There’s been a lot of talk about Star Trek 3 lately, especially with Roberto Orci leaving the director’s chair on the third installment of the rebooted franchise. We’ve also heard rumors that the plot of the film may have involved time travel, or at least some kind of time travel device. 15 months after going dark on the internet, Orci briefly reappeared to shed some light on his exit, his continued involvement in the Trek series, and those reports about the story.

Back in September of 2013, Orci went onto the forums at TrekMovie and got into it with some fans over disparaging comments about Star Trek Into Darkness. He apologized, but shortly thereafter deleted his Twitter account and hasn’t been seen much, or at all, online since. However, that changed the other day when he hit up the same website to respond to some questions about his leaving.

Have you always wondered what it would look like if Doctor Who and Star Trek came together? If that’s the case, then today is your lucky day, sort of, in a weird, roundabout, totally unofficial way. Former Time Lord Colin Baker is going to have a guest appearance on the fan made Trek series Star Trek Continues. Even in this unusual manner, it’s hard not to get excited about the collision of two such long-lived, iconic sci-fi franchises.

A crowdfunded series, Continues is the brainchild of a group of likeminded Trek fanatics that seeks to give the characters from the original series a chance they never got when the show was prematurely cancelled. In their way, they carry on the Enterprise’s five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. And Baker is set to show up on the fourth episode of the series.

Guns in space are cool when it comes to Han Solo, Captain Kirk, or Ellen Ripley, but otherwise, most people agree that space should be kept weapon-free. That was a big focus of John F. Kennedy’s moonshot speech, as he intimated over and over that the USSR might use space as a “terrifying theater of war.” Space technologies have militaristic uses and connotations, even if they’re not designed for anything of the sort, which was why Russia’s successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked the Space Race into high gear. The U.S. knew that if they had a rocket powerful enough to launch a satellite, they could also launch nukes. Plus, satellites can be used to spy. That’s part of why the U.N. and other countries approved the Outer Space Treaty, which, among other things, restricts the use of weapons of mass destruction in space, as well as using space for military bases or weapons testing (“The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes”). Despite all this, it used to be common practice for cosmonauts to have access to a gun in the emergency kit of all Soyuz capsules.

Apparently, this all started in 1965 when a return Soyuz flight landed off-course, prompting survival stories that boasted bears, wolves, and other dangerous Siberian wildlife that warranted protection. Though the cosmonauts never actually had to fight anyone or anything and were quickly rescued, the idea had been born that certain situations astronauts encounter could be dangerous enough to warrant a gun. Even after the formation of the ISS, the practice continued.

Of the various things you might expect to find on a Star Wars comic book cover, a giant green space rabbit probably isn’t very high on the list. But that’s precisely what we’ve got on the above variant cover for Star Wars #1, the first of several new Marvel comics set in George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. And unless you were a fan of Marvel’s classic Star Wars comics back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, you could be forgiven for wondering if this signaled some sort of ill-conceived Star Wars/Bucky O’Hare crossover. That’s exactly the sort of hare-brained scheme fans were worried about when it was first announced that Disney had purchased Lucasfilm!

But no, he isn’t Bucky, but rather a blast from Marvel and Star Wars‘ past. The space bunny in question is actually named Jaxxon. He was created by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin way back in 1978 and first appeared in the eighth issue of Marvel’s ongoing Star Wars comic series. That put him in the second story arc in the series run, and also made him one of the earliest original characters to be introduced into the embryonic “Expanded Universe.” And like the rest of the original EU, he’s been swept aside to make room for Disney/Lucasfilm’s more interconnected and closely policed Star Wars canon. Don’t worry, he won’t actually appear in the new Star Wars series; Jaxxon just drops in for the “Party Variant” cover, which will only be available at Star Wars #1 launch parties. Bonus points if you show up to one dressed like him and refuse to answer to anything but “Bucky.”

Star Trek: Generations definitely wasn’t the franchise’s finest hour, but it did have the major selling point of getting to see Kirk share an adventure with the Next Generation crew. Unfortunately for Kirk, that adventure ended with his death after he got a freaking bridge dropped on him. One of the two men responsible for writing that death scene was Ronald D. Moore, who went on to bring us the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Starz’s Outlander adaptation. In a new interview with Collider, Moore shares his thoughts about what it was like to be tasked with killing off a character he’d grown up idolizing.

Moore told Collider:

It was difficult, and yet I was very eager to do it. It was a really odd thing. I really wanted to do that story. I really wanted to write the death of Captain Kirk. I really wanted to do it in the movie. I remember writing the scene with Brannon [Braga], my writing partner, at the time. When I said, ‘And Kirk dies,’ I wept. It was very emotional and very strange, in the moment and all the way through the process. I’d read it in the script and I’d always be struck by what I’d just done and what we were doing, and that this was my childhood hero and I was writing his death. Even then, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I was mystified by why I was doing it, why I was so driven to do it, and why it was affecting me like it was. I still don’t know what it means. It’s a strange singular experience. I don’t even know anyone to talk to about it because I don’t know anyone who’s had that experience.

For fans who got hooked on Star Trek’s original run on NBC from 1966 – 1969, the sting of cancellation left them with many dark years before Gene Roddenberry’s creation rose from its ashes as 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And this was before the internet, so keeping track of any glimmers of a future for Trek required you to keep up with fan magazines, gossip at conventions, or kidnap and interrogate Roddenberry inside a windowless van with a shirtless Captain Kirk emblazoned on the side. But if you did one of those things, you might have heard tell of Star Trek: Phase II. Before The Motion Picture was a thing, Phase II was set to pick up the Enterprise’s story with a second five-year mission. It fell by the wayside along with plans for a proposed “Paramount Television Service,” but Phase II’s passing left many relics behind, including this concept art by Mike Minor.