By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds completed the transition from sci-fi series to mean-spirited sketch show this week. It happened when the episode “A Space Adventure Hour” began with a sketch comedy sequence that looked like it belonged on Saturday Night Live. The sketch’s primary goal? To viciously mock William Shatner.
The sketch was a straight-up Mad Magazine-style Star Trek: The Original Series parody, complete with over-the-top costuming, dialogue, and John Belushi-inspired line delivery.
Here’s a snippet from the episode.
The episode was about a holodeck adventure, but the sketch did not take place on the holodeck. It’s not clear where the sketch took place in the series’ context. It was tacked on with no real explanation or reason other than that some holodeck characters said they made a TV show once.
The part where it makes no sense in the plot of the show is par for the course with the increasingly subpar writing on Strange New Worlds. It was the engaging in mockery targeted at the original Trek series that was new.
Paul Wesley, who plays James Kirk on the show, turned into an extreme parody of William Shatner. His performance was no different than if John Belushi had been making fun of him, as he did on SNL in the 70s.
The show’s cast and producers will no doubt try to couch this as some sort of homage, but if there’s a line between parody and homage this sequence definitely crossed way, way over it.
Strange New Worlds has become increasingly bizarre as the show has continued in its run. Initially, it was a solid Star Trek series about exploration. These days, it’s mostly an intentional farce, complete with musical numbers and vaudeville bits that seem chiefly designed to amuse the cast, audience be damned.
Now, I guess it’s Shatner be damned, too.
William Shatner generally says whatever the heck he wants, and as a result, in recent years, uptight Hollywood types have begun labeling him as problematic. Paramount has even been removing him from Trek marketing materials. Maybe this was the show’s way of sticking it to him, or some such nonsense.
We’ll probably never know why they really did it, and they’ll pretend it was an homage until the bitter end. But it wasn’t, and everyone of good sense who saw it knows that. Only the Slop Eaters will be convinced.
