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Outside of a brief moment at San Diego Comic-Con last year, and the cheeky arrival of the TARDIS in the background of an episode of Strange New Worlds, attempts to make a Star Trek and Doctor Who crossover have seemingly fizzled out—especially now that the former is preparing to film its final episodes, and the latter is navigating its own post-Disney future. But that doesn’t stop one of the rare few stars who can say they’ve appeared in both franchises from having ideas about how to make one happen.
That star is, of course, Christina Chong, who plays Enterprise security chief La’an Noonien Singh on Strange New Worlds, and appeared in the 2011 Doctor Who episode “A Good Man Goes to War” as Lorna Bucket, a soldier who had previously encountered the Doctor as a child, only to be tragically killed in the clash between the Doctor’s allies and the sinister agents of the Silence. For Chong, the TARDIS’ sneaky appearance in Strange New Worlds‘ season 3 episode “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” wasn’t enough to satisfy her itch… and instead she dreams of a crossover episode that utilizes her unique connection to both franchises.
“So what I would do is—I played a character called Lorna Bucket in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’, one of Matt Smith’s episodes—and I would somehow find a way to make La’an and Lorna Bucket the same character,” Chong theorized in a recent panel appearance at the ST: CHI convention (via TrekMovie). “[I’d] create a story as to why Lorna Bucket was in the Whoniverse, and what brought her to Trekverse. I don’t know what that reason would be right now.”
It’d have to be a pretty crazy reason, given that we see poor Lorna take a bullet and die in the Doctor’s arms in “A Good Man Goes to War”, never mind that she’s from the 52nd century, while La’an is from the 23rd. But Doctor Who itself has done plenty of examples of reusing actors by suggesting a kind of temporal reuse of faces—it was suggested in the most recent season, for example, that Varada Sethu’s new companion Belinda, from contemporary Earth, had a temporal connection to the 51st-century soldier Mundy Flynn, also played by Sethu the season prior in Steven Moffat’s “Boom”, even if it never ended up being explored.
In fact, maybe that‘s the connection, given that Flynn was a marine who served in the same religio-military organization as Lorna Bucket, the Church of the Papal Mainframe. Maybe something wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey happened, and Lorna’s likeness found its way across time and space (and multiverses) to be born as La’an? It’s Doctor Who *and* it’s Star Trek; you can just make up some technobabble and say it works that way.
Alas, no matter how much technobabble you fling onto the page, Chong’s idea is unlikely to make it out of her fannish dreams.
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