This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 4.Today’s Star Trek is not like your granddad’s Star Trek. Gone are the shaky sets, the wildly incorrect science, and the scenery-chewing acting. But if you tuned into “A Space Adventure Hour,” this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, that is exactly what you saw. This hour features tape-driven computers, a view screen that is clearly just a hole in the wall, and a puppet alien demanding “brain cells to power their radiation” before firing “nuclear lasers.”As if all of that wasn’t enough, Paul Wesley, the actor who has made the role of James T. Kirk his own with his thoughtful and understated performance, appeared to be doing … a William Shatner impression?“Yeah, but boy he leaned into it didn’t he?” says Jonathan Frakes, who directed the episode. “He was working it, he committed. I thought it was quite fearless, I really enjoyed that. I think we honor Bill and Kirk in a way.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});It turns out the show we were watching was not Star Trek, but The Last Frontier, a 1960s TV show whose production team were the subject of a murder mystery that has been adapted in the prototype holodeck program.Within that story in a story in a story was a playground where the Strange New Worlds production team could make a funhouse mirror reflection of Star Trek’s original series.“It was still wonderfully camp and arch and absurd, and all the different departments seemed to come together and knew how to tonally wink at that,” Frakes tells us. “It wasn’t as serious as TOS, it was an homage, but it was also its own little wild animal.”Frakes has a long history with Star Trek. He was, of course, Commander William Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, a role which led to his first directing gig. He has gone on to become a prolific television director in his own right, but that career has included Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, two Star Trek movies (First Contact and Insurrection), the videogame Star Trek Klingon, and every live action iteration of the new next generation Star Treks – Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds.But there is also another side to that career. While he was still on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Frakes played a comedic version of himself on the sitcom Cybill, which included a romantic scene from a Trek-esque show opposite Cybill Shepherd in full lizard makeup. He directed the pilot of the comedy, Star Patrol, sadly never picked up for a full series, but which was definitely riffing on some Star Trek like ideas. And much more recently, he has directed a number of episodes of The Orville, a show that at least initially marketed itself of something like a TNG parody, even if it eventually turned out to be something far more sincere. But Frakes always goes into these parodies carrying a respect for the source material.“I think I’m always conscious, a lot of us are, of honoring Gene [Roddenberry]’s vision, if you will. All the shows have been successful because of his commitment to a world with no hunger, no greed, no sexism, no racism, and an appreciation of that,” he says.Star Trek the Show vs. the Star Trek in Your HeadThis isn’t the first time that Star Trek has shown us a more parodical version of itself, right down to the Shatner impressions. The more child-orientated animated series Star Trek: Prodigy featured the episode “All the World’s a Stage,” which introduced the “Enderprizians”, a culture inspired by and based on a 23rd century Starfleet officer’s teachings to create a sort of TOS-parody world.“An aspect of Star Trek’s place in popular culture that was top of mind for me as I was writing the episode was the curious phenomenon in which memetics allow bits of modern folklore to evolve and become distinct from their primary origins, while still conveying some aspect of the original,” says Aaron J. Waltke, co-executive producer of Star Trek: Prodigy and writer of “All the World’s a Stage.” “A couple examples are the phrase ‘Beam Me Up, Scotty!’ which was famously never uttered in The Original Series … or the ‘Shatner’ impression with a womanizing swagger and halting staccato rhythm that has become so divorced from how Kirk actually behaved. It is really an impression of an impression of an impression. And yet, it’s immediately recognizable by most people who have never seen a single episode of the series.”That pop culture idea of Star Trek, rather than the show as it exists in our DVD boxed sets and streaming services, also informed author John Scalzi when he was writing his novel, Redshirts.“Obviously Star Trek, particularly TOS, was a huge, huge influence (I mean, the title),” Scalzi tells us. “But one reason to make the show in the book a knock-off of Star Trek was to give myself more latitude than I might have if I addressed the show directly. Also, of course, there would be trademark issues, which is a practical reason not to delve into the specifics of the Star Trek universe and instead keep it general.”That said, not everyone agrees that the often parodied pop culture idea of Trek is all that different from the show itself.Paul Cornell wrote the “Year Five” Star Trek comic, designed to be a continuation of the original 1960s series.“I think the pop culture idea of Trek only departs from the actual in a couple of places, notably Kirk as a Casanova (when he’s really all about duty),” says Cornell. “In my Kirk romance comic, I tried to push hard toward the onscreen, largely monogamous, version.”Infinite Parodies in Infinite CombinationsOther Star Trek parodies use Trek’s place in pop culture as the basis for the humor. Murderbot’s corporate dystopia is about as far from Star Trek as you can get, but it’s in-universe show, Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, definitely has some familiar Trek-ish elements, right down to the show’s Captain being played by former Sulu, John Cho.“One of the conceits we liked the idea of for Sanctuary Moon is if an AI had been tasked with creating all entertainment and creating most of the stuff that is broadcast, what would the bastard child of that constant churning and reiterating of the most popular shows look like?” says Sue Chan, production designer on Murderbot. “Star Trek on steroids plus Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, if you took the cheesiest parts of those and put them in one show. If Murderbot is being informed by all these insanely overcooked aspects of humanity, what would they look like? So we just went for it, and it’s a nice contrast to what’s really going on.”The differences between the characters in Murderbot and Sanctuary Moon are immediately obviously.“[In Sanctuary Moon] everything is stand and deliver. They don’t debate anything. Everything is a proclamation,” says Chan. “So their set has to be a proclamation. It can’t have any subtlety to it whatsoever. Our real show has to be contrasted to that.”John Scalzi’s Redshirts, like Sanctuary Moon and Strange New Worlds’ A Last Frontier is also about a fictional TV show within a story, but rather than heightening the melodrama, Scalzi adds a sense of reality to the well-worn tropes.“The thing that most drew me to the novel was the fact that people tended to treat ‘redshirts’ pretty much as a joke and a trope – we all know someone is going to die for drama purposes, and it’s not going to be someone whose name is in the opening credits,” says Scalzi. “But the fact is, in universe, every one of those redshirts was a highly-motivated, highly-competent individual. They staffed the flagship of the Federation! They went to the Academy! And so on. I wanted to take that trope and make readers see the people behind it.”If you start talking about Star Trek parodies, you are on a ticking timer until someone brings up one title in particular, another story about a show-within-a-show.“I mean, Galaxy Quest, come on, it’s one of the best Star Trek movies and everyone knows it,” says Scalzi. “It nails both the ridiculousness of the universes shows exist in, and the camaraderie that made the shows work.”“That honored Star Trek in the most amazing way,” Frakes says. “I remember going to see it and thinking these people had read our mail. I called Patrick and said, ‘You’ve got to go see this movie!’ I saw it on a Friday, he went to see it twice that weekend, the stuff in that movie is a perfect example.”“It’s really hard to go wrong with Galaxy Quest,” Waltke agrees, adding, “I thought Black Mirror‘s ‘USS Callister’ was an incredible take on the dark side of sci-fi escapism that could have easily been worthy of Star Trek, that somehow still manages to find hope in what amounts to a holodeck nightmare episode.”Waltke is also a fan of the way Star Trek continues to proliferate through pop culture ephemera.“I believe you can find a crashed runabout in Fallout 2,” he points out. “Even Care Bears spent a significant portion of their final season in the 1980s doing an extended Star Trek parody!The Frontier of Parody and ParodiedAs much as Galaxy Quest has made an impact on Star Trek fandom, it is easy to wonder if it hasn’t also changed Trek itself. How a franchise responds to parody can have a big impact.“Fictional worlds with no self-mockery get into trouble,” says Paul Cornell. “For instance, Bond when they found Austin Powers had annexed all the fun.”It is easy to see the low-key, gritty, almost minimalistic Casino Royale as a response to parodies like Austin Powers and Johnny English (which was written by the same people as Casino Royale), and you might wonder if Galaxy Quest played a role in the more flashy, kinetic Star Trek J.J. Abrams brought to the big screen in 2009.Frakes doesn’t believe this is the case.“I don’t think the parodies harm us or help us. I think they exist as part of the Star Trek world,” he says.That said, he acknowledges the clear stylistic differences between the latest iteration of Star Trek and its predecessors.“We were encouraged on Discovery to be very cinematic, as we are in Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy,” he says. “The Alex Kutzman Star Treks are certainly very cinematic compared to the Rick Burman Star Treks.”Scalzi believes that as well as becoming more cinematic, Trek has also become more willing to poke fun at itself.“One thing that has changed is that Star Trek (and its creative teams) are much more willing to parodize themselves!” he says. “You see it most obviously in Lower Decks, but Strange New Worlds has been happy to offer up meta-commentary on the Star Trek universe more occasionally. Star Trek is now observing itself in ways it only infrequently did before, and I think that’s a good and fun thing. “But ultimately, Frakes and Cornell both agree that Star Trek does not have much to fear from its parodies precisely because humor is so baked into the franchise from the start.“There’s no comedy bit about Trek I wouldn’t do within Trek. Trek is healthy enough to deal,” Cornell says. “I think the biggest fictional worlds always have parody built in. They come pre-mocked. Hence Lower Decks, in universe but also a parody, a vein which has existed in healthy Trek since TOS. (For instance, Shatner’s perfect straight man Kirk in “The Trouble with Tribbles.”)”Frakes agrees that, on a visual level, Strange New Worlds looks a lot more like the popular idea of Star Trek than Discovery, even if both shows are ultimately Star Trek in their bones, but he also points out that Strange New Worlds has a lot more levity, and hints that this element is also coming through in the latest look at the 32nd century Trek universe.“I just did the first half of the finale of Starfleet Academy, which has thankfully some of the levity which has always been important for Star Trek,” Frakes tells us. “You go back to Bones and Kirk and Spock, we on Next Gen aspired to find some of that quality which was the core of those three characters. You love the way they took the piss out of each other, that was part of the charm of the show.”But if humor is an essential part of great Trek, it might also be true that sincerity is an essential part of its best parodies. There’s a reason Scalzi refers to Galaxy Quest as one of the best Star Trek movies in its own right.When asked what parodies often miss, Scalzi says, “Often, the optimism. Parodies are focused on the absurdities of the show, and that’s perfectly fine! But it’s optimism that is central to nearly every iteration. It’s hard to parodize effectively. Easy to mock! Hard to parodize.”There’s a theory that every actor in a Doctor Who parody is secretly doing an audition, and the same may be true of Trek. Even this year’s continuation of Black Mirror’s “USS Callister,” as far from Trek’s optimism as you can get, had a plot that almost precisely played straight one of the very earliest TOS episodes, “Charlie X” – where the monster is an all powerful but emotionally immature being with a creepy attitude to women. And the ending, while obviously having a dark Black Mirror-esque twist, still fits neatly into Star Trek’s themes of crew and found family.“If I had to offer one critique [of Trek parodies], it would probably be when a parody gets too caught up in the superficial trappings without having something earnest to say about the story itself,” says Waltke. “Not that I don’t love John Belushi throwing himself around the bridge of the Enterprise, but for me, a great parody can cut to the quick of what its subject was aiming for, and rework it into a philosophical jest. Then again, maybe I’m expecting too much from a silly little sketch… but the ones that work on more than surface level stand the test of time!”This was certainly true of Waltke’s episode “All the World’s a Stage”.“We wanted to focus on the quirkiness of ’60s Jet Age science fiction that served as the foundation for Star Trek,” he says. “For modern audiences, they may seem a bit unusual… but deep down, even the kitschy kirk-fu and flimsy particle board sets still embrace the same core values of exploration, courage and selflessness that Starfleet represents.”And “A Space Adventure Hour” is an episode that is not afraid to joke at the expense of some of the cheesier aspects of old fashioned Star Trek, as well as some of the behind the scenes drama of The Original Series, but at the end of the day it is a celebration of what made Star Trek special.As Frakes tells us, “Celia [Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura] has that moment where she talks about how important the diversity is, and she’s talking about herself, about Uhura, about the world that we live in, and it’s all woven in seamlessly by the writers.”New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.The post “A Space Adventure Hour” Reveals Why Modern Star Trek Is Defined by Parodies appeared first on Den of Geek.