It seems that Christina has been able to convince the Showrunners to incorporate some of her own enthusiasms into La’an’s character.

In a TrekMovie piece, she’s quoted saying that she and Ethan Peck had a total of 75 hours of dance and fight choreography preparation over the season. The heaviest episode is in the back half of the season.

While I enjoyed the edgier La’an, Goldsman seems to have a very rigid idea that, in drama, trauma is the foundation of character development. It’s tiresome when every single character has to have a traumatic backstory, experience trauma in the show, or look forward to trauma (in Pike’s case).

So, as an example, it seems that the only way for Ortegas to have a character arc is for her to be traumatized and go through the process of overcoming that.

In that case, it’s better to have La’an move on. Between Tomorrow cubed and Hegemony II, we’ve seen two very significant life events for her that make it credible that she could finally more on.