There was no way Chris Pine was getting through an entire Saturday Night Live hosting gig without a Star Trek sketch, but you can tell that the writers weren’t all that into the idea. Or rather, they were really into a lot of other ideas—Cousin Oliver syndrome, novelty surf records, Neil deGrasse Tyson—and so they shoehorned them in to the obligatory Star Trek premise, creating this weird, hilarious hodgepodge. The sketch is ostensibly a “lost episode” of the original Star Trek series, in which producers, in a harebrained attempt to attract younger viewers, cast a drunken nightclub singer named Sal Delabate (Bobby Moynihan) as “Spocko,” Spock’s half-brother from Queens. As deGrasse Tyson says after one of the clips: “Wow. A lot to unpack there.”
Going back to the 1960s would have been a smart move even if the writers weren’t planning on ending with a Beach Party Bingo musical number, because it gives Pine the opportunity to ape last season’s Captain Kirk. Everybody has a William Shatner impression (even William Shatner), but Pine’s is worth watching—he doesn’t overdo the pauses and gets the posture just right. But that’s pretty much the only part of the sketch that’s about Star Trek in any way—the rest of it is just watching Bobby Moynihan deliver Spocko’s catch phrase (“Now that’s a star trek!”) and perform his big hit, “Pizza Beach.” Which, honestly, is everything you could ever want from a sketch about Star Trek.
