10 Real World Star Trek Locations You Can Visit

For the first time in its history, Star Trek was not made in Los Angeles when filming for Star Trek: Discovery was moved to Pinewood Toronto Studios. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds also films at CBS Stages Canada near Toronto, but Star Trek: Picard was shot at Santa Clarita Studios in L.A. County.

Toronto and its environs have, therefore, already been not Toronto in several episodes. For example, in Discovery, the city's Aga Khan Museum served as Vulcan in the episode Lethe, and Saru's home village was filmed at the Scarborough Bluffs Park that borders part of Lake Ontario. Strange New Worlds has equally filmed in and around Toronto as elsewhere, but then it switched things up a bit for season two's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

In an interview for Collider, showrunner Akiva Goldsman stated,

We were gonna […] take the show to New York, and we quickly realized we could not afford it. […] [W]e went through the process of […] how do we make Toronto look like New York? And then we sort of thought, 'Huh, why don't we just let Toronto be Toronto?'

And so, they did. During La'an and alternate Kirk's time-displaced stay in the city, the pair stop off at Yonge-Dundas Square, steal from the Roots store, take a walk along the waterfront at the harbour (chess first, hotdogs later), and lunch at the Lakeview restaurant (poutine has gravy and aliens are not [just] science-fiction).