Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spent an episode pretending to be Days of Our Lives, and the cast is still processing it.

"Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass," which dropped on Paramount+ last week, has the reality-bending Trelane (Rhys Darby) trap the Enterprise crew inside a full-blown daytime drama, gauzy lighting and evil twins included. Spock gets a soap-style rival in his half-brother Sybok, both played by Ethan Peck. Days of Our Lives veteran Deidre Hall shows up too. Only Captain Pike (Anson Mount) seems to notice how absurd the whole thing is, though that doesn't stop him working through the emotional wreckage of the imagined decades he lived through in last season's finale.

Christina Chong and Peck broke down what it took to pull off the tonal swerve during a panel at Tampa Bay Comic Con last weekend, moderated by Collider's Maggie Lovitt.

For Chong, who plays security chief La'an Noonien-Singh, the trick was acting badly on purpose without it reading as actually bad. "That was interesting for me because of, you know, trying to nail down, trying to be a bad actor while still being kind of a good actor," she said. "Where's the line? Learning to do all those, staring off into the distance, what am I looking at?"

Peck said the production brought in a cinematographer who specialises in soap opera camera work, a completely different setup from how the show is normally shot. "They set them up far away, and they slowly marched them in as you're filming the episode," he said. "At most during one take, two cameras at the most are used, maybe three. And I think we used four, and maybe six, for that." Chong called the whole exercise "almost like theater, in a way," though Peck admitted he struggled to keep a straight face during one scene meant to play smoky and smoldering, because Chong "was just laughing hysterically."

Chong had other news for the room too. Her dog Runa Ewok, who played the princess's companion in Season 1's fantasy episode "The Elysian Kingdom," is set to return, though a customs issue kept the actual dog from making the Tampa Bay panel in person. "She may or may not be appearing on the show very soon, so keep an eye out for that, in a big way," Chong said. Runa landed her first role after Chong built her an Instagram page during the pre-production quarantine, and castmate Celia Rose Gooding reportedly lobbied for the dog to get written into the script once a fantasy-themed episode came up.

Two episodes remain in Season 4, wrapping up with the finale "Tomorrow's Enterprise" on September 24. Season 5, already confirmed as the show's last, arrives next year in a shortened run and adds Thomas Jane as Bones McCoy and Kai Murakami as Sulu. A separate Kirk-led sequel series, reportedly pitched with Paul Wesley reprising the role, hasn't been greenlit by Paramount yet.