Giant Freakin Robot

Almost every Hollywood insider seems to agree that the villain of the next Star Trek movie is Khan Noonian Singh. Yes, that Khan. On the flipside of that, the movie’s director JJ Abrams’ insists that it isn’t Khan. No one believes him because, to put it bluntly, JJ Abrams lies. He lies a lot.

You can’t trust anything Abrams has to say about his projects, ever, and the rumor that Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Khan in the next Star Trek has been confirmed and triple confirmed by so many scoop sources that it seems like fact.

But maybe it’s not.

You can’t trust JJ Abrams at all but normally you can trust Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the new Trek series. Pegg is normally a pretty honest and up front guy so maybe we should believe him when he tells The Telegraph…

It’s not Khan. That’s a myth. Everyone’s saying it is, but it’s not. I think people just want to have a scoop. It annoys me – it’s beyond the point to just ferret around for spoilers all the time to try to be the first to break them.

Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation² #1
IDW Comics, on shelves Wednesday

It’s a crossover for the ages – all of them! (That was a time-travel pun.) IDW comics puts its Star Trek and Doctor Who licenses to good use by giving us an adventure that pairs Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor with the Next Generation crew of the NCC-1701-D U.S.S. Enterprise. Unfortunately for all involved, they won’t have time to swap amusing paradox stories in Ten-Forward, because the Borg and the Cybermen have decided to team up and kill all humans (and all the other squishy races, presumably). The Assimiliation² miniseries is penned by Tony Lee and Scott and David Tipton, and while it kicks off with the modern Doctor and the TNG crew, covers for upcoming issues hint that the series will make pit stops across the history of both franchises. While this mash-up is one sure to have some slavering and some fuming, hopefully Assimilation² will prove to be lots of fun for fans of both franchises. If you want an early look-see at some of the pages from the first issue, check out Wired’s preview right here.

The hit AMC show Mad Men entered the year 1966 this season and that means the timeline of the series now exists past the point of Star Trek’s 1966 premiere. Maybe that doesn’t mean the crew of the Enterprise had to come up eventually, I suppose they could have simply ignored it, but they haven’t.

This past Sunday in an episode titled “The Christmas Waltz” a Harry Krishna character named Paul Kinsey sat down to pitch a Star Trek spec script he wrote called “The Negron Complex”. He doesn’t actually go into detail on what his episode about, other than to hint it’s all an allegory for Krishna, but Kinsey does seem pretty adamant that not only will Star Trek survive on network television but that his ep should be the crew’s second season debut.

Watch as the worlds of Mad Men and Star Trek collide…

The future of space exploration is definitely in question these days. NASA is having its budget sliced down to the bone. Privately funded spaceflight is promising, but still has many hurdles yet to surmount. In spite of a state of affairs that could easily generate cynicism in many a space devotee, there’s at least one group who is meeting the challenge by dreaming big…some might say ridiculously so. The folks behind the aptly named BuildTheEnterprise.org, you see, want to build an honest-to-gosh, real-life version of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and they want to do it over the next 20 years.

Now, some of the more skeptical amongst us might point out some of the obvious obstacles to a working Enterprise: the lack of warp-drive technology, for instance, or most of the other technologies that allowed the Enterprise to boldly go where no one yadda yadda yadda. The BTE folks seem aware of that, and are instead proposing the Enterprise’s iconic design as a starting point, then equipping the theoretical vessel with existing, or at least hypothetically possible, tech. We might not have warp drive, for instance, but we might conceivably be able to build ion propulsion engines powered by nuclear reactors. We might not be able to create artificial gravity as snazzy as Star Trek, but we already know how to simulate gravity through rotation. They even have a first mission in mind for the Enterprise: finally putting some humans on Mars.

It’s all a bit pie-in-the-sky, of course, but it’s a fascinating thought experiment if nothing else. We will probably never see warp drive in our lifetimes, if at all (unless the Singularity has a few surprises for us), but there are space-exploration technologies just waiting to be developed further, lacking only the passion and funding to make it happen. BuildTheEnterprise still has a steep climb ahead of it when it comes to the funding, but you have to admire their passion. And hey, to paraphrase Doc Brown, if you’re going to build a space craft, why not do it with some style?