This post contains spoilers for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 3, episode 4, “A Space Adventure Hour.”
The latest “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” episode, “A Space Adventure Hour,” opens in bizarre fashion. On the bridge of a starship, a captain and his first officer discuss the ship picking up some radiation. That doesn’t sound too out of place, does it? Except the captain is played by Paul Wesley (who plays Jim Kirk) and the first officer by Jess Bush (who plays Christine Chapel), neither of whom are their usual characters. The costume, set design (magnetic computer tapes!), score, foggy camera quality, and tinny audio are all closer to the original 1960s “Star Trek” … and that’s exactly the point.
It turns out the Enterprise, specifically La’an, is being tasked with studying a prototype holodeck. La’an chooses the setting: a mid-20th century Hollywood murder mystery. She plays detective Amelia Moon in the midst of the cast and crew of a soon-to-be-canceled sci-fi series, “The Last Frontier.” When the studio head is found dead, everyone is a suspect. The holodeck fills the cast with avatars of the Enterprise crew. The episode’s cold opening was a scene from “The Last Frontier” itself.
Like “Strange New Worlds” season 1 episode “The Elysian Kingdom” (when the Enterprise crew was brainwashed into acting like fantasy storybook characters), the episode shows the regular cast play different characters than usual. Wesley’s Jim Kirk is already close to William Shatner’s Captain Kirk from the original “Star Trek.” He’s a gambler who thinks outside the box, but not a full-blown hothead skirt chaser like Chris Pine’s Kirk. But in “A Space Adventure Hour,” he’s not only playing Kirk, he’s playing Shatner himself.
In the holodeck simulation, Wesley’s character is Maxwell Saint, lead actor on “The Last Frontier.” Onscreen, he’s a starship captain with cool confidence and a distinctive, staccato cadence of speaking. Offscreen, he’s an egomaniac who gets under all his co-stars’ skin. Shatner has a well-deserved reputation as a ham (not that he’s a bad actor, to be clear), both for being a prima donna and his often exaggerated, easily imitable performance as Kirk. “Family Guy” episode “When You Wish Upon A Weinstein” did a cutaway gag of Shatner (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) acting in “Fiddler on the Roof” and giving Tevye the same mannerisms as Kirk. Shatner’s way of speaking is just that synonymous with him, and Wesley replicates it as well as MacFarlane does.
“A Space Adventure Hour” is a “Star Trek” episode about “Star Trek.” The diligent Trekkies will spot how Shatner isn’t the only Trek alum being lampooned in this episode.