I wanted to say something about the passing of James Doohan, aka Scotty from the original Star Trek. I was lucky enough to catch an interview with George Takei on MSNBC a couple of nights ago. Obviously, it's an empirical fact that George Takei kicks ass, but even empirical facts can use a little reinforcement from time to time, and this interview did just that. Takei told stories about Doohan's lust for life and manic embrace of everything that crossed his path, and alluded to his legendary battles with William Shatner. Just imagine this, if you will - we'll set it on the bridge of the Enterprise, to give it a backdrop. The hired director stands behind the camera, helpless and mortified, as Shatner and Scotty go at each other for barely comprehensible reasons while George Takei lounges in the navigator's chair and laconically urges calm. If you were in 1968 for a day, where else would you rather be than in the other chair on that bridge? Had just one of those battles had been recorded, it would have been the single greatest episode of Star Trek, bar none. Because you know they went at it for well over an hour once they got started. Tack on a scene of Spock saying "Uh, the Klingons are firing anger rays at us" at the beginning, cram in a few commercial breaks wherever you can, and it's an automatic classic. Ideally it ends with Shatner getting pelted with Tribbles and singing.

Inadvertently, I seem to have summed up why the last two Star Trek series fucking sucked.