Incoming transport. Incoming transport.

“It turns out pumping your body full of adrenaline and pain inhibitors is bad for your health.”

So, yes, a lot of stuff going on the past couple days. My Agents of SHIELD book collecting my homespun ruminations and trenchant insights delivering what Marco Lopez calls my patented “wisdom delivered at the end of a fist” writing style would have been the star of the big San Diego comic book convention if it wasn’t for the debut appearance of Walker Young’s Untitled Walker Young Project which literally swept the carpet away from the aisles in between doors B2 and C, right under the air handling tubes which honestly makes our booth and Brian Pulido’s the most comfortable part of the floor. Man, I can’t thank all y’all enough for the warm reception you gave his work at the show.

Anywho, I’m caught up now, so here we go. Uhura’s they’re-trying-to-talk-to-me-but-I-don’t-understand episode was kind of an obvious yawner and almost a placeholder episode in a series of shows that has “Loud as a Whisper” and “Darmok” and a million other episodes in its totality so in terms of enjoying the narrative it was a bit of a yawner any Trekkie figured out instantly IT’S THINGIES IN THE NEBULA LIKE LITERALLY THAT ONE WITH M’BENGA’S KID but then we watched “Those Old Scientists” four times: Walker and me huddled around the iPad in the Embassy Suites like a 21st Century version of news from the front, me reading the captions over Mark’s shoulder on his iPad as we watched The Matrix Revolutions and talked about the day; once at home with Mimi, who loved it, and then I had it on when I did laundry. Remember when you were in college and no matter what happened you recorded The Next Generation four eps a tape on SP and then watched it every day until the next new one so at that point you even had the commercials memorized? That’s what it was like being a Trek fan in the before times. And that’s what it was like this week catching up. It’s this good? Yes, it is this good.

Anyway, that old man in the Captain Fun gear and the Enterprise workout clothes that say PRISE on it in black instead of navy blue because Captain Pike likes to wear his workout clothes under his uniform every once in a while just to make the bridge crew smell his manly musk sitting in the chair at the top of this column really Really REALLY remembers the 12 year old kid in rural Vermont who lived for 6 pm on WPIX so he could see the adventures of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, tooling around looking for space adventure who still lives inside of that old man with the seventeen Chinese knock-offs of Star Trek uniforms. And boy did that kid love this latest episode, turning Dr. M’Benga into Space John Wick and pixie-ish badass Nurse Chapel into friggin’ Trapper John is just another one in a great list of excellent episodes and I for one am happy after the last five or six years of nonsense that they’re finally making actual Star Trek again. Remember when Disco fans would get so mad at the (admittedly) harsh critique that the Kurtzman-led new stuff “just wasn’t Star Trek“? This is the kind of thing we were talking about. PTSD from the Klingon War impacts the derring-do of the usual cats, bringing heavy philosophical questions about the nature of conflict discussed while everyone drinks racktajino and does full-contact trust falls until somebody gets a knife in the chest. More of this, please.

And all the Clint Howard we can take.