Star Trek Legend Jonathan Frakes Breaks Down Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Holodeck Episode

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 4, "A Space Adventure Hour." Read at your own risk!]

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has earned a reputation for boldly going where no Star Trek series has gone before, with ambitious experiments like a musical episode and a crossover with characters from the animated series Lower Decks. 

But for "A Space Adventure Hour," the fourth episode of the third season, SNW takes one of its biggest swings yet, introducing a proto-version of a franchise staple, the Holodeck, to tell a classic Agatha Christie-style locked-room murder mystery tale set in 1969 with a plot that is itself a funhouse mirror version of Trek's real-world Hollywood history — including barely veiled doppelgangers for Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, original star William Shatner, and TV legend Lucille Ball, whose studio Desilu paved the way for the series.

Is it any wonder, then, that for this special episode, the SNW producers turned to one of the most dependably creative and uber-Trek-literate directors in their phone contacts: Jonathan Frakes, who as an actor has played Star Trek: The Next Generation's Will Riker for going on four decades, and established himself as an always in-demand director, having helmed fan-favorite episodes of nearly every live-action Trek series, two TNG feature films, and an array of popular non-genre television series — including Leverage, Castle, Burn Notice, NCIS: Los Angeles, and The Librarians — throughout his prolific career. 

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And Frakes told TV Guide that the opportunity to be behind the camera for what may be the franchise's most meta episode was "a gift." 

"It was a bulletproof script, and it gave those actors an opportunity to use other parts of their toolbox," Frakes said. "It was like doing [the 1996 Star Trek film] First Contact."

One of the biggest treats for Frakes was working with Anson Mount, the show's Captain Pike, to make Mount's holographic character TK Bellows, the boozy, soft-spoken creator of The Last Frontier — a much-lower-quality 1960s sci-fi TV series set on a starship — into a twisted, winking version of Roddenberry, whom Frakes had been cast and subsequently mentored by in the early days of TNG.

"Anson and I had talked about what a great idea it would be, and then I had to essentially get permission [from showrunners Henry Alonso Meyer and Akiva Goldsman]," Frakes revealed, noting that greenlight came with an admonition not to be too close to home. 

"Because Anson had asked me, I dug up some interviews [with Roddenberry] and stuff, so we leaned into it," he explained. "We didn't do it as on the nose as he doesn't look like Gene, but he certainly has adopted some of the wonderful mannerisms, and he's placed his voice in a place that reminds me very much of Gene. I think it's a hysterical performance… It's an homage to Gene, and I think the stuff that Anson's doing is astounding."

Frakes also admitted that he quietly gave Paul Wesley, who recurs on the series as a young James T. Kirk, permission to go "full Shatner" in his performance as the holographic Maxwell Saint, the hammy star of the cheesy space series, affectionately mimicking and escalating some of the icon's well-known performance quirks to great comic effect. Asked about their low-key conspiracy, "I'm shameless," Frakes admitted with a gleam in his eye. "That's my middle name, so I have to be reeled in. And so does he."

Rebecca Romijn, too, was thrilled to try on a variation of a key figure in the real world lore of the franchise. "My character, Sunny Lupino, is loosely based on Lucille Ball, who people may know — or don't know — is the person who originally greenlit the Star Trek series," said the actress, who got to play a version of the Hollywood legend that came, like Ball, with the backstory of a philandering husband, but unlike Ball, was less focused on her comedic skills and more on her reinvention as a power player in the industry.

"I thought it was such an incredible way to introduce the concept of the Holodeck for the first time, and such a genius way to do this loose retelling of the history of Star Trek disguised as this Hollywood party," said Romijn.

Despite playing the Ball avatar straight, "Rebecca's sort of wink to Lucille Ball is hysterical," enthused Frakes. "I mean, there's so much great inside-baseball stuff."

"It started out as a very different kind of episode," revealed executive producer Goldsman. "It actually started out as sort a more dramatic exploration of a show in the '60s on the Paramount lot. And then we had always also sort of longed for a Holodeck episode, so things just sort of combined, and it's one of those episodes that iterated in the room over and over and over again — sort of like sifting for, hopefully, gold. That's what was left after we sort of spent a bunch of time seeing what would fall out."

"The fun of it was imagining an alt-reality version of Star Trek," added executive producer Myers. "Meaning a Star Trek that didn't get to do three seasons, that didn't get to come back again, that didn't do all the things that were actually important to the culture that accepted and that saw a Star Trek in the '60s." 

"It's an homage to '60s television, and it was also a real acknowledgement of how hard it was to make sci-fi in those days," Goldsman continues. "And because Frakes is directing, it literally couldn't have been a more meta experience. Which then just made it ever more delightful by the inclusion of bloopers." 

The end credits of "A Space Adventure Hour" satirizes the infamous Star Trek blooper reel that was a hallmark of early fan conventions, an assembly of gaffes largely built upon the now-antiquated special effects of The Original Series' era (look for Frakes' gag parodying his own infamous move, as Wesley imitates Riker's signature way of taking a seat).

"We all had a ball," said Frakes. "First of all, we were on location, which we never are on Star Trek, for 40 years, so we were in that big, bizarrely overdone mansion for I think six days with no adult supervision, and we had the time of our lives, as you can imagine. We had a lot of creative people happy to be doing something that wasn't on a spaceship, to be frank."

Only one cast member didn't get to indulge in the fun of creating a holodeck avatar: the show's Spock, Ethan Peck. "Poor Ethan. He had to go full Spock the whole time," said Frakes. "But everyone else got to play."

But Peck was committed to his place in the story, which included another big leap: launching Spock's romantic involvement with security officer La'An, played by Christina Chong, as foreshadowed by their uniquely steamy tango lessons.

"Ethan and Chrissy took time out of their schedules and out of their weekends to go and work on the dance," said Frakes. "They brought me a version that I had to find a way to shoot, and I had to change very little because they had worked with a wonderful choreographer. So that whole part of the story, we talked about the romance, that was what we did on the set during rehearsal, but the nuts and bolts of the dancing and dialogue, they rehearsed a lot on the weekends and I used to go to the studio on the weekend and see where they were with it."

Jess Bush, who plays Christine Chapel, delighted in the opportunity to break out of the usual parameters of the series, playing Last Frontier actress Adelaide Shaw, whom Frakes characterized as a hybrid version of actress Jean Shrimpton and musician Stevie Nicks.

"It was so fun to show up at work and everyone's in these zany different outfits and just marveling at the characters that they've decided to portray and seeing how your new one interacts with theirs," said Bush. "I remember just watching Anson and being like, 'You are brilliant as this strange writer character. You are really going there and doing such a good job of it.'"

"Getting to play in my Australian accent was really an interesting experience," Bush, a native Australian, added. "I'm so used to being in an American accent at work that it's like an easy door into Chapel — as soon as I switch into it, it's a signal for my brain. But staying in my Australian accent [as Shaw] felt like weirdly exposing. I was like, 'Am I allowed to do this here? This feels strange!'"

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Bush said she feels no one was better suited to take the reins of the episode than Frakes. "He was just the perfect person to drive the ship on that one, just because his knowledge of Star Trek lore, but also his personality and the way that he commands a room," she said, "He's so vivacious and just bubbling with excitement and he's so funny, and he is not pretentious in any sense of the word. He'll come up and he'll be like, 'Oh, I gave you some really shit direction — no, I totally messed that up. Let's turn it all on its head, and you're doing great.' And he's yelling and cheering. He's just having the best time and he is really on your team, and I think that he makes you feel so at ease and you're having so much fun together making this thing."

Amidst all the meta-merriment, Frakes noted that he was especially moved by Celia Rose Gooding stepping out of her role as Uhura and into a holographic alter ego as Hollywood power agent Joanie Gloss, who gives voice to a crucial guiding tenant underlying Star Trek: how the show helps make it feel like the future includes you, no matter how different you are.

"The Celia business felt so honest, because she's speaking about how powerful sci-fi can be as a metaphor and diversity and all the things that Gene inspired in all of us that all of the people that are still making Star Trek are trying to maintain some version of and carry it on," said Frakes.

As for what Roddenberry himself might think of having an alternate version of his history with the franchise he created, Frakes says, "I hope he would see it for what it is: It's an homage; it's a spoof; it's a genre piece. But there are moments in the show which directly honor his point of view, which has kept all of us here talking about it for 59 years." 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is now streaming on Paramount+.