Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Christina Chong 'Felt the Weight of the Whole Star Trek Fandom' in Episode 3's Pivotal Meeting

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." Read at your own risk!]

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," the third episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' second season, hit all the highlights that a classic Trek time travel episode can offer, plus an added bonus: It gave actress Christina Chong an opportunity to dig ever deeper into her character, La'an Noonien-Singh, and, along with the requisite escapade in the past (or present, for us 21st century-ites), set up some intriguing possibilities for La'an's future, particularly in terms of her relationship with James Tiberius Kirk, aka the future adversary of her great-great-however-many-greats-grandfather Khan Noonien Singh.

"I've never done an episode — I've never done a project, actually — where I've been in every single scene of the episode," Chong told TV Guide of the substantial spotlight the episode put on La'an, as she and Kirk find themselves in 21st century Toronto contending with a chronological conundrum that threatens the timeline. "When I was flicking through [the script] when I first got it, I was like, 'Oh my...Oh. Oh, oh. Okay, she's...Right — Oh. Oh my God!'"

Chong said she was thrilled to get such a showcase to further flesh out La'an, one of the series' key non-legacy characters who nevertheless has family ties to the greatest Star Trek villain of all. Not only is her connection to Khan — memorably played by Ricardo Montalbán in the Original Series episode "Space Seed" and its big screen follow-up Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan — further developed, but La'an's usually aloof, lone wolf nature is challenged and thawed by a forced cooperation with, and the not inconsiderable charms of, Jim Kirk, played by Paul Wesley. The episode plays essentially as a two-hander between Chong and Wesley, and La'an and Kirk grow closer as they attempt to repair the splintered timeline and return to their own era.

"Every scene was incredible! There's romance, there's all these things that La'an has never had to play before, and it was an amazing challenge, really exciting to do," said Chong, who especially enjoyed building the relationship between La'an and Kirk that may have big ramifications in the future — even if, because of the final, poignant timeline-tweaked twist, Kirk has no memory of their shared experience. And the actress is eager to explore the percolating La'an-Kirk chemistry anew in even more scenes with Wesley down the line, where no matter how serious, silly, or heartbreaking the material, the two actors can't help but crack each other up.

"I just love Paul — he's so much fun to work with," Chong said. "There's just something about him — I just look at his face and laugh! He makes me laugh. And it was so much fun. The whole episode, every scene, the cast and crew were waiting for us to stop laughing. We would get into fits and giggles. And watching him discover [Kirk] — because remember, he's not the Shatner Kirk. He is building that. So it's really interesting to watch how he's creating Kirk-That-Will-Be."

What she's maybe in not such a hurry to repeat right away are the exterior scenes they shot in contemporary Toronto, where Strange New Worlds' production is based. "We were filming in daylight [for hours] outside in Toronto, freezing cold," she recalled. "We happened to just find the most cold part of Toronto, this little wind tunnel in the middle of the city where we were filming outside, and I'm wearing this thin leather jacket and jeans and it was absolutely freezing! It was snowing one take, not snowing the next take, snowing one take, not snowing the next take. [But] it was an amazing adventure. It really, really was."

But aside from the frigid realities of Toronto weather and the will they/won't they pleasures of the star-crossed romance, Chong said she was especially knocked out by the canonically seismic reveal toward the episode's end, when La'an meets her ancestor Khan, still just a child in the 21st century (the moment itself marking a shift in the once-established franchise chronology, pushing Khan's timeline forward several decades in a move to more realistically position his storyline against real-world history).

"For me, it was the scene with the little Khan," said Chong. "I felt the weight of the whole Star Trek fandom, and the power of it, and the legacy. In that moment, looking into that little boy's eyes; in that scene, he's so cute and lovely. And I was like, 'Wow — this is Khan. This is who he really is, who he was. He didn't start off bad. No one is inherently bad.' So for me, I really felt the power of everyone who'd been before me coming into that moment, discovering that with them."

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+.