Warning: This article contains major spoilers for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 4, Episode 1, “Valles Marineris.”
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” spent three seasons treating La’an Noonien-Singh’s ancestry as a quiet character detail. The Season 4 premiere, “Valles Marineris,” which debuted July 23 on Paramount+, turned it into an active plot point instead, confirming on-screen that her genetic connection to the franchise’s most famous villain, Khan Noonien-Singh, is no longer just backstory, according to SlashFilm.
The reveal comes in the episode’s back half. After an interstellar squall throws the USS Enterprise 65 million years into the past, La’an, Una Chin-Riley, and Erica Ortegas beam down to a Cretaceous-era Earth to recover iridium — and end up facing off against dinosaurs, according to AV Club. At one point, La’an instinctively punches a velociraptor with her bare hand hard enough to break bone, but back on the Enterprise, she tells Dr. M’Benga something’s off: “I broke my hand and I don’t feel any pain,” according to Fangirlish.
Augmented DNA, Activated
La’an goes on to explain that her body feels more attuned than usual, even as her mind stays confused, and links the change directly to her augmented DNA — the genetic inheritance she carries as a descendant of Khan, according to Fangirlish. Nurse Christine Chapel tries to ease her mind by explaining that having those genes does not decide who she is as a person, even though the series has earlier used that same stigma as a major foundation for La’an’s entire character journey. according to Fandom Pulse, which also noted the episode reopens a long-standing canon question: why Spock and Kirk never mention La’an once they encounter Khan directly in “Space Seed.”
For longtime viewers, the connection itself isn’t new. La’an has been established since the show’s first season as a descendant of Khan Noonien-Singh, the genetically engineered “Augment” who became one of Star Trek’s most notorious villains, and as the Enterprise’s chief of security and sole survivor of a Gorn attack that killed the rest of her family, according to DIRECTV Insider. What’s changed in “Valles Marineris” is that her lineage is now doing something rather than just being mentioned.
A Season-Long Setup
Critics have already started reading the moment as a warning sign. SlashFilm pointed out that this activation lands right as La’an’s relationship with Spock, established as a casual romance back in Season 3, has become one of the show’s more prominent threads — and argued the physiological shift could be building toward something more serious than a simple breakup or reassignment by season’s end.
The premiere packed in plenty of other movement, too. Una is promoted to Commander during the episode, and Fleet Captain Robert April offers Pike a shot at becoming Commodore, an offer Pike asks to hold off answering until after the mission, according to Gizmodo. The crew also makes contact with a long-vanished Martian civilization, led by Commander Cassel, who dismisses Starfleet’s caution about disturbing the timeline with a blunt reminder that her people are focused on the present, not hypothetical futures, according to AV Club.
According to TrekCore, Akiva Goldsman directed the episode “Valles Marineris,” which opens the fourth season of Strange New Worlds—a season that reports describe as the show’s second-to-last. With La’an’s condition left unresolved as the episode ends, her connection to Khan looks set to shape much more of Season 4 than it has in any prior year of the show.
