During the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, actor Brent Spiner attracts a stalker, a fan from the lunatic fringe who sends disturbing packages and threatening letters to him under the name “Lal.” Trekkies know that Lal was an android created by Commander Data in an episode titled “The Offspring.”
Spiner contacts the LA police only to finds himself dealing with an eccentric detective who seems more concerned about getting his Star Trek script produced than investigating the case. The FBI becomes involved when “Lal” sends razor blades to Spiner through the mail and a postal worker is injured. The female agent assigned to the case just happens to have a twin sister in the bodyguard business and she’s hired to accompany Spiner everywhere…and I do mean everywhere. The action heats up as “Lal” closes in. Along the way, Spiner veers off on several odd tangents about his stepfather that loosely relate to the plot. As for the ending, no spoilers here, only that it was rushed and contrived (the kind of “riveting” finale we’ve seen in a hundred other thrillers).
While not perfect, this amusing noir-comedy blends fact and fiction to deliver a fast-paced and suspenseful tale that includes the main cast members of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as Gene and Majel Roddenberry and even a cameo by Ronald Reagan.
This sardonic anti-war tale begins with Billy Pilgrim’s return to Dresden, Germany after WWII where he was a POW during the infamous firebombing. Throughout the story, it becomes evident that Billy suffers from PTSD and depression as he travels back and forth in time, experiencing fragments of his life involving terrible hardship and death. So it goes. To cope, he creates a fictional planet called Tralfamadore where claims to have been taken to become an exhibit in a zoo for the entertainment of the Tralfamadorians. And of course, Billy enjoys the science fiction novels of one obscure and loathed writer named Kilgore Trout.
The wealthiest Hollywood playboy in America, Malachi Constant, is invited to the home of Beatrice Rumfoord to witness the manifestation of her husband, Winston Niles Rumfoord, and his dog Kazak. Nine years before, Rumfoord had piloted his spaceship into an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum near Mars. Kazak was his only companion aboard ship. Since then, man and dog exist as energy but materialize on a regular schedule in his mansion on Earth. Word of Winston’s materializations have spread over time and now draw a crowd outside the mansion’s walls. His wife, however, permits no audience to Winston’s appearances—until he specifically requests the presence of Malachi Constant.
A writer named Jonah (or possibly John) looks back on his adventures, and his conversion to a religion known as Bokononism, while conducting research for a book about the late Frank Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. The first leg of our hero’s journey takes him to Hoenikker’s hometown of Ilium, NY where he meets two of Hoenikker’s three adult children. There, Jonah learns that each of the children possesses a piece of Ice-Nine, a dangerous substance their father developed for the military.