Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live featured a sketch that served as a parody of both Star Trek and Thanksgiving dinner.
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The sketch featured guest host Steve Carrell as the leader of a space exploration team, not unlike a Starfleet away team. The team has made first contact with an alien species is preparing to enjoy a traditional meal with the race’s representatives.
The meal involves a food called kern, that is very much like Earth’s corn, only that it is purple and where corn has kernels, kern has cornels. Oh, and also it screams in pain when you eat it.
The sketch revolves around funny, almost the same sounding words and the idea of the space team trying to figure out what to do about eating what may be a sentient creature. They don’t struggle with it too long, and the sketch gets a bit out of hand as the actors knock over pieces of the set, swap the wrong words out, struggle with switching to the close-up of the screaming kern, and fail to keep their composure and break out laughing.
You can watch the entire bit above.
While Star Trek, for the most part, has avoided tradition holiday-themed episodes, Thanksgiving has popped up a few times over the course of its history. In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Charlie X,’ the crew of the USS Enterprise is preparing to have their Thanksgiving dinner. Captain Kirk bemoans the fact that they’re serving meatloaf because there’s no turkey on the ship, at least until Charles Evans – the titular “Charlie X” – uses his incredible powers to transform the meatloaf into turkey while it is in the oven.
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Blaze of Glory,” Deep Space Nine’s former Starfleet security officer turned Maquis defector Michael Eddington remembers that Captain Sisko cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for the staff on the space station. Knowing that Sisko is the son of a chef and takes pride in his own cooking, Eddington tries to get under Sisko’s skin by telling him he used too much tarragon in the stuffing.
In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “The Observer Effect,” a scene from Commander Tucker’s childhood shows his father placing a Thanksgiving turkey on the table before Trip can warn him that he has removed the screws from the table, earning him a grounding.
What do you think of SNL‘s “Space Thanksgiving” sketch? Let us know in the comments!
