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:
