In the same tradition that produced a fairy tale story in Season 1, the Lower Decks crossover and musical in Season 2, and the recently-announced puppet episode for Season 4, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 delivered an episode with an especially kooky premise this week on the 2025 TV schedule. In order to test an early version of the holodeck, La’an Noonien Singh entered a murder mystery simulation revolving around the cast and crew of a TV show from the 1960s called The Last Frontier. It was obviously meant to poke fun at Star Trek: The Original Series, and Paul Wesley, who plays James T. Kirk on Strange New Worlds, opened up about breaking out his William Shatner imitation for the events of “A Space Adventure Hour.”
While Wesley’s Kirk performance is usually relatively subdued, “A Space Adventure Hour” gave the actor the opportunity to enter caricature territory when the Enterprise’s short-lived holodeck used Kirk as the model for Maxwell Saint, the lead actor of The Last Frontier. Speaking with TVLine, Wesley had this to say about channeling William Shatner’s Kirk from the TOS days, but without going too far with the impression:
I realized immediately what an opportunity it was to give the viewers a satirical, more humorous version of what I could have done. Because I know a lot of people are like, ‘Wait a minute, where’s the pause in the cadence, and where’s the gesturing, and that Shakespearean almost element of James T. Kirk that we all know from the ’60s?’ And I thought, ‘Well, here it is. Let me do it for you now.’ And I had an absolute blast doing it… I didn’t want to overdo it, but I also wanted to do enough where it was a wink to the true fans.
Anyone who’s spent time watching the original voyages of the starship Enterprise that ran on TV from 1966 to 1969 will instantly recognize that halting, oftentimes overly dramatic dialogue reading. It’s so often used for William Shatner impressions, and now Paul Wesley has gotten to do his own within an official Star Trek production. That said, there were times during the shooting of “A Space Adventure Hour” (which also introduced a new romance for La’an) that Wesley had to pull back a little bit on the Shatner-isms, recalling:
I did, obviously, a bunch of takes. And so there were variations in the pauses, where the pause is like, ‘Is he gonna say his next line?’ And then we settled on sort of the moderate one.
Paul Wesley’s William Shatner impression was just one of the ways that “A Space Adventure Hour” served as a funny, yet heartfelt homage to both Star Trek: The Original Series and the behind-the-scenes of it all decades ago. Other examples included Anson Mount playing a Gene Roddenberry-type figure and Rebecca Romijn playing a woman who helped get The Last Frontier on the air and was heavily invested in its success, just like what Lucille Ball did for Star Trek. Unfortunately, the holodeck in this episode proved to be more trouble than its worth, so don’t expect Strange New Worlds to revisit this simulation by the time the show’s finished its five-season run.
Yes, there is an endpoint already plotted out for what’s currently the only Star Trek TV series airing. However, we have a long ways to go before reaching it, so watch new episodes Thursday on Paramount+ in the meantime. Also don’t forget that Starfleet Academy, the next of the upcoming Star Trek TV shows, will premiere in early 2026.
