Every geek dreams of commanding their own starship, but few get the chance.  I want to recognize the starship captains that have inspired us over the years.  They’ve shown up how to lead and how not to lead.  How to handle crisis and how not to handle crisis?  And most of all, how to speak every line with the gravitas of a Shakespearian actor.  Here’s to you, the 7 best starship captains and your gravitas.

7. Turanga Leela

The Planet Express ship might only be expected to deliver packages across the galaxy, but that hasn’t stopped Leela and her crew from stopped (and starting) interstellar catastrophes.  She’s help save the universe from random time skips to fighting giant bees, beetles, and women to doing with the nasty with an embarrassing cadre of space dorks.  All part of the job.

6. Captain Peter Quincy Taggart

So technically he’s a captain who isn’t a captain who becomes a captain but not really.  Well, for the sake of this list, Captain Peter Quincy Taggart can pretend to captain my ship any day.  Taggart captains the NSEA Protector on the classic TV series Galaxy Quest (best remembered in the documentary film of the same name).  On the show he foiled the greatest evil aliens the universe has ever seen, but his greatest triumph came in the 1999 Galaxy Quest film where he and his crew has to save an alien race from certain extinction.  Even though he was really an aging actor with no command experience except for lines in a script, Taggart rose to the occasion and saved the day.  Never give up. Never surrender.

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Us geeks have good lives. Tons of entertainment: TV shows, movies, comics, games to give our lives meaning and purpose (must live to see Episodes 7-9). But not everything can be as amazing as the Buffy Musical. Sometimes, the people we trust to entertain us betray us. They take what we know and love and shoot a missile right through our 2-meter exhaust ports. Here are the 7 biggest insults to our geekdom.

7. Canceling Firefly

A show about underdogs got beaten down by the big guns. One of the could-have-been-best-sci-fi shows ever was canceled for poor ratings before even airing all the finished episodes. And as an added insult, the Fox network aired Firefly’s episodes out of order causing mass chaos around the galaxy. Yeah, it’s all Fox’s fault. At least we got the kick ass movie out of the deal.

6. Star Trek video games

Still, to this day, we’ve yet to see a game deserving of the Star Trek moniker. And what’s worse is Star Trek appeals to so many different game genres. There’s conquering (or bringing peace) to the galaxy or just straight dogfights and exploring the galaxy. But each game looks like some gaming student’s long-procrastinated homework assignment, often filled with bugs and lacking all the features that could make the game cool. There’s the crappy attempt at a strategy game in Birth of a Federation to every bad SNES game where you just go on dumb away missions. Remember, away missions were boring on the show and they’re boring in the game. I must say, Star Trek: Bridge Commander has been the one white dwarf of light. Unfortunately, the recent Star Trek Legacy pales in comparison (I’m assuming white dwarfs are pale).

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