Well, from a certain point of view, all altruism is self-serving. The fact that they knew an alliance would help them later on for a fact isn't that different from embarking on any other partnership. The human mentality is certainly capable of elevating hope to where it can stand side-by-side with fact.

He also didn't necessarily die in the ring. Spikey-arms was on the run from the fight-club. It could be he was breaking out and the dead guy tried to stop him. Of course, if he really wanted to get away from Roulette's goons, he probably shouldn't have been at his address of record…

One at a time, at least.

I genuinely couldn't remember the actual secret (or that there was a secret, or that it was a season-long arc), but I always remembered how no one could figure out that rebus. "Muh-fire?"

I first found out about this from Christopher Bird's blog (and his commenters). http://mightygodking.com/20…

I applied for a spot with the visual effects team (no dice, by the way, but it was the first time a Hollywood production bothered turning me down; I'm on the board!), and even with an immediate start in mid-August, it seemed like it was going to be a hard time getting all the pre-post-production done in time for a…

Once the blu-ray comes out, you'll probably be able to see that scene with every song under the sun. Stands to reason at least one will be a rickroll.

Indeed, Orion pirates go back to "The Cage." Of course, Roddenberry later decided a lot of things from TOS didn't belong in Star Trek during the '70s and '80s. I once read a memo that must've been from the development of Phase 2 that dealt with the idea of synthehol and how to reconcile it with Scotty being a drinker…

One of the reasons I've frustrated by the Captain Kirk as Space Fratboy stereotype is that most of the time his "conquests" were him playing Don Juan in order to get one over on the bad guys (I've seen a few people compare it outright to the trope of feminine wiles). And sometimes, he was just in the same room as an…

I know a guy who has a theory that you can trace Shatner's broadness directly back to the filming of "Arena," when he developed chronic tinnitus from being too close to the stage explosives (Nimoy had it, too), and thus may have had trouble modulating himself as precisely as he used to. I know somewhere between "fuck"…

I remember when I first played that game, I thought it was odd that Kirk said "sabahtaje," but not nearly as odd as the narrator referring to a device's effects on a planet's "echo-system" a couple levels later.

That's a bit unfair. While there are some lines that were obviously written for Spock and McCoy ("I do have a theory" "I thought you might" and "You and you, you've just become nurses"), they did apparently also add a couple that were more specific to Kirk's relationship with Chekov and Scotty ("I was never that…

My rule of thumb is I see stuff that was shot (or animated) in 3D in 3D, and post-converted stuff can die in a fire. I've seen "fake 3D" a few times, and it's still not matching the native stuff for quality.

I still miss the toss. You've gotta have the toss.

“Fool.”
“Do you know how rap works?”

They had a pledge drive or something where you could get a toy version of that pen. It was super-bulky because it actually made the noise when you wrote with it, but that pen was probably the first thing I was excited to wait for when in the mail I was a teeny, tiny kid. Like, before I was old enough for school. I…

There was a more specific shout-out to TMP: McCoy is wearing medallion in the last scene when he's in his civvies, a (much) smaller version of the one from his first scene in TMP.

If you want the in-universe reason, it would've been the last time they all worked together before Sulu went off to be captain of the Excelsior.

I've been trying not to think about how easy it is for me to say, "Best Star Trek movie in twenty years."

Just the once. I am a professional spaceship guy now, technically*, so I guess I just have The Eye.