Ensign Redshirt: Four AM

Boy, things got tense around here. I didn’t even know there was a 25th amendment.

Evil is still on the loose. Thanks for your tips, but I think the intel on those Middle Easterners is bogus. No one listens to us blue-collar types, though. I guess everybody is too busy torturing the Secretary’s son. Maybe they will get back to me about it. They laughed at me in 2002, you know, but I was right about IU beating Duke. Upper management might give me more respect if I were out in the field, running and jumping in a dark suit and earpiece.

Even so, I would never be able to run and jump nearly as much as Barry Van Dyke did as Detective Steve Sloan in Diagnosis: Murder. Steve never met a hedge he couldn’t clear, or a fleeing criminal impervious to a flying tackle. When given the choice between a sidewalk and a garden shrub, it was shrub every time.

The second son of Dick wrote and directed several episodes of his father’s most recent T.V. vehicle, which finished its 8-year run in May 2001. A few months later, America was attacked by terrorists. You do the math. (Yes, there were a couple post-9/11 television movies, but I’m a believer in convenient truths. )

Barry may have needed his famous father to get his start (as a local violin-playing kid in New Rochelle in the Dick Van Dyke Show), but he’s built an accomplished resume without help from Daddy, too. We all remember his appearances on Airwolf, Gun Shy and The Redd Foxx Show (where he did not play a local violin-playing kid). And of course, there is his crucial role as a member of the advance team heading to Earth in Galactica 1980. Yes, that Galactica 1980.

Turns out that flu bug going around was actual a bio weapon. Just stay away from hotel ventilation ducts, and you’ll be fine. Evil is everywhere but hotel ventilation ducts.

Transmission ended . . .