For decades, Deidre Hall has made television's most unbelievable moments feel oddly possible. Her Days of Our Lives alter ego, Dr. Marlena Evans, has survived possession, kidnapping, comas, memory loss, and more family shocks than a telenovela writer's room could fit into one season.
So when Hall arrives in Paramount+'s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds as Enterprise psychiatrist Dr. Elanor Chivers, it is less a stunt casting choice than a tiny, perfect piece of television destiny.
Her appearance comes in "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass," a playful episode that sends Captain Christopher Pike, played by Anson Mount, into a world where the Star Trek universe suddenly operates by the deliciously exaggerated logic of daytime soaps. There are loaded glances, dramatic pauses, mysterious ailments, secrets that refuse to remain secret and a level of emotional chaos that Latino audiences raised on telenovelas will recognize immediately.
Hall, who has played Marlena for more than five decades, told this reporter that she loved how the Strange New Worlds team brought the joke to life.
"Everybody seemed to know except for Pike what was going on," she said. "He was the confused one. We all knew, and we were all in on the joke except for Pike."
That is the fun of the episode. It treats soap opera as something equal to Star Trek. It recognizes that melodrama, science fiction, and telenovelas have always spoken the same emotional language. They all ask viewers to accept the impossible as long as the characters' feelings are real enough. A person can be possessed by the devil, transported into another dimension, or discover a secret twin, but heartbreak still hurts, love still complicates everything, and a well-timed close-up remains one of television's most potent weapons.
For Latino viewers, that connection is especially easy to understand. Telenovelas have long trained generations to embrace high stakes, family secrets, tragic romance, characters who return from the dead, and revelations that arrive precisely when the music tells us they should. That storytelling DNA has never disappeared. It has evolved across streaming, from Spanish-language drama to English-language series that borrow its emotional scale without always giving it credit.
Hall has seen the format evolve firsthand. Days of Our Lives, once a daily stop for daytime viewers on NBC, moved to Peacock, a shift that initially made even its veteran cast nervous.
"We were confused and concerned," Hall recalled. "Can people find us on streaming? Our audience is so used to going right to NBC." The transition, she said, ultimately worked. "We ended up adding a whole younger audience to the show."
That may be the real bridge between Salem and the USS Enterprise. Both franchises have survived because their fans have welcomed new formats without giving up the things that made them fall in love in the first place. Star Trek has traveled through television eras, films, animation and streaming. Soaps and telenovelas have moved from living-room appointment viewing to bingeable episodes on phones and platforms. The technology changes. The emotional addiction does not.
Hall was already a lifelong Star Trek fan before putting on a Starfleet uniform. "We all watched Star Trek from way back there," she said, remembering William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy's Spock and the strange planets that made the original series feel unlike anything else on television. "You never know what to expect, but great, great, great show."
Her role as the ship's psychiatrist also feels like a wink to viewers who have spent years watching Marlena listen, diagnose and somehow remain composed while Salem burns around her. Hall sees the similarity clearly.
"Those are therapist qualities," she said of Chivers' calmness. "Being calm, patient and a good listener." Then she laughed: "They better be."
The crossover is so natural that it opens the door to the kind of fantasy casting that makes longtime fans giddy. During the interview, Hall entertained the idea of William Shatner's Captain Kirk one day crossing into Days of Our Lives. "You should write that down before somebody steals it," she said.
It would be wild, of course. But then again, wild is a relative term in a world where a beloved soap opera icon can walk onto the Enterprise, help turn a sci-fi episode into a loving homage to melodrama and make it seem as if she has always belonged there.
For anyone who has ever shouted at a telenovela screen, cried over a forbidden love or waited for a character to wake from a suspiciously convenient coma, the answer is simple: she has.
