4 Ups And 5 Downs For Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.4 — A Space Adventure Hour

2. DOWN — Pastiche, Parody, Or Just Taking The Piss?

This week, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching the wrong TV show. Both opener and closer would have made for great sketches on Saturday Night Live (SNL). We were almost waiting for Bobby Moynihan's 'Spocko' to walk across the screen shouting, "now, THAT's a Star Trek!" or for Paul Wesley as Maxwell Saint to tell someone to "get a life".

So wrapped up in its parody of Star Trek, A Space Adventure Hour seemed to forget what it actually was — Star Trek. Far from pastiche of 1960s sci-fi more widely, the episode, at times, descended into overt, unfunny mockery of The Original Series in particular, of its creators, and stars.

The faux outtakes/behind the scenes of 'The Last Frontier' at the end of A Space Adventure Hour provided some egregious examples. Wesley as Saint was now partly free to improv his way through a series a 'Shatnerisms,' hyper-exaggerated by their very nature, but never quite so out of place.

"I was trying to get my leg over" was more than just a nod to the 'Riker manoeuvre'. Ending the entire episode on a series of grotesque 'pursings-of-the-lip' as the TOS music played was then neither pastiche nor parody. It was, quite simply, just taking the piss.