Strange New Worlds Pushed Its Crew To The Limit For La'an & Kirk's Time Travel Trip
It wouldn't be "Star Trek" without a time travel episode back to the present, and season 2 of "Strange New Worlds" has obliged. Of course, in a long-running media franchise, the "present" always moves forward. In the "Original Series," the Enterprise crew went back to the 1960s in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" and "Assignment: Earth." For their fourth feature-length adventure — "The Voyage Home" — the Enterprise crew went back to 1986, the same year of the film's release.
Early aughts prequel series "Enterprise" featured Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and his Vulcan right hand T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) going back to 2003 in the episode "Carpenter Street." Carrying out an assignment from temporal authorities in the far future, Archer and T'Pol had to prevent meddling aliens from wiping out humanity.
Season 2, episode 3 of "Strange New Worlds" — "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" — echoes "Carpenter Street." La'an Noonien Singh (Christina Chong) finds herself in an alternate timeline with no Federation. Soon, she and an alternate James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) go back in time to stop some time-traveling Romulans and set things right.
This unlikely pair arrives in 2020s Toronto. In a clever gag, Kirk initially thinks they're in New York City — the Canadian metropolis has often stood in for the Big Apple in film and TV productions. If it can fool generations of film and TV audiences, it can fool a starship captain. La'an and Kirk adapt quickly to the circumstances, all things considered, but according to Christina Chong, the shoot came with challenges for the crew.
Problems from shooting outside
Chong recently spoke to Screen Rant about her "Star Trek" experiences; during the interview, she detailed what the "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" shoot was like. Since the episode is focused squarely on La'an, Chong was in every scene and had none of her usual castmates to play off of. "I've never done that before," she explained.
"Strange New Worlds" season 2 was filmed from February to July 2022, primarily at CBS Stages. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," though, was shot onsite in Toronto. Since the crew and cast were shooting outside, that meant they had to account for weather changes (especially snow) and conserve their daylight. Chong explained:
"We had to get up every morning at the same time. Normally, your call is pushed by a few hours so that you get a proper 12-hour turnaround. But we couldn't do that because of the daylight. So we were pushed every single day."
There was also COVID-19 to worry about — safety protocols are naturally harder to enforce in the open-air environment of a city than they are on a sound stage. According to Chong, episode director Amanda Row caught the bug and had to take some days out. "The team was always changing and [our] episode was pushed or having to be reshot," Chong elaborated. From watching "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," I never would've guessed that shooting the episode had been grueling. The ultimate compliment after miserable work is that the artists' struggles are invisible in the final product.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+. New episodes air every Thursday.