterprise fights a literal red dragon in space. That image alone is worth the price of admission.

What Doesn’t

The problem is everything around the good stuff. The Sir Rauth/Pollux impersonation plot, where two Elysians disguise themselves as Pike and Spock and stroll onto the ship mid-crisis, doesn’t hold up to about six seconds of scrutiny, and the episode doesn’t seem to care that it doesn’t. Queen Neve’s scheme to have “Benny Russell” (Pelia) ghostwrite a sequel where she conquers the kingdom evaporates without consequence. And La’an’s actual hero’s journey — the thing this episode is ostensibly about — amounts to getting rescued, following a MacGuffin hunt other people solve for her, and then resolving her whole arc by choosing to “accept her good side” in the last five minutes. For a season that’s already leaned hard into breezy genre-of-the-week episodes, this one asks you to buy real emotional stakes without doing the legwork to earn them.

Once La’an a Time Review: The Verdict

“Once La’an a Time” isn’t a disaster — the costumes are great, the dragon rules, and there’s enough affection for the source material (both The Elysian Kingdom and, weirdly, The Princess Bride) to keep it watchable. But a sequel riding almost entirely on nostalgia for a better episode was always walking a tightrope, and this one doesn’t quite make it across. With the season finale, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” landing next Thursday, this plays more like table-setting filler than a episode that needed to exist on its own terms.

Follow along for more Strange New Worlds coverage as Season 4 wraps up next week. Got thoughts on “Once La’an a Time”? Drop them in the comments, or find us on Threads, Bluesky, and Facebook.