Badasses don't die.

Can I just tell you how excited I am that Zachary Quinto is playing Spock in the new Trek movie? The answer is very frakkin excited. The Toaster is psyched for this one! First he was Adam, the selfish, bratty foil for rookie agent Kim Bauer in the excellent 3rd season of 24; now he plays Gabriel Gray, aka Sylar, in NBC's (mostly) disappointing "Heroes."

In fact, Sylar is the only reason I have not given up on Heroes altogether. The rest of the show is crap, mostly. Sylar's story has always been the story of a bad man getting badder by the minute, except for the brief time this season when he found out that he didn't have to kill to take someone's powers. He usually just sliced off the top of his victim's head, fiddled around inside the brain, and presto: he had taken someone's superpower. This year he found out he could take someone's power by finding empathy somewhere in his dark heart for one whose power he covets. That lasted long enough for him to find true love, until the Hunger found him again and he killed her. More recently he took an apprentice and hit the road in search of his real father; he first found a diner. It was boarded up, abandoned. Sylar had a flashback to his childhood: His father had brought him to the diner in order to sell him for a little extra cash. Once the transaction concluded, his father got up and left. The little boy obviously didn't understand; he went running after his father. He got to the parking lot just in time to see his father kill his mother in the car and push the body out the passenger side door. The juke box was playing "The Chain," by Fleetwood Mac. It was a brilliant, chilling scene, alone worth the price of admission to an hour of my Monday night. I could go on, but I don't want to ruin it for you. Check Sylar out.

And the man who makes it happen is Zach Quinto; it's so easy to picture him as our favorite Vulcan. The studied, quiet intensity Nimoy brought to the character of Spock, the calm center, is the same thing that makes Quinto's Sylar so scary. And the eyebrows! They won't need to do much makeup for that one, I tell you. (Also, have you heard Heather Nova's cover of "We Can Work It Out?" It's wonderful.)

Anyway. Star Trek opens soon, with SHAUN OF THE DEAD as SCOTTY! JJ Abrams directs; you know him, the guy who created Lost, and Alias, who gave us Cloverfield, the best shaky-cam monster-destroys-New-York movie ever. Run, don't frakkin walk, to your internets and lock down a ticket for this flick, I tell you, it's gonna be the runaway hit of the summer. This one has the potential to be as widely popular as The Voyage Home was at Christmastime in '86. That is all.