Since “The Next Generation” first powered up the holodeck, “Star Trek” episodes have been able to use the fabled sci-fi device to create whatever environment someone can program. The conceit — thanks to replicator technology, holograms, and the suspension of disbelief — has given us a pipe-smoking Data playing Sherlock Holmes, Capt. Janeway starting a morally complex relationship with an Irish barman, and the creation of Vic Fontaine and his nightclub on Deep Space Nine.
Starfleet is in the early stages of developing the holodeck in the time of “Strange New Worlds,” and Season 3’s “A Space Adventure Hour” has the USS Enterprise beta testing the technology. The episode follows holodeck episode tradition, and in it, we see the cast take on new characters, new costumes, and more than a few wigs.
Anson Mount’s Capt. Pike tasks Christina Chong’s La’an to run the nascent program through the wringer to see how it holds up. La’an, who loves a 1960s murder mystery series featuring an investigator named Amelia Moon, has Martin Quinn’s Scotty upload those stories into the holodeck’s programming, which then creates a new mystery for her to solve.
The result: Several murders in an extravagant mansion, where the suspects — wearing Enterprise crewmembers’ faces — work together on a 1960s sci-fi television show called “The Last Frontier,” and have the hair and wardrobe to prove it. Mount, for example, sports a curly hairdo and a gut to play the nebbish creator of the show, while Paul Wesley’s Kirk is an actor who plays a starship captain who delivers lines in a Shatner-esque style.
The episode, written by Dana Horgan and Kathryn Lyn, jumps from scenes on the psychedelic set of “The Last Frontier,” to the gaudy mansion where the murder mystery unfolds, to the USS Enterprise, where Scotty and the real crew face challenges of their own after the holodeck refuses to shut down and drains the Starfleet ship’s power at inopportune moments. Things veer into silly territory, but “A Space Adventure Hour” also contains a soupçon of earnestness about the importance of sci-fi shows from that time.
The episode, in fact, was originally planned as a straightforward exploration of a 1960s sci-fi show very similar to “The Original Series,” and how Gene Roddenberry’s vision was an inflection point in both American and television history. Getting to that point, however, was a challenge for the writers.
“We just weren’t good enough,” said Akiva Goldsman in an IndieWire interview with his co-showrunner, Henry Alonso Myers. “God knows we tried, and we kept running up against either things we didn’t know how to reflect or weren’t right for the form. And so the deeper we got into it, a less earnest look started to evolve.”
Ultimately, Goldsman explained, the ‘60s sci-fi show became “the stone in the soup” around the rest of the story, resulting in a classic holodeck tale that also moves forward a romantic relationship between two characters. Production for the episode began two weeks before filming, and involved costumes galore (almost all of which were made in-house) and creating two new sets.
“The Last Frontier”
The bridge of “The Last Frontier” is colorfully zany, full of bulbous knobs and dials, and — like many shows of the ‘60s — appears to be thrown together in a short amount of time with minimal budget.
Making the set look relatively unpolished compared to today’s expectations was, according to Myers, “weirdly challenging” for the departments. “We kept having to be like, ‘This is great. We need this to be simpler. This is great. We need this to look cheaper, but real.’”
“It was on the verge of being corny. In fact, it was openly corny, I think here and there,” production designer Jonathan Lee told IndieWire. “But we just leaned into the whole thing.”
Inspirations for Lee and costume designer Bernadette Croft (besides “The Original Series,” of course) included the Dan Dare comics, “Lost in Space,” “The Outer Limits,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Further efforts to make the show of a certain age included using hot tungsten lights rather than their usual LED setup and having the bridge’s video screen merely be a hole in the wall.
That hole in the wall shows us the antagonistic Agonyan, played by Kira Guloien, who we also saw as the multi-armed bartender in the season’s second episode. “We wanted to make it look like we dumpster dived for fabrics and just threw it together, like they would have done in the ‘60s, especially with last-minute notice,” Croft explained.
The “crafty” look of the alien was complemented by the glitter, velour, and corduroy Croft used for the characters Wesley, Jess Bush, and Melissa Navia played. And when the shot zooms out and we see the cameras and production crew for the 1960s set, we also hear another voice that may be familiar to Trekkies.
We don’t see the director of the “Last Frontier” episode onscreen, though we do hear someone say, “Keep rolling! Keep rolling!” That’s the voice of “Star Trek” veteran Jonathan Frakes, who is the director of this “Strange New Worlds” episode. “Frakes was very present in a lot of this,” said Myers. “He’s very good at making it a fun place to play, and he very much gave that energy on set.”
Everyone enjoyed shooting “The Last Frontier” scenes so much, in fact, that they added one or two extra filming days on that set, including the bloopers we see at the end of the episode. “A lot of that came from Jonathan [Frakes],” said Lee. “He spotted things and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if that happened?’ So we had a door that fell off, and we built the chair with this loose panel on the side, so that if somebody just hits it the right way, it would just fall over. These were all very carefully designed. There were no accidents to any of them at all … and the blooper reel was hilarious.”
Murder in a Mansion
The place where all the holodeck murders happen was on location, and finding the right mansion was a challenge. “We spent weeks looking for the right house, and we just couldn’t find anything that had the quirkiness that we were looking for,” said Lee.
After going through several options, Lee visited one north of Toronto that was described to him as a bit over the top: “The owner of this house was very passionate about France, and there were portraits of Napoleon, and the detailing of the house was just extraordinary — his architect put all this very elaborate Old French style architecture in there.”
Lee knew it was the place the minute he walked in the door. And when he shared the images with Frakes, the director “exploded with joy.”
The Canadian mansion became the place for murder, and the crew spent four or five days ramping up the gaudiness of the house with new wall art and other key pieces of dressing. All that was missing was the actors in their costumes.
Almost all of those costumes, with a few exceptions like Kirk’s leather jacket and turtleneck, were made in-house by Croft’s team. The actors all loved donning the new clothes and their new characters. “The best thing is how excited the cast is,” said Croft. “They get into it — they’re so excited, it’s infectious.”
Take Rebecca Romijn’s Lucille Ball-inspired character, Sunny Lupino, whose power dress involved the most expensive fabric ever bought for the show. “She had once been an actress or model, and now she’s the head of a studio, and she’s got all this power,” said Croft. “So we did this late ‘60s mod dress with this beautiful, beaded embellishment that really caught the light and sparkled.”
Mount also delved into portraying TK Bellows, the creator of “The Last Frontier.” “He called me, and was like, ‘I think I need some padding,’” said Croft. “It was interesting to build a belly for Anson, and I think it really helped him get into the character. Because once you have a different physique, you slouch or change the cadence of your walk. And even the way he was posing and stuff, like he was always slouched in the chair. It was so great to see him literally the opposite of this handsome, strapping, commanding leader.”
It Ends with a Kiss
“A Space Adventure Hour” also sees La’an and Ethan Peck’s Spock kiss for the first time, something that was originally supposed to happen two episodes ago in “Wedding Bell Blues.” But as the story for the holodeck episode came together, including figuring out the whodunnit for the murder mystery, the writers realized that the awakening of the romance between the two characters made more sense here.
“Henry and I had pairs of scissors just cutting around the stuff we shot [for “Wedding Bell Blues,”] because that was supposed to be the first kiss,” Goldsman said, referencing the dancing scene in episode 302 between La’an and Spock.
“We were trying very hard to make a murder mystery that had a great twist at the end, one that would flip the story,” added Myers. That twist has Spock — more specifically, the holodeck’s replication of Spock that La’an, until the end, thinks is the real Spock — be the murderer. La’an figures it out because she’s been falling for the Vulcan. She knows what kind of person he is, and the holodeck’s version of him reacts in ways the real Spock wouldn’t.
La’an confesses all of this to Spock (while they’re once again dancing, of course) once she solves the mystery and escapes the holodeck. The two kiss.
“It’s one of our favorite types of endings on the show,” said Myers about that romantic moment. “It’s both gripping, and it also makes you go, ‘Well, what’s happening next week?’”
“A Space Adventure Hour” is now streaming on Paramount+. New episodes of the show are released weekly.
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