If I have nightmares tonight, I'm blaming it on Wil Wheaton.

So, oidhche and palingyuan and I have been watching our way through Big Bang Theory on DVD. We're into season 3, and last Friday we got to the first of the episodes where WW appears. Now, P follows WW's blog. I only picked it up directly this past weekend, but I've gotten highlights for quite some time via P and various other friends. Besides, I live on the Internet. You can't do that without tripping over WW from time to time. Oid, however, does not live online. And, while he was and is a big fan of Star Trek:TNG, it appears he hasn't knowingly seen WW in anything since. Nor was Oid already aware that WW has been on BBT several times. (The initials are taking over! Ack!) So he had to pause and gape and say "Is that really him?" while we explained the umpteen other things he's been in lately.

Then, on Sunday, I watched the Star Trek reboot movie. I couldn't help thinking about the poor confused girls at the end of our row, who clearly had absolutely no knowledge of Trek at all, and had the misfortune of sitting near a line of serious geeks who were noisily enthusiastic. At the same time, I was poking around online, and that's when I added WW's blog to the LJ feeds I'm following. And he'd just posted about watching one of his movies with his wife, who hadn't seen it before.

About this time, it occurred to me that I've really only seen a couple of ST:TNG episodes that he was in. I didn't watch it when it was originally airing, and while I've seen enough episodes to have reasonable familiarity, I've seen more from the later years than the earlier ones. I'm much more of a fan of the original series -- hence my squeeing at the reboot movie. Except, of course, I can't even be sure how much of TOS I've seen either.

Clearly this means that my next TV series to watch through obsessively and chronologically is Star Trek. Both of them. Maybe some of the later series too, depending on my mood when I get there. If Netflix had them available streaming, I would have started right away. Instead, I had to watch through the movies I had here and send them back to start getting Star Trek by mail. The first disk arrived today.

Well, the first episode was "The Man Trap" which I know damn well I've seen before! In fact, it's the catalyst for what was possibly the most terrifying moment of my childhood. You see, we only ever watched Star Trek reruns when my dad was out of town on business trips. We'd set up a card table in the living room and eat dinner and watch Star Trek. So, one night, we watched that episode. It's the one where an alien shapechanger is killing people for their salt content and then impersonating them to get to the next victim. It's really pretty creepy in its own right.

After dinner, my mom and brother cleared the table and were putting things away in the kitchen, while I took down the card table. I was bent over it with my back to the door, when I got the feeling you get when there's someone watching you or sneaking up behind you, even when you haven't seen or heard anything. I turned around, and right behind me was my mother, arms and face out in the salt-monster-sucking-your-life pose. I jumped back so hard I'm surprised I didn't go through a wall, and screamed bloody murder. My little brother came running in, and Mom didn't even want to explain it to him. I was probably no more than ten at the time, so he'd have been about seven, and she knew it was much too scary a joke for him. She'd slightly misjudged it for me. Only slightly, because once I stopped panicking, I thought it was hilarious. But I did have nightmares that night. And occasionally since.

So that's why it's all Wil Wheaton's fault.