Recap / Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2E03 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

On board the Enterprise, La'an goes about her usual business as Chief Security Officer: dealing with a Denobulan cadet accusing Chief Jay of stealing a prized ring, telling Spock that his lute playing is too loud, and dealing with Pelia's oddball collection of artifacts, one of which the Louvre would love to have back. However, while sparring with M'Benga, he notes that La'an is suffering in some way — she wasn't even at Una's welcome back party — but La'an refuses to elaborate. After that, La'an continues her duties when a strange man in a nice suit stumbles out into the hall and collapses. He's been shot with a bullet and, with his dying breath, gives her a strange device and tells her to "get to the bridge". Energy ripples go through the hall and, with only that warning, La'an goes to the bridge... and finds a certain James T. Kirk at the captain's chair!

Through a conversation between Kirk and a pleading Spock, we find out that Starfleet has been replaced with the United Earth Fleet, and the Romulan Star Empire is kicking Earth's ass and about to take over Vulcan. Kirk refuses to help out the Vulcans and focuses on La'an. In their conference room, Kirk is incredulous over the idea of alternate timelines and tries to order La'an to surrender her device. She refuses, and in the struggle the device activates and the two are transported elsewhere and elsewhen. Kirk mistakenly believes they're in New York City until La'an points out the big honking sign reading "Toronto". Can't blame Kirk— man was born on the spaceship USS Iowa, and Earth is nothing more than a ruin in his timeline.

The two need to blend in, but being in 21st Century Toronto means money is still being used. Thus, La'an creates a distraction so they can grab some clothes, and Kirk uses his brains to... beat people at chess. As he's accustomed to the 3-D version, 2-D is easy for him. Afterwards, they get hot dogs and enjoy a sunset together, something Kirk has never experienced. The next day, Kirk is still not certain why they should be doing this, but La'an convinces him that just surviving is no way to live. Though humanity still has its dark period, her timeline is so much better... and Kirk's brother, Sam, is still alive. This is more than enough to convince him... just as a nearby bridge explodes. Oh, so that's what that man meant.

Kirk and La'an get to the bridge and La'an notices something off about a piece of rubble. Asking a photographer for her camera, they're able to see that the rubble was scorched with photonic energy, way too advanced for 21st century Earth. Stealing a car, the two chase after the van carrying the rubble, but are stopped by a cop. When the cop tries to arrest them, the photographer from earlier is able to deter him by filming the arrest. The photographer, Sera, reveals she’s something of Conspiracy Theorist and shares her thoughts. However, it's one of her photos that catches Kirk’s attention— a Romulan Bird-Of-Prey. He recalls that a cold fusion reactor in Toronto will explode in a few days, eradicating the city. This is the event they need to prevent. Without a tricorder to scan for it, La'an is inspired to find help.

She discovers the Archaeology Department and is able to convince the Pelia living in that era for help. She isn’t into engineering just yet (but she finds it interesting), but she is able to help by giving them a diver's watch from the 1980s, as the tritium byproduct from the reactor will cause the hands on the watch to glow. Back in Toronto, as they try to find the reactor, La'an laments her loneliness at being a Noonian-Singh, but Kirk (having never heard the name) doesn’t care, the two sharing a kiss. The moment is interrupted by the hands on the watch glowing. They’re close.

They reach a building and see there’s a hand scanner. Kirk wonders if they might need to force someone to let them in, but a sign pointed out by La'an makes it moot: Noonien-Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement. Her own DNA is enough to get them in.

Oh, whoops— them and Sera. Turns out she knows who Kirk is and feels dumb that she didn’t put two and two together. She didn’t blow up the bridge, but she’s here for something bigger. Gloating that she’s here to alter humanity’s history, Kirk realizes Sera is a Romulan. Kirk takes a gamble as he realizes she’s trying to blow up the reactor and goads her into shooting him. He’s dead, but the alarms prevent her from getting to the reactor. Sera captures La'an and she goes for plan B.

Heading for genetics, La'an realizes what plan B is: to kill her ancestor Khan. Sera explains that Khan's genocidal acts are needed to push humanity into its Dark Age and from there to its more enlightened state. She’s been here since 1992 and has waited 30 years for this moment. She urges La'an to walk away and live a life without her ancestor using that device she has, but La'an refuses. They struggle and La'an shoots Sera, who triggers an implant to vaporize herself before she dies. Curious, she enters Khan's room and meets the young future dictator, a scared little boy. Despite knowing that there are other Augments, La'an refuses to kill or take away Khan. The device activates, allowing her to return to her present.

Arriving on the bridge of the Enterprise, she finds Pelia arguing with Captain Pike over the artifacts. They're surprised La'an is out of uniform (which Uhura has to see for herself) but La'an brushes off everything, telling Pelia they can let her problem go. Returning to her quarters, she's confronted by a member of the Department of Temporal Investigations, which hasn't yet been established at this time. She thanks La'an for her work, requests the device back, and tells her she can't tell anyone about what happened. Once the person leaves, La'an calls up our timeline's Kirk under the pretense of information about his brother Sam. However, when the call ends, she busts into tears, the loneliness of being a Noonien-Singh having gotten even lonelier…

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Tropes:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The time period La'an and Jim are sent to is clearly in the early 21st century, but the year is never established. It's early enough that the designs on Canadian currency haven't changed^note there's even a brief glimpse of the Queen's face on a $20 during the chess sequence, but late enough that they've had time to build a gigantic impractical bridge from Toronto to... somewhere unclear on Lake Ontario.
• Alternate Timeline: Thanks to temporal meddling, a new timeline is created where the Federation never comes to be, Earth is destroyed, and humanity (now living in lunar colonies) instead forms the United Earth Fleet. The Romulans are on their way to conquering Vulcan, and Earth forces are implied to be on the losing side of their war with them as well. It turns out that this is what happened when humanity never had Khan Noonien-Singh around to start the Eugenics Wars, as his plunging of humanity into another Dark Age and starting World War III was the kick to the rear that Earth needed to get its act together.
• Ambiguous Situation: We're not told who Kirk's first officer in the altered timeline is, except that she's female and good at chess. Given the In Spite of a Nail similarities of the bridge crew, it could be Una, but it's also possible it's someone we've never heard of.
• Ambiguous Syntax: The time traveler that passes his device to La'an instructs her to "get to the bridge"; she assumes it's the bridge of the Enterprise, leading her to Kirk. Once she and Kirk are sent to the past, they wander aimlessly until they witness a bridge in 21st-century Toronto being blown up. Since both La'an and Kirk recall this event, she realizes it can't be the attack she was warned of, until she sees the debris and recognizes the blast pattern as having been caused by a photonic bomb, technology humanity has yet to develop. This sets them on the path to discovering the actual target.
• Apocalypse How: Earth still exists in Kirk's timeline, but it's an uninhabitable wreck with skies choked by nuclear ash.
• Artistic License – Geography: Most of the urban geography is pretty solid: all the real-world locations visited in Toronto are roughly where they ought to be and correctly depicted as walkable. However, the episode features a giant bridge crossing Lake Ontario ending in Toronto. We're never quite told where the other end is, only that it's one of the largest bridges in the world. The thing is, a mega bridge ending in Toronto doesn't really make sense. All major cities on the Canadian side of the border around the lake have a straight path to Toronto that a bridge wouldn't shorten. The only destination that doesn't is Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is a rather small population center for such a mega bridge. If we assume (as implied by Sera's claim it symbolizes international co-operation) the bridge crosses the border into the USA, then that makes the biggest destination across the lake be Rochester, which while large is still a rather small population center for such a mega bridge to Toronto. A tweet from the bridge's designer calls the bridge the Toronto-Niagara Bridge, suggesting it goes over Lake Ontario and around Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is near the Canadian/US border.
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement:
  • Despite stereotypical Canadian politeness, the local police are not going to let a public safety threat like Kirk off with a warning, regardless of Sera's nagging and the radio dispatcher insisting that maximum police presence is needed to deal with the explosion.
  • Kirk and La'an manage to cross the American border, by road, into Vermont to visit Pelia, then go back into Canada, despite not having passports or even identities in this time period. There are plenty of unfenced areas of wilderness where sneaking across wouldn't be difficult, but a throwaway line reveals they bribed a guard — anyone who's been through the U.S.-Canada border in the last twenty years or so will raise an eyebrow at this singular lack of difficulty, especially since there was a terrorist attack less than a day ago.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: All the talk of a "cold fusion reactor" ignores the fact that there's currently no accepted theory that would make it work.
• Artistic License – Art: The painting that Pelia allegedly stole from the Louvre is Vermeer's The Concert, was actually stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston as part of a larger 1990 heist of the paintings in the museum's collection worth at about $500 million, with The Concert itself being valued at $250 million which makes it the most valuable piece of art ever stolen and remains missing.
• Big Brother Instinct: Little brother, in this case, but Kirk stops protesting his timeline's destruction when La'an offhandedly uses the present tense to refer to Sam Kirk.
  Kirk: Sam's alive?
• Bittersweet Ending: La'an saves the timeline, at the cost of having to ensure the survival of her genocidal ancestor. The alternate Kirk she bonded with dies. Starfleet Department of Temporal Investigations forbids her from sharing what she went through, meaning she has to live with the trauma of killing someone, feeling responsible for saving Khan, and losing Kirk on her own. She calls her timeline's Kirk, on the pretense of having questions about Sam, and breaks down crying when the call ends.
• Bland-Name Product: The Toronto news channel that La'an and Kirk see when they first arrive in the 2020s is clearly based of the real life local news channel CP 24, even following the channel's format of having the weather and traffic along the right side of the screen with the main feed occupying the upper left quarter, but the ident in the upper right corner is obscured when first seen and replaced entirely by a Canadian flag when shown on a smaller screen.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Double subverted. Upon seeing the hand scanner, Kirk initially suggests waiting for someone to enter/exit and then force their hand onto the scanner. Then La'an sees "Noonien-Singh Institute" on the wall and realizes she can use the scanner, as it actually checks for a DNA marker she possesses despite being several generations removed. It's then played straight when Sera forces La'an to activate another scanner to enter Khan's room.
• Brick Joke: The intro has La'an dealing with Pelia's huge stash of historical artefacts, some of them seemingly stolen, before saying she'll leave that to the Captain. When she returns to the present and goes on the bridge, Pike, Una and Pelia are having a discussion about Pelia's stolen artefacts and Pike, noticing La'an, offloads the problem back onto her.
• Call-Back: Sera mentions the Temporal Wars depicted in Star Trek: Enterprise.
• Call-Forward:
  • As in "A Piece of the Action", Kirk's ability to drive leaves something to be desired. Amusingly, this episode vaguely hints toward "A Piece of the Action" specifically— in "A Piece of the Action", the car Kirk is having trouble with is an (Iotian replica) vintage tourer with a manual transmission. The Dodge Challenger in this episode is an automatic. Maybe he just doesn't know how to drive stick!
  • The solution which Kirk, La'an, and Pelia discuss, but ultimately don't use because they lack the engineering background, is using a tricorder to find the temporal disturbance— the same solution Kirk and Spock will use several subjective years later (and a chronological century or so earlier) in "The City on the Edge of Forever".
  • At the end of the episode, La'an gets a visit from the Department of Temporal Investigations to retrieve the time travel device and tell her to keep quiet about the events of the episode. They still haven't been formed yet, and presumably won't be until Kirk's encounter with the Guardian of Forever.
  • In the first episode where the Department of Temporal Investigations appears, they make a reference to James T. Kirk being one of their most prolific offenders. Guess who time travels this episode and adds to his gigantic case file?
  • Just like the Kirk of the original timeline, Alternate Kirk is an excellent chess-player, using his skills to get them some cash to operate with. He even mentions having regularly played 3D chess with his Number Two, although for him it wasn't Spock since Earth and Vulcan aren't allies in his timeline.
  • Sera mentions the concept of time itself "fighting back" against time travelers, a property originally brought up by Annorax in VGR: "Year of Hell", whose own sanity was equally questionable after centuries of failures.
• Canon Welding: Of a sort, this episode manages to explain various timeline and continuity issues that reflects the entire history of Star Trek through a reference to repeated efforts to mess with the timeline but it always corrects itself somehow. It manages to affirm Khan's place in history from TOS, implies this is part of the Temporal Cold War from ENT while including the cast and characters of this series.
• The Casanova: The Prime timeline Kirk wastes almost no time flirting with La'an when she calls under the pretense of asking about his brother, offering to share drinks if they happen to wind up on a Starbase together.
• Chekhov's Gun: During The Teaser, Pelia mentions in passing while arguing with La'an over her collection of, ahem, acquired objects that she ran an establishment called "the Archaeology Department" centuries ago. La'an seeks out a past version of her there, though she turns out to be an antiques dealer who hasn't studied engineering yet.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The prominently featured Alien Invasion Conspiracy Theorist who happened to have a picture of a Romulan T'liss-class warbird is really a Romulan spy? Say it ain't so!
• Coincidental Broadcast: Right when Kirk and La'an are mulling where they might be able to find an ally who could help them engineer a way to detect the cold fusion reactor that's about to be blown up by Romulans and destroy Toronto, La'an glances at a TV news channel that happens to mention unseasonably hot weather in Vermont— reminding La'an that Pelia is living there in this time period. (It's especially coincidental that this news channel^note and it is a news channel— we see it reporting the news in an earlier scene happens to be reporting on the weather, and not on the explosion that blew up a giant landmark bridge in the city that morning.)
• The Conspiracy: Sera, a human whom Kirk and La'an meet in the 21st century, claims that there's a global one to hide the existence of aliens while making advances using fragments of tech recovered from various attacks, while the attacks themselves are part of a conspiracy to stunt the progress of humanity. Sera is actually part of the latter conspiracy, and is a Romulan in disguise from the future who's attempting to prevent humans from forming the Federation to weaken their future adversaries.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Kirk as he appears in this episode is an expert chess player, consistent with his portrayal in Star Trek: The Original Series, where he was near-on-par with the near-perfect Spock.
  • While this alternate timeline Kirk was born in space, not on Earth, he was still born in Iowa. Or, more precisely, he was born on the USS Iowa.
  • Sera commits suicide similar to the Zhat Vash assassins in Star Trek: Picard, only with an implant in her neck instead of biting a tooth capsule.
• Cosmic Retcon: Sera acknowledges that the Eugenics Wars originally began in 1992, but time travelers constantly mucking about in history has bumped up the date by a few decades. She attributes it to time itself trying to correct things.
• Cute and Psycho: Sera first shows up as a disarmingly earnest and attractive investigator and activist ... who turns out to be more than a little unhinged by the end of the episode, gunning down the alternate Kirk and enjoying having done so to a Famed In-Story historical figure, and then murdering multiple institute guards and threatening to do the same to Khan.
• A Day in the Limelight: The episode focuses on La'an.
• Deadpan Snarker: Kirk and La'an.
  Kirk: You come from a line of axe murderers?
  La'an: Oh no, we never use axes.
• Dresses the Same: When Kirk and La'an are at Roots picking out clothes to shoplift, they emerge from the dressing rooms wearing the exact same outfit. When they see each other, they share a Meaningful Look, and Kirk visibly deflates and goes to pick something else.
• Door Dumb: Kirk's inexperience with some elements of 2020s Earth includes a complete inability to understand revolving doors.
• Drives Like Crazy: Kirk recklessly drives around a Challenger and nearly gets arrested by the police while trying to track the van carrying the evidence from the bridge bombing, despite repeated protests from La'an to be discreet.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: There are a few shots of Toronto's iconic CN Tower.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: La'an teases Kirk over his middle name being Tiberius, especially compared to his brother's more normal middle name of 'Sam'.
• Epic Fail: Kirk's first time with a revolving door has him completely miss the exit and force the door back instead of just going back around. La'an even mocks him for never having used one before.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Initially, Jim resists the idea of ending his reality, expressing concern for his friends. But he gradually realizes that his world is a Crapsack World and gets on board with helping La'an, especially after learning his brother George is alive in her timeline.
• Failed a Spot Check: When arriving in the 2020s, Jim immediately assumes that they're in New York, completely missing the Toronto Eaton Centre sign he's standing under.
• Famed In-Story: Sera is actually embarrassed by how long it took her to recognize the James T. Kirk when she first met him. (Perhaps because he's a brunette?)
• Foreshadowing:
  • The comical business of Kirk failing to recognize Toronto (despite the giant signs saying "Toronto") will get a pretty grim explanation later in the episode: not only is Earth in general an abandoned wasteland in his timeline, but Toronto specifically was annihilated hundreds of years ago— and they arrived just a few days before the event.
  • Sera's politics are not quite internally consistent (she films cops to prevent police brutality, which is left-wing-coded, but she proposes a conspiracy theory about an alien invasion being covered up by an international cabal, which is right-wing-coded). To a 21st-century observer, this could be a sign that something is off. Since Jim and La'an both know for a fact that aliens will try to invade Earth, they don't notice the discontinuity.
  • Kirk's lack of familiarity with La'an's last name foreshadows the real divergence point between their timelines: the death of Khan Noonien-Singh.
  • Sera shows La'an and Jim some photos, one of which is of a Romulan Bird-of-Prey (which Jim recognizes) with almost pristine quality compared to the other photos she demonstrates. Later, it is revealed that Sera is a Romulan.
• Funny Background Event: La'an enters a clothing store and looks around. Behind her, Kirk utterly fails to work out how to use a revolving door.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Sera has been trapped on Earth for 30 years, watching various temporal shenanigans delay her mission to assassinate a young Khan, and her Motive Rant makes it clear that the frustration is getting to her.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: La'an prevents a disaster that would have wiped the Federation from existence, but a temporal agent warns her that she can never discuss it with anyone.
• Gun Struggle: At the climax, La'an manages to knock Sera's gun out of her hand, prompting a minute of keep-away before La'an manages to grab it and put two in Sera's chest, mortally wounding her.
• Had the Silly Thing in Reverse: Kirk's first attempt at driving a car has him initially put it in reverse.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Kirk goads Sera into killing him so she'll set off the alarm and be unable to reach the reactor.
• Hidden Depths: Kirk is recalcitrant and bewildered for the first few hours that he and La'an are on Earth, but he proves himself when they need to get money fast and he absolutely cleans up against the chess hustlers in a local park. Even with the advantage of being used to 3-D chess, he says that he used to beat his first officer all the time. Later, he has fun with La'an by pretending not to recognize literary and Biblical references.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Discussed in relation to Khan Noonien-Singh. By killing him, his specific Eugenics Wars never happened but Earth suffered a far worse WWIII that rendered it uninhabitable by nuclear war. Humanity recovered and became a United Earth, though mostly spread among colonies in the Sol System, but has become isolationist, all because the Romulans were making sure they didn't advance enough to become a threat to them.
• Identical Grandson: Despite being numerous generations removed from the Noonien-Singh (presumably Khan's parent) who runs the Noonien-Singh Institute here, La'an successfully opens the door to the facility with her palm print. In fact, it's implied that her ability to get into the facility is the whole reason why the Department of Temporal Investigations agent needed her help in the first place. (Why a palm print scanner is simply looking for Noonien-Singh family DNA^note remember, it's Khan who's the augment— presumably his parents aren't, so the scanner can't just be looking for signs of augmentation, rather than scanning for specific authorized individuals' DNA profiles or, say, palm prints, is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
• If We Get Through This…: La'an and Kirk discuss the possibility of his coming back to the prime timeline with her. This seals his fate and he is dead by the end of the episode.
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: The time traveler, half-dead from a gunshot wound to the stomach, passes his time travel device to La'an and tells her to "get to the bridge." Unfortunately, he fails to give her any context beyond that, so La'an, joined by Kirk, has no idea what to do and simply stumbles from one clue to the next until the duo figure out where history diverged.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Resolved, for the moment anyway. It's never been quite clear in canon how Khan Noonien-Singh's name breaks down; one popular (although not uncontested) way of interpreting it has been that "Noonien" is his given name, "Singh" is his surname and "Khan" is a title. This episode establishes it as a given name with a two-part surname, "Khan Noonien-Singh" (like "Una Chin-Riley").
• Infinite Supplies: The pile of money Kirk hustles at chess appears nowhere near large enough to rent the palatial hotel suite he and La'an share, let alone to get to Vermont and back.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Despite the wildly divergent history, most of the crew of Enterprise were still born and wound up on a version of the Enterprise. Even Spock is in contact with them, though as Earth is more isolationist in this timeline, he joined Vulcan's space fleet rather than Earth's. The two differences that stand out are that Sam Kirk is no longer alive, and the Noonien-Singh line has been wiped out, stunting humanity's progress into the stars. Knowing his brother survives in La'an's reality motivates Kirk to help her, as that plus the objectively better nature of her timeline is worth sacrificing his own.
  • Kirk was still born in Iowa— rather, on the U.S.S. Iowa, a spaceship.
  • Khan was killed and the Eugenics Wars never happened, but Earth suffered a more devastating WWIII that delayed First Contact with Vulcans. They have managed to build a ship as impressive as the Enterprise but humanity has nowhere near the same influence and resources they would as the capital of The Federation.
  • On a broader scale, Sera acknowledges the inconsistent canon of the franchise in regards to past events, namely the Eugenics Wars happening decades later than they were first stated to occur. This doesn't stop Federation history from playing out largely the same, a fact she attributes to time itself fighting back against the meddling of people like her.
• Instant Expert: For a version of Kirk who probably didn't get to drive a car as a kid, Kirk becomes an expert driver in no time flat.
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: Sera threatens the cops with this, claiming she's live-streaming Kirk's arrest to the "entire, very judgmental Internet." They find an excuse to let him off with a warning.
• Irony: Kirk's love interest is the descendant of a man he wanted dead in another timeline.
• It Will Never Catch On: Pelia justifies her taking artifacts like a packrat with a "just in case" justification that the Federation's "no money, socialist utopia thing" could wind up a passing fad.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Overlaps with California Doubling. Kirk identifies the city that he and La'an arrive in as New York City, ignoring the several obvious signs around him that say it's Toronto. Toronto regularly doubles for NYC in visual media, more often than it appears as itself.
  • Sera's discussion about why the Eugenics Wars have been so inconsistently depicted (revealed to be because of constant time-traveling to prevent the formation of The Federation) hews similar to why fans have been splitting hairs trying to figure out where it all fits.
  • Kirk comments that while he calls his brother 'Sam', everyone else calls him 'George', only for an amused La'an to counter no one calls him George. In the original series a minor but critical plot point was indeed that only Kirk called him Sam, here everyone has been calling him that.
  • Sera kicks herself for failing to recognize the most famous captain in Starfleet history. Perhaps she didn't recognize him because he no longer looks like William Shatner.
• Literary Allusion Title: The episode's title refers to Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5).
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Pelia argues that even if her belongings are stolen, and she's not admitting they are, the statute of limitations on those crimes has long since expired.
  • Kirk playfully tries to pull rank on La'an to order her to eat a hot dog. La'an points out that he's not a Starfleet officer in his timeline, so she doesn't have to take orders from him.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: The Romulans send an agent into the past so they can kill Khan, preventing the Eugenics Wars, thereby causing humanity to become isolationist and never solving their problems in the same way they did after having witnessed the horrors of World War III thanks to Khan. As such, their United Federation of Earth is on the losing end of a war with Romulus, and other species are facing the same fate.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: As they follow the van, La'an tells Kirk to be discreet. He replies that "discreet" is "basically [his] middle name." Then, they get into a digression about her thinking his actual middle name, "Tiberius", is insane.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Kirk realizes that saving her timeline requires destroying his. La'an's argument that his timeline is much worse (Earth in a perpetual nuclear winter, war with the Romulans, many millions of people killed) doesn't convince him. Her mentioning that his brother Sam is alive in her timeline does the trick.
• Moose and Maple Syrup: As the first ever Star Trek production with scenes set in Canada^note although many scenes from SNW and Discovery have been filmed in and around Toronto, or indeed with more than a passing reference to it (aired two days before Canada Day!), the episode goes over several Canadian stereotypes:
  • When explaining to a Kirk who's never been on Earth what Canada is, La'an goes through several stereotypical Canadian things.
    "You know, maple leaves, politeness, poutine..."
  • Kirk later tries and gushes about poutine being served with gravy.
  • Canada's cold weather is brought up, with Kirk complaining about the cold and La'an noting that "It's actually not that bad for Canada".
• Mundane Luxury: Kirk is wowed by a simple hot dog from a cart and amazed by poutine (with gravy!). Apparently food in his time leaves something to be desired.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Kirk recklessly drives a red sports car, which his younger self did in his first scene in Star Trek (2009).
  • Kirk mistakes La'an's name for "Noonien Soong" rather than "Noonien-Singh", the former being the name of Data's creator.
  • Sera at first poses as someone tracking UFO activity on Earth, similar to Rain Robinson.
  • While Trapped in the Past, La'an seeks out help from a friend who is alive and living on Earth passing for human. Data did the same thing when he reached out to Guinan in "Time's Arrow".
  • When La'an snarks at Kirk about his troubles operating a revolving door, he defends himself by saying he's from space, the inverse of one of his most famous lines.
  • Kirk being born on the U.S.S. Iowa rather than the state of Iowa was considered for Star Trek (2009) before the ship was renamed the Kelvin.
  • Similarly, La'an poking fun at Kirk's middle name, Tiberius, echoes George Kirk Sr. telling Winona that it's "the worst" before they settle on their newborn son's first name, James, as the opening scenes to 2009's Star Trek draw to a close and the alternate timeline U.S.S. Kelvin rams the Narada.
  • La'an's conflict in this episode is an inversion of Kirk's in "The City on the Edge of Forever". In that episode, Kirk had to stop a time traveler from saving the life of Edith Keeler, a good person that Kirk had fallen in love with, because despite her good intentions, the future would suffer if she didn't die. In this episode, La'an has to stop a time traveler from killing Khan, an evil person who haunted her entire existence, because despite his atrocities, the future would suffer without his influence.
• Noodle Incident: Kirk tells La'an that he spent six months in a Denobulan prison with a Vulcan cellmate. How he wound up in prison remains unknown, as well as why the Denobulans would imprison him and a Vulcan.
• Not Me This Time: When Sera is accused of detonating the bridge, she says she's not responsible for that particular event - and since both Kirk and La'an remember that event happening in their respective timelines, they accept this claim.
• Not So Stoic: The events of this episode show layers to La'an and finally at the end weeps for her loss.
• Obfuscating Insanity: When Sera reveals herself as a Romulan spy, Kirk and La'an have to credit her for playing the kooky conspiracy nut act to the hilt.
• Oh, Crap!: La'an is horrified when she sees crayon drawings hanging in the hallway Sera is pushing her down, and the horror only grows when she sees Khan's name in childish handwriting on the door.
• Older Than They Look: Sera appears to be in her early thirties, but she states she's been on her mission for thirty years, indicating she's much older than that. Justified, of course, as she's actually a Romulan, and despite having been surgically altered to pass as human she still presumably ages at the normal rate for her species, who live longer than humans.
• Out of Focus: La'an is the only opening-credits actor with any meaningful role in this episode, augmented by Paul Wesley as Kirk, Adelaide Kane as Sera and Carol Kane (no relation) as Pelia. The intro and denouement are the only times any other regulars appear; Chapel and Ortegas have no lines for the second episode in a row, and Uhura's screen time is limited to Double Takes at La'an's appearance.
• Point of Divergence: It's quickly established the timeline has changed significantly and not just minor crew changes, the further into the story bigger changes are revealed. Kirk shares that Earth is in perpetual nuclear winter after World War III and humanity colonized other planets but remained isolationist, a far cry from The Federation. The first thing La'an and Kirk can confirm is they both remember the terrorist attack on the Ontario bridge, and then they pinpoint a reactor detonation that destroyed Ontario as what made WWIII far worse and resulted in a less idealistic future than what La'an is from.
• Product Placement: Kirk namedrops Apple and DuckDuckGo at one point, and the store he and La'an shoplift their outfits from is visibly the Canadian retailer Roots (in fact, filmed in the actual Roots in the Eaton Centre steps away from where they materialize). He also steals a red Dodge sports car with numerous shots of the vehicle's logo.
• Race Lift: Relatively speaking. Khan Noonien Singh is an Indian name in origin and suggested to have a Sikh background while he was portrayed by the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán, given the notoriety of the character it had been assumed an ambiguous background was in play. In this episode Khan as a child is played by Desmond Sivan, who is more clearly Indian.
• Rank Up: Due to the on-going war with the Romulans, James Kirk has been fast-tracked to captain; when the time-line resets, he introduces himself to La'an as "Lieutenant Kirk."
• Real Name as an Alias: La'an calls herself "Vanessa" when introducing herself to Sera, while Kirk just uses "Jim" because it's not like she'll know who he is. Little does he realize she will in fact recognize him, though she admits it took her an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots for Starfleet's most famous captain.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: La'an and Kirk conclude the divergening point was a cold fusion reactor exploding. Turns out it was actually the early death of Khan Noonien-Singh (and subsequently avoiding the Eugenics Wars), the reactor exploding was just the method used to achieve that.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The time travel device La'an is given protects her from changes in the timeline.
• Rubber-Band History: The reason for Khan and the Eugenics War occurring decades later than previous canon had established is revealed to be this. The Temporal Cold War and other incursions by time travelers have thoroughly altered major events, but certain things that have a particularly heavy impact on history have to occur, even if they don't happen when they originally did. Thus, the eugenics project that produced Khan happens about 50 years after it was "supposed" to.
• Series Continuity Error: This episode actually subverts what seems like an error from the trailer when Kirk says "I'm from space" which would contradict "I'm from Iowa; I only work in outer space." It turns out that this alt-timeline Kirk is the one from space; Prime Kirk is from Riverside, Iowa, as he should be.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: A time traveler pops onto the Enterprise and tasks La'an with stopping an attack in the past, before vanishing and suddenly putting her on a version of the Enterprise with Kirk in command. Things are complicated by his only instruction being "Get to the bridge" devoid of any context, and the time travel device plopping her and Kirk in the past during a struggle with no equipment.
• Ship Tease: After getting back to the prime timeline Enterprise, La'an places a call to "our" James Kirk to get closure. Being Kirk, he offers to buy her a drink if they ever happen to be in the same place at the same time.
• Shirtless Scene: When Kirk is changing in the Roots dressing room, his shirt rides up. La'an glimpses this through a gap in the curtain and is rather distracted. (If that little bit of Kirk torso gets her that riled up, she's obviously never watched TOS.)
• Shout-Out: The device La'an is given by the temporal agent — a handheld time-travel device with a red light indicating something needs correcting in the time period you've just arrived in, which changes to green upon a successful mission — seems pretty reminiscent of the Omni from the 80s sci-fi series Voyagers!.
• Single-Season Country: Obviously the one time Star Trek visits Canada, it's winter; the Yonge-Dundas Square billboard helpfully informs us that it's -15°C today, and there's snow in several scenes (although it appears noticeably snowier and colder during the car chase sequence than when Jim and La'an are at the waterfront following the explosion just prior).
• The Slow Path: Sera came back in time from an unknown date of origin intending to interfere with the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s by assassinating Khan Noonien-Singh and prevent the Federation from forming, only for everybody and their mother to apparently have a similar idea and delay Khan's childhood to the 2020s. Thus Sera was forced to live on Earth as a Deep Cover Agent for the intervening thirty years.
• Smart People Play Chess: Kirk effortlessly defeats multiple opponents at traditional 2-D chess, dismissing it as "idiot's chess" when La'an is impressed by his skill. He also tells La'an that his XO got tired of losing to him and he's been searching for a Worthy Opponent ever since.
• Stable Time Loop: Implied in regards to Pelia. La'an seeks her out because she knows Pelia as an engineer and knows she's alive in the 21st Century, only for 2022 Pelia to reveal she's not done any math since "Pythagoras invented the damn thing" let alone engineering. Still in the end she helps and La'an tells her that she's more of an engineer than she thinks, and Pelia remarks that maybe she missed her calling and that having an honest job as an Engineer would be nice. Implying this interaction would kickstart her interest in engineering and leading to be the Engineer we know with over 100 years of service at Starfleet by the 23rd century.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: La'an clearly falls hard for alternative Kirk, and he falls for her, but he dies and it just wouldn't be the same with her timeline's Kirk.
• Suicide Pill: When Sera is shot by La'an, she triggers a device which vaporizes her in an instant, presumably so humanity won't discover there's aliens running around.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: Season two of Star Trek: Picard established the existence of Supervisors like Tallinn active on Earth during the 2020s with the explicit mission of safeguarding the integrity of the timeline. You would think such an organization would be very interested in Romulans travelling to the past to assassinate Khan Noonien-Singh and change the course of history. Granted, they're not always effective, hence the Temporal Wars.
• There Are No Therapists: Starfleet has them, and M'Benga encourages La'an to talk to one at the start of the episode, which she declines, despite having been willing to do so in the previous season. Temporal Investigations, however, does not seem to keep anyone on staff who can talk to people who get roped into time-travel events so that they can deal with their trauma without breaking the Temporal Prime Directive. La'an is told that she can't talk to anyone, period, and is left to deal with all of it alone.
• Time Crash: A variation. This episode finally provides an in-universe explanation for why the history of the Eugenics Wars has become so inconsistent and contradictory since "Space Seed". There have been so many attempts, both benign and malignant, to meddle with humanity's historical development — and especially the pre-First Contact period — that the entire original timeline's been shot to hell, with the repercussion that the Wars, while not being erased, have been displaced decades further into the 21st Century rather than the early 1990s; Sera mentions 1992 as when they were supposed to have started. Of course, Sera clearly has a few screws loose from being stuck on Earth several decades longer than planned, so that explanation is, shall we say, subject to interpretation.
• Time for Plan B: When her plan to sabotage the reactor is ruined, Sera switches to Plan B: kill Khan Noonien-Singh directly.
• Time Police: The man who arrives on the Enterprise in The Teaser after being shot is revealed during the denouement to be an agent of the Department of Temporal Investigations, originally introduced in DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations". Another agent takes his time machine back from La'an and warns her not to discuss what she experienced lest she contaminate the timeline all over again.
• The Time Traveller's Dilemma: Discussed. Kirk points out that if they succeed in restoring La'an's timeline, his own will be erased, so he doesn't actually have any reason to help her. La'an has to sell him on how much better her timeline is to get him on board, though it is the revelation that his brother is still alive in her timeline that fully convinces him.
• Time-Travel Romance: Played with. La'an and Kirk are both from the future, albeit different timelines and they fall for each other as they have to cope with being in the past together.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Apparently, so many time travellers have tried to interfere with the events surrounding Khan Noonien-Singh and the Eugenics Wars that the timeline itself, in somehow resisting their incursions, has gradually displaced the relevant events themselves: Khan, who was originally a world-conquering warlord in 1992, is now a small child circa the 2020s. (This is a relief for the writers, as, in the Real World, time insists on advancing and the Eugenics Wars keep not happening.)
• Trapped in the Past:
  • The time travel device La'an is given is programmed to send her and Kirk back to a specific point and only allows a return trip when the timeline has been restored, so she and Kirk can't go back once she accidentally triggers it.
  • Sera is a Romulan time traveler who has been stuck on Earth for three decades.
• Tragic Time Traveler: La'an is kicked into an Alternate Timeline where the Romulans are the galaxy's dominant superpower, and accidentally drags that timeline's version of Jim Kirk back to 2020s Toronto with her. She becomes attracted to him, and then he's killed helping her stop a Romulan temporal operative. Because of the Temporal Prime Directive, she's forced to keep these traumatic events secret forever.
• Undercover as Lovers: They share a hotel room with one bed, and later Kirk refers to La'an as his wife.
• The Unreveal: It's never actually clarified when Sera came back from in the future to infiltrate 20th and 21st century Earth and stop the formation of the Federation — or whether her timeline or reality still even exists after all the temporal incursions she describes.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Khan was just a scared, lonely boy before he became the most vicious dictator in all of history.
• Visual Pun: A minor example. The monologue from which the title, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", is taken contains the line "all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death". The Romulan assassin uses a suicide device to convert her body to dust when she fails her mission. "Dusty death," indeed.
• Wham Line: Kirk being so casual about La'an's name that he gets it wrong while teasing her tells her just what the divergence point is— and what she'll probably have to do to save her timeline.
• Wham Shot:
  • A time traveler ends up on the Enterprise and tells La'an to "get to the bridge" before he dies. She does, but it's not Captain Pike in that chair... it's James T. Kirk.
  • La'an sees the name of the building where the fusion reactor is kept: the Noonien-Singh Institute. And if that wasn't enough, there's a small room that has one familiar name on the door... KHAN. And when La'an comes face-to-face with her notorious ancestor... he's just a scared little boy, not the genocidal dictator that he's destined to become.
• What You Are in the Dark: La'an is given a chance to let Khan, her ancestor, die rather than let him become the next mass murdering dictator, while she has a chance to walk free and live whatever life she wants thanks to the time travel device protecting her from changes in the timeline. She chooses not only to stop his would-be-killer, but spares him despite knowing what he will do.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: La'an thinks that "Tiberius" is an insane middle name.
  La'an: Your parents must really hate you.
• Would Hurt a Child: To change the future, Sera intends to kill a very young Khan. The initial plan was to detonate the reactor and wipe out Toronto, taking him with it, but she goes the personal route when Kirk derails the first plan. Overlaps with La'an's Wouldn't Hurt a Child, as she can't kill her genocidal ancestor because he's a boy.
• Your Universe or Mine?: Kirk and La'an share a kiss, but they're from different timelines, so it wouldn't have lasted. (Unless the time travel device lets him stay with her, but he says that the universe probably couldn't handle two of him. He's not wrong.)

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