Space Shatner

I am kind of pleased about William Shatner going to space. If you haven't heard, the 90 year old is going on an 11 minute, suborbital flight with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company. I saw a bit of an interview he did on Good Morning America for it where Al Roker called Shatner the "youngest 90 year old" he knows. And it's true--it's amazing how physically healthy and verbally acute he seems to be. Compared with how frail Leonard Nimoy and Deforest Kelly looked years before they died, it's remarkable.

Shatner's flight is scheduled for the 12th, just two days from now. It was only to-day I thought of his toupee and wondered if it would be an issue. Maybe that's why he was visiting a hair transplant clinic, according to the Mirror. That's right, people are still interested in William Shatner's toupee. Since I last blogged about it nine years ago, articles and blogs from others have appeared regularly. Cracked published an article just this year about a Star Trek producer who claims Shatner stole toupees made especially for him from the Star Trek set. Though, if you ask me, I don't see why Shatner should've had to have stolen them. Who else could have or would have used them? If the producers weren't just going to give them to Shatner, that's some pretty epic stinginess. Maybe they were planning to use them for Michael Myers?

I guess if the producer really wanted them back he could've just plucked them off Shatner's head.

Anyway, the news about Shatner's impending space flight made me want to watch Star Trek. Specifically, I wanted to watch him rolling around with a woman wearing a ridiculous criss-cross of minuscule cloth (you see, live action Cowboy Bebop, this is the fun you could've had). I did a search for "Skimpiest costumes on Star Trek" and came across this 2012 article by io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders. She would so be cancelled for it to-day, or at the very least given the stink-eye by all the shills currently sheltering at io9. It was via this article I was reminded of the third season episode "The Cloud Minders".

The basic concept is fairly similar to Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, being about a floating city of artists and intellectuals and a separate class of workers toiling on the planet below. "The Cloud Minders" follows a more obvious path of political allegory, though, making some of the city dwellers secretly corrupt tyrants (the others being ignorant) and the workers being kept mentally inferior by regular exposure to toxic gas. It ignores some of the complexities and morally grey areas that Jonathan Swift's version did a much better job with. Still, the episode has camp value and it's nice to remember a show that actually wanted to engage the audience with serious ideas instead of just mindlessly pushing a message.

Also when I searched for "Skimpiest costume on Star Trek", this article came up in which actress Sherry Johnson claims her improbable outfit in "What are Little Girls Made Of" was partially held together by Shatner's toupee ribbon. Could that possibly be true?

The Captain and the Silicon Lifeform

It was William Shatner's 90th birthday a few days ago and I saw various people online wishing him well. I decided to watch Shatner's favourite episode of Star Trek (according to his memoirs), the 1967 first season episode called "The Devil in the Dark". It is a good episode and dated in ways that make it a breath of fresh air to 2021 eyes.

Along with Princess Mononoke, "Devil in the Dark" is one of the few stories of human industry versus the environment I've come across that doesn't portray human industry as the embodiment of pure evil. We're introduced to the group of miners menaced by an alien threat before the opening theme.

When was the last time you saw a group of guys like this in a movie or TV series? Nowadays, if a film or series absolutely must show a group of working class proles, they'll invariably be young and sleek. On Star Trek, podgy old guys were cast because that's what miners generally looked like in the '60s.

They're on a planet mining minerals desperately required for reactors by several nearby colonies. The mysterious monster also takes out the miners' reactor by making off with a crucial component--one too old for the Enterprise to be carrying a replacement for. Writers used to integrate a better sense of understanding of how things tend to work. Every piece of technology on this show is made up but there's a legitimacy to this chain of problems--a crucial mining operation that nonetheless relies on dated technology that the relief vessel can't provide maintenance for. Advancements that may be great in the long term, making things worse in the short term.

Spock (Leonard Nimoy) slowly starts to work out that there's more to the dangerous creature than it may seem. The peculiar silicon orbs it leaves around will obviously be eggs to most viewers but Spock is very cautious expressing this theory for 1960s audiences. Shatner, Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley are all good in their usual debate triumvirate. I particularly like the scene where Spock first mentions to Kirk that killing the last of a species may be a "crime against science." Kirk has a visible emotional reluctance to even contemplating the idea because he senses all the obstacles in the way of doing anything about it. Spock, meanwhile, doesn't actually need convincing the thing still needs to be killed and calmly only says that it's "a pity." After all this time, Spock is still one in a million.

Star Trek is available on Amazon Prime and Netflix (in the U.S. and Japan).

I'm reminded that I began this year by watching Star Trek II, a film that seems an even more appropriate viewing for Shatner's birthday. May you continue to feel young, Captain.

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A face consumes an extra hour's night.
The longer day would take the chin to heart.
The soggy message urged a laundry fight.
A perfect shadow taught the sculptor art.
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The dishy woman cached the plaster ROM.