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.
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:
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.