Twenty-two years ago, Lucy Lawless wasn’t just playing Xena, she was part of one of SNL’s greatest ever sketches. Sam Brooks pays tribute to Stevie Nicks Fajita Round-Up.

The year is 1998. Jenny Shipley is prime minister, we win zero medals at the Olympics, and an actress named Lucy Lawless is the first New Zealander to host American TV sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. We’re at the height of Xenamania, and Lawless is not just the most famous person in New Zealand, but the most famous New Zealander in the world.

Looking back at the episode feels more like looking into some strange funhouse mirror rather than into a part of television history. Lawless’ monologue, New Zealand accent fully intact, rests entirely on a stretched-out joke about how Xena is a lesbian, complete with Tina Fey dressed like a trucker. It has not aged well, to put it nicely. Elliott Smith (RIP) is the musical guest. The sketches include one where Will Ferrell plays a sexually aggressive nude model, and one where Lawless plays a stripper clown who has to argue a case in front of Judge Judy. I guess we expected different things from our comedy in 1998.

Saturday Night Live is one of those cultural institutions that never quite properly reached our shores. One obvious reason is that it was never regularly broadcast here; another is that we don’t share a tradition of watching televised sketch comedy at midnight on a Saturday. I don’t count this as a flaw in New Zealand culture, trust me.

Every now and then a sketch breaks out and make headlines here – think Tina Fey and Amy Poehler playing Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton, or Alec Baldwin puckering his lips and calling it an impression of Donald Trump. But mostly SNL is something that comes over here in drips, drabs and YouTube clips, free of episode-long context. And in the pre-YouTube era? Forget about it, with the exception of legendary clips like ‘More Cowbell!’ or the Debbie Downer sketches.

The other reason it never really took off here? A lot of SNL stuff is by design disposable. It’s a fast turnaround sketch show hosted by somebody who might not necessarily be very funny or good at live comedy. When SNL hits, it hits hard – any episode with Melissa McCarthy is wall-to-wall gold solely due to her commitment to the material she’s given – but it misses about as much as you’d expect it to, given that it’s a full 90 minutes of comedy written and performed in a single week.

But I’m not here to talk about Saturday Night Live. I’m here to talk about one of the best sketches that the show has ever done, one of the greatest pieces of comedy involving a New Zealander ever, and one has dug deep into my brain since I saw it on some off-brand video hosting website a few years ago: Stevie Nicks Fajita Round-Up.

The concept is very, very dumb, right from the intro line:

“Hello, I’m Stevie Nicks. Do you like the music of my band, Fleetwood Mac? And do you like fajitas, flautas, quesadillas, and other Tex-Mex specialties? ”

Yup. That’s the sketch. It’s a commercial for a Stevie Nicks Tex-Mex restaurant called Stevie Nicks Fajita Round-Up. Lucy Lawless, commits to Nicks’ goat-bleat of a voice and flowy mannerisms (complete with fan blowing her hair around all witch-like) and sings Fleetwood Mac songs turned into jingles that hawk burritos, fajitas and other Mexican food “for an affordable dining experience you’ll never forget”.

To wit:

You placed an order, I wrote it down.
Three enchiladas, the best in town.
Then I saw my reflection in a big pile of nachos.
Until a landslide brought it down

It’s dumb as hell, and in an interview a few years ago, Lawless herself admits that she doesn’t really get it. I was also surprised that she came to SNL with a Nicks impression prepared, because a Stevie Nicks tex-mex restaurant feels like the kind of idea that some impossibly outre homosexual (I say this from a place of identification, not judgement) would have had in his back pocket for five years, rather than something that comes from the host.

It’s one of those sketches that shouldn’t work. Lawless wasn’t known for her comedy, and I doubt anybody was expecting her to pull a spot-on Stevie Nicks out of her Xena armour. It’s also one of the rare SNL sketches that not only doesn’t outstay its welcome at a crisp two and a half minutes but rests entirely on the guest host’s shoulders. Then add the fact that it relies on one of the hackiest comedy tropes in the book: swapping out serious lyrics for funny lyrics that rhyme. By rights, Stevie Nicks Fajita Round-Up should have been forgotten alongside the hundreds of sketches performed by hosts who can’t even read cue-cards convincingly, let alone carry a sketch.

But damn if it’s not one of the best comedy clips I’ve ever seen, and one that I could watch on repeat quite comfortably for the rest of my life. Every time I pick up something new, whether it’s the way Lawless elongates the second syllable of “cocaaaaaine” or how truly spot-on and awful the photos of the food are.

And it’s solely thanks to the commitment of one plucky New Zealander, doing her damnedest not just to mimic Stevie Nicks, but to show us what it would be like if music’s most notorious sorceress truly did open a Tex-Mex restaurant in the heart of Arizona. Bless you, Lucy. You’re more than Xena, you’re more than one of New Zealand’s most iconic performers and climate change activists. You’re also the bastion of one of New Zealand’s greatest comedy exports, and I bow down to you for it.

The Frenchest man to helm a starship is back! The first episode of Star Trek: Picard is out, and José Barbosa and Josie Adams have some thoughts.

Warning: contains spoilers (kind of a big one)

Josie Adams

Captain Jean-Luc Picard was a father figure to me for a couple of years, so seeing him back on screens is how I imagine dogs feel when their owners come home from war. I felt exactly like this and I will not take it back. Picard is my dad and I have been barking at the door for 17 years.

If dogs could write fan fiction about their owners coming home from war, what they’d write would also be pretty similar to Picard. It opens with an Enterprise-esque ship soaring through the colourful cosmos, with Bing Crosby’s ‘Blue Skies’ playing as Picard and old mate Data play a game of space cards.

My dad and my boyfriend are accompanied by a massive jug of Earl Grey, hot, by the gallon. It’s too good to be true. Watching, I turn to José and tell him I reckon this is a dream. Yeah, I’m a pretty experienced cultural commentator.

Episode one remains fanfic-esque until about two-thirds of the way through. Dahj is the Mary Sue insert, an emotionally fragile fleshbot just looking for safety while wearing a cool coat. It’s basically the dreams I used to have about being in Bladerunner. Then she dies!! But did she?? Kind of! This scene made me racist, because after it I immediately viewed Picard’s Romulan staff with a suspicious eye. 

Sir Patrick Stewart is doing the heavy lifting in this episode, which is super unfair because he deserves a better cast after pulling his acting muscles playing Professor X for so many years. Thank God Allison Pill, nerd actress extraordinaire, shows up. I gather that in the next episode the crew will assemble and we’ll also get a gruff young gun pilot and some muscle/black ops expert. 

Traditionally, Trek opening titles tell us something about the show: whether it’s explicitly “going where no-one has gone before” or just showing us the Deep Space 9 space station whirling around a wormhole. The opening titles to Picard are vaguely biological: microorganisms unfurling, pixels replicating, your standard close-up Orphan Black stuff. Is this about AI? GE?

The answer appears to be both, but we don’t yet know if Picard is a Westworld robot. What we do know is that this episode establishes J.J. Abram’s 2009 insult to the Federation as canon: the Romulan supernova really happened. Fuck that noise. I’m sticking around to see Seven of Nine show up and then I’m out.

Side note: It looks like Data’s daughters, just like their father, fuck.

José Barbosa

For the longest time I’ve had one all-embracing unified theory of entertainment media: everything is shit now. Generally speaking, every reboot or prequel or spinoff or ‘reimagining’ of a successful IP is basically terrible. It either completely forgets what made the original special or photocopies ideas and jokes or visual motifs and upscales them to 1080p.

Into this climate came the news Sir Patrick Stewart would be reprising the role of everyone’s favourite RSC French man, Jean-Luc Picard, in a new series focussing on the former captain of the Enterprise D. “This will be shit,” I thought, remembering how everything is shit.

And then the Watchmen series came along and Lindelof and crew knocked it out of the park, taking the best of the lauded comic book and making it fresh and funny and intense and, most of all, taking all that and using it to examine something really important.

“Oh wow,” I thought, my world rocked to its core, “maybe not everything is shit.” 

I began to hope that maybe Picard would not be shit. 

Unfortunately, Picard is shit. 

OK, actually the first episode of Picard is shit. And by shit I mean it’s fiiinnneee, but really, it’s shit. The dialogue falls from the sky like aviation waste: “I knew what to do. It was like lightning seeking the ground.” 

Characters make out-of-the-blue decisions that make no sense. For example, Dahj (a young woman mysteriously linked to Picard) tracks down Picard because she feels somehow she’ll be safe, but then nicks off in the middle of the night because she was worried for the safety of her hosts. 

The one genuine surprise comes about two thirds of the way through the episode where Dahj, until then placed as a crucial character to the story’s plot, explodes; murdered by some bad guys with StarLord’s guns. It’s completely undone two scenes later where it’s explained that synthetic robot people are always made in pairs. Why? They just are, whatever … it doesn’t matter because it means there’s another one of her out there and we can use the same actor. It’s a win-win, take an early lunch, people. 

Amusingly, the next biggest surprise that actually made Josie and I gasp was the appearance of Discovery-era Spock! Well, we thought it was Spock, turns out it was some Romulan guy who looked a hell of a lot like Spock. 

Picard is really just fine. The series does look great, possibly the lushest dynamic range in which Star Trek has ever been shot since the original series and some of TNG (oosh give me more film masters plz). It’s a treat to see Sir Stew get his teeth into something and not phone it in (hello, all of the X-Men films) and I’ll never get tired of seeing science fiction people use keyboards to pilot machine or vehicles like they’re typing in commands while playing Zork.  

But if the story of the series (or season) is to revolve around AI, do I have any faith it’ll be explored with the same detail, intensity and skill as on the better Data episodes of TNG (season two’s ‘The Measure of a Man’ being the high point)? So far I have very little faith, but I hope I’m proved wrong because Picard deserves a stonking great last adventure.

Star Trek: Picard is now streaming on Amazon Prime.