Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Trip To Toronto Was Never Supposed To Happen
This post contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 2, episode 3.
As the location of Starfleet headquarters, San Francisco has been called the "center of the 'Star Trek' universe." It's appeared across numerous TV episodes and movies, most notably, "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where the Golden Gate Bridge even featured prominently on the poster. We've also seen it appear in Holodeck recreations on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but it's not the only Earth city to show up in "Trek."
In "Strange New Worlds" season 2, episode 3 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and an alternate-reality version of James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) make an unscheduled time-traveling visit to Toronto. It's a less yellowish Toronto than the one we see in Denis Villeneuve's "Enemy." In fact, this Kirk, who was born in space and therefore has no experience with revolving doors, initially mistakes the place for "New York City, mid-21st century."
In an interview with Collider, "Strange New Worlds" co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman revealed that when the writers' room was conceiving the episode, they originally had New York, not Toronto, in mind:
"We wrote it for New York, right? We were gonna do this giant spectacle and take the show to New York, and we quickly realized we could not afford it. So then we went through the process of doing that thing that everybody does, which is, well, how do we make Toronto look like New York? And then we sort of thought, 'Huh, why don't we just let Toronto be Toronto?' And that was fun for us and probably lower impact on the city than you might imagine. So, you know, I don't think it was like trying to film 'Star Trek' in Times Square."
Hollywood North
As Akiva Goldsman alludes, Toronto has often been used as a stand-in for New York, so Kirk's confusion over his whereabouts (despite the huge video screen with news about "Budget Overruns on Lake Ontario Bridge") serves as an in-joke about that. The place doubles for other U.S. cities, too: as authentically "Boston" as "Good Will Hunting" might seem, its famous Harvard bar scene was filmed in Toronto.
La'an reminds Kirk that Toronto is "the biggest city in what used to be called Canada," but if she had the time or the meta inclination, she might have also educated him on how Toronto was (and in real life, is) a magnet for film and television productions due to government tax incentives. This has earned it the nickname "Hollywood North." Amazingly, even the Oscar-winning musical "Chicago" was shot in, you guessed it, Toronto.
"Strange New Worlds" co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers told Collider that local crew members helped make the Toronto of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" more recognizable, though the episode uses VFX to invent new sections of the city:
"It also became an interesting gift for our director [Amanda Row], who came from Toronto and really knew it, and everyone who works on the show, who all know Toronto very deeply, and had a chance to kind of give it a look and a feel that made it feel a little bit different and more recognizable to people who knew that area of the world. [...] One of the only unique challenges we had, that we've never had literally in the VFX work that we do across the show, is there are sections of Toronto that we invent, and you wouldn't know that it's not real until you see it."
New episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" stream every Thursday on Paramount+.