This comical Star Trek-themed DirecTV ad has been playing endlessly during the baseball playoffs. It features a current-day William Shatner inserted into footage from 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Trekkies seem to be enjoying the spot, by and large, but it’s stirring some nerdy debate about whether Kirk’s uniform has been messed with (“I will nitpick on the fact that the Starfleet badge is too small ... the belt buckle is more angular ... and the collar is too small,” says a commenter on YouTube) and whether some kind of software was used to “de-age” Shatner (he does look shiny and slim). And there’s the usual grousing about why Shatner is doing a Star Trek ad and not a Star Trek movie. Says another YouTube commenter: “What’s more frightening is that [this] may go down in history as the last appearance of James T. Kirk.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd