The creator of Star Trek, the late Gene Roddenberry, has arrived in the form of a holographic, nervous, nebbish man, embodied by the usually heroic Anson Mount. Could Next Generation fans in the 1990s have imagined Patrick Stewart playing a metafictional, pseudo-version of Roddenberry? It’s hard to picture, but in a new episode of Strange New Worlds Season 3 — “A Space Adventure Hour” — that’s essentially what has happened: The lead of a Star Trek series, a bold starship captain, is playing a man named T.K. Bellows, a depressed TV writer, drink in hand, who presents human foibles and contradictions in surprising ways.
“Anson [Mount], when he read the script, really wanted to lean into that being Gene,” director and Star Trek legend Jonathan Frakes tells Inverse. “That started with Anson.” But how close to Roddenberry is the fictional T.K. Bellows? And is Star Trek’s new metafictional version of itself, The Last Frontier, really Star Trek-inside-of-Star Trek?
