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.
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Honors Gene Roddenberry And Lucille Ball
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is an ensemble, but Anson Mount (who plays Captain Christopher Pike) is the top billed star. Fittingly, in the holodeck simulation, Mount gets to play the creator of "The Last Frontier," T.K. Bellows, described as a dreamer using the show to depict his utopian vision of the future. One scene shows Bellows and Saint getting into a tiff on "The Last Frontier" set; Bellows asks Saint to deliver his lines like a human being, so Saint asks that Bellows write dialogue that sounds like a human being. "Does no one here care about my vision?!" Bellows laments.
In the same way Saint represents Shatner, Bellows is a stand-in for Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek." Bellows is rarely seen without a whiskey glass and bottle in his hand, like how Roddenberry was well known to drink and use drugs. It's later revealed that Bellows isn't sad about the show being canceled, but that it's being picked up without him.
While Roddenberry was never fired from "Star Trek" during its original run, he did step away during its third and final season. During the later making of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and then "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Roddenberry was moved out of positions of real creative decision-making to let new blood take over. (He wasn't happy about it.) Many modern Trekkies also downplay Roddenbery's influence on the show in favor of his collaborators'.
Mount as Mr. Bellows is only the second of more familiar faces. Rebecca Romijn, usually the Enterprise's first officer Una Chin-Riley, is, in the holodeck, Sonny Lupino, a strawberry blonde actress-turned-producer on "The Last Frontier." Lupino is certainly a homage to Lucille Ball. While Ball is mostly remembered for "I Love Lucy" and her work as a comedienne, she was also a producer who fought hard to get "Star Trek" on the air. "A Space Adventure Hour" also drops a reference to Lupino working with her ex-husband, a la Ball's marriage with and 1960 divorce from Desi Arnaz. Ball bought out Arnaz's shares of their production company, Desilu Productions, in 1962 and went onto produce shows like "Star Trek" at the company.
Strange New Worlds Homages The Original Nurse Chapel
The fourth "Star Trek" parallel among "The Last Frontier" is the least exact. Jess Bush's character, Natalie Shaw, plays the female first officer on "The Last Frontier." "Star Trek" historians know that Roddenberry wanted a female second in command on the show; the original pilot, "The Cage," featured Number One (Majel Barrett), who we now know as Romijn's Una. Number One was cut in the show's second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," and the subsequent series.
Barrett did get a part on "Star Trek," though: Nurse Christine Chapel. So, Bush's character in "A Space Adventure Hour" is layered metatext. Jess Bush, who has succeeded Majel Barrett as Chapel, is in this episode playing an analogue to Barrett herself and Barrett's original "Star Trek" role.
It's not a perfect comparison; Bush uses her natural Australian accent for Shaw, whereas Barrett was American. Barrett was also famously involved with Roddenberry (they married in 1969), whereas Shaw isn't in any relationship with Bellows. Shaw is shown to have been linked to Saint in the tabloids, but disputes that when La'an/Amelia questions her: "Absolutely 100% never ... he's a chauvinistic egomaniac, I can barely stand to be on set with the guy!"
"A Space Adventure Hour" is all about "Strange New Worlds" honoring and lampooning the history of "Star Trek" (because there's plenty about the franchise's history that's worthy of one or the other). And a big part of that history, which the episode doesn't forget, is the people who made the show in front of and behind the camera.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" streams on Paramount+, with new season 3 episodes dropping on Thursdays. "The Last Frontier" is unfortunately not streaming at the moment.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
