Paramount+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? Mild spoilers ahead.“A Space Adventure Hour”Strange New Worlds uses a Hollywood murder mystery to get meta on Star Trek itself. | Marni Grossman/Paramount+The conceit of Strange New Worlds Season 3, Episode 4, “A Space Adventure” hour is, perhaps, triply metatextual. Not only is this a holodeck-gone-wrong story in the mold of a Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager romp (“The Big Goodbye” “Our Man Bashir,” and certainly, “Bride of Chaotica!” are referenced lovingly here) but the holodeck itself creates a secondary piece of metafiction: In order to test the holodeck tech La’an plays a detective named Amelia Moon who is investigating a murder connected to a 1960s science fiction TV series called The Last Frontier. The set-up here recalls more than a little bit of Picard’s obsession with hardboiled detective Dixon Hill, with an obvious nod to Carmen Sandiego (that hat!), and a less obvious reference to Shadow Spade.But as much as La’an’s turn as an old-timey detective is charmingly nostalgic, Trek fans will probably be laser-focused on the meta-Star Trek elements within this simulation. Paul Wesley plays an actor named Maxwell Saint, whose over-the-top starship captain is not just a William Shatner send-up, but perhaps the strangest blending of both a real character and a parody at the same time. “Paul said: ‘How far can I take this?’” Frakes reveals. “And I said: ‘Why don’t you take it as far as you can?’ I think the elements he brought were just delicious. But, also, going forward, that we’re plugging the idea that his Kirk is the next generation, if you will.”This year, another Trek alum, John Cho, played another faux Kirk-ish starship captain in Murderbot’s Trek-ish spoof, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.” Combined with Black Mirror’s return to “Space Fleet” in Season 7 this year, it does make one wonder if we’re reaching critical mass for tongue-in-cheek Star Trek spoofs. Has the cultural memory of what the 1960s Star Trek felt like been replaced with what it really was?Creating Meta-Trek“The first version of this episode was actually quite literal,” Strange New Worlds showrunner Akiva Goldsman tells Inverse. “There was a version where we were going to do an episode about the making of Star Trek; about sort of that moment where Lucille Ball saves Desilu [Studios.] But, ultimately, it felt weird if we were going back and meeting Gene Roddenberry and all of those other things with our characters. So we tried to make it reflective of the story about how the [original] show came about, but not actually be that story.”Jess Bush, Melissa Navia, and Paul Wesley, as imagined versions of different space explorers in the metafictional series, The Last Frontier. | Paramount+What Goldsman is referring to is the fact that in real life, Lucille Ball, famous star of I Love Lucy, was the head of the studio that first produced the original Star Trek, and was an early champion of the show. When Star Trek first debuted in 1966, Ball even sent a letter of congratulations to Roddenberry, indicating that she wanted the series to succeed. In this Last Frontier universe, the analogy for Ball is Sunny Lupino, played here by Rebecca Romijn. This bit of casting is also a nod to Star Trek’s history because in SNW, Romijn plays Number One, a character first played by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry’s long-time partner and the woman who would later be known as “The First Lady of Star Trek.”But, in the breezy narrative of “A Space Adventure Hour”, the analogs to both real Star Trek and real Star Trek history are largely aesthetic, rather than historically accurate. Yes, there is a ridiculous TOS episode called “Spock’s Brain,” but it isn’t nearly as silly as the cold-open spoof version in this Strange New Worlds episode. And Gene Roddenberry didn’t really act the way Mount portrays J.K. Bellows. Or, wait. Did he?Riker and The Real RoddenberryGene Roddenberry and Jonathan Frakes back in the day. | TrekLand/Larry NemecekBecause this episode was directed by Jonathan Frakes, the actor-turned-director was in a unique position on the set. Frakes not only shares a birthday with Roddenberry, August 19, but he was also personally cast by the Trek creator himself, back when Roddenberry essentially rebooted the Star Trek franchise with The Next Generation in 1987. So, if there is anyone who could guide Anson Mount on how to create a faux-Gene Roddenberry, it is almost certainly Will Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes.“I was thrilled with Anson’s idea of that character being Gene,” Frakes explains. “He captured the physicality of it; he put on the belly. He really went for it.” Frakes also says that the showrunners “reined us in a little” bit to make it clear that this wasn’t a direct representation of Gene Roddenberry in any real sense. And yet one revelation in the story, that J.K. Bellows was planning on quitting The Last Frontier, does reflect reality, relative to the history of Trek. For Star Trek’s third season (1968-1969), Roddenberry stepped back from much of the day-to-day production of the show. And in 1986, before he created The Next Generation, Roddenberry was, by all accounts, thinking about retiring entirely. Essentially, it was only a strange proposal for a different Trek reboot that got him back in the game, with a desire to create a new version of Star Trek, his way.So, the Strange New Worlds shadow version of Roddenberry, J.K. Bellows, does represent some of the contradictory aspects of the famed writer. Roddenberry was idealistic, but he was also complicated. He was a dreamer, but a businessman who was constantly trying to figure out how to make more money from his most famous creation. In this way, Strange New Worlds walks an interesting line between lionizing Roddenberry and lovingly mocking him. “Anson is not playing Captain Pike,” Frakes says of the performance. “I think it was absolute magic.”Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+.Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the WorldAmazon -