Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has proven that it can boldly go where no show has gone before with great success. The Paramount+ series has tackled a fairy tale, a musical, a partly animated crossover with Lower Decks, a murder mystery, and others. And in Season 4, as announced at San Diego Comic-Con, there will be a puppet episode!
And so when TV Insider spoke with Paul Wesley, who plays Kirk (not yet a captain), we had to ask if he’s going to be in the puppet episode.
“I’m not in that episode, unfortunately, so I can’t speak to it. But I have seen some stuff and it is just pure brilliance,” he said. “I am jealous that I’m not in it actually.”
We do know that we will see Puppet Pike; the first look at him was revealed during the Comic-Con panel and can be seen in the photo below.
Paramount+
Wesley did have fun with Season 3’s murder mystery episode, “A Space Adventure Hour,” playing, in the holodeck simulation, the actor who stars as the captain on The Last Frontier, a take on the originalStar Trek.
“What I love about Strange New Worlds is that every single episode is its own movie. It’s an episodic series with serialized elements, but at the end of the day, you can actually tune in, and each episode is a completely different theme. It’s almost like everything is obviously a space adventure, but in a weird way, you’re exploring so many different genres,” he said.
For his character, Maxwell Saint, “I wanted to give the fans a little bit of a treat by doing the sort of, I guess, for lack of a better word, satirical pop culture version of William Shatner‘s Kirk,” Wesley shared. “Obviously, it’s exaggerated, it’s fun, it’s meant to be playful, but it was an opportunity for me to do that so that fans who love The Original Series can feel that nostalgia because my approach to Kirk when I first got this role was to create my own version of Kirk that didn’t have any of the sort of mimicking copycat version of what William Shatner did. And this was a great opportunity to do the opposite of that, which was sort of try to emulate a little bit of his performance in the ’60s, but with a comedic twist.”
What are you hoping to see from the puppet episode? Let us know in the comments section below.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+