Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s LeVar Burton will be a guest judge on Syfy’s Face Off.

On Face Off, special effects make-up artists compete to collect $100,000.

Burton will guest judge the episode airing February 22, when the artists will “design aliens based on the work of series judge Patrick Tatopoulos.”

Face Off has been renewed for a ten-episode third season.

A new Star Trek-themed statue, this time another Captain Kirk one, is being offered later this year by Hollywood Collectibles Group.

The Captain Kirk 1:4 scale statue is the “authentic likeness of William Shatner.” It stands nineteen inches tall, is made of hand-painted, heavyweight polystone.

Previous statues in the Trek series include a 1:6 scale Captain Kirk (seated in his command chair), the Gorn and Mr. Spock 1:6 scale statues.

Only seven hundred-and-fifty pieces of the Captain Kirk 1:4 scale will be made. Those who pre-order now will be able to obtain lower serial numbers (from one to one hundred). The Captain Kirk 1:4 scale statue will sell for $279.95 and can be reserved by heading to the link located here.

The fifth episode of Jackpot Party‘s Star Trek online slots game has been released.

The episode, A Piece of the Action, follows Red Alert, Explore New Worlds, The Trouble With Tribbles, and Trap-a-Tribble.

In A Piece of the Action, players can claim four random “Win Warp” features, including: The Rock Creature Multiplying Wild, Enterprise Respins, Kirk’s Gone Wild and Dilithium Crystal Super Scatter.

In Star Trek slots, “the ultimate goal is to seek three or more Feature symbols to trigger the Rescue Bonus round.

“Once triggered, players select from sixteen transporter co-ordinate buttons to try and beam their crew mate safely back aboard the USS Enterprise and out of danger. Discover credit rewards for everything beamed back – but receive the top prize for rescuing a crew mate.”

Star Trek: A Piece of the Action is available at Jackpot Party.

Star Trek‘s William Shatner has been tapped to host the 2012 Juno Awards.

The Juno Awards are chosen by the members of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and presented to Canadian musical artists and/or bands for musical or technical achievement.

This year’s ceremony will be held on April 1 at Ottawa’s Scotiabank place, and will be aired on CTV. Performers will include Feist, Deadmau5 and City & Colour.

Reading Rainbow may have fallen victim to a lack of money and a change in attitude regarding educational television programming, but former host LeVar Burton had found a way to bring it back for a new generation.

Burton believes that today’s children are in need of encouragement when it comes to reading. “There is a brand new generation of kids who could definitely use the kind of spark and inspiration Reading Rainbow provided where actually becoming a reader is concerned,” he said. “As far as I can tell, reading will never go out of style, and neither will good old fashioned storytelling.”

A mobile app is Burton’s first step in reaching out to those children. “The center-point of the App is books,” said Burton “Wonderful, lightly enhanced digital books for children. However we’re also very interested in delivering an enriching experience to kids, much like classic Reading Rainbow did on TV.”

Burton has already retrieved the @readingrainbow Twitter handle from a cybersquatter, and future plans would include DVDs and classic Reading Rainbow episodes, which would be streamed.

“Every day of my life someone comes up to me and tells me about the impact the show had on them growing up,” said Burton. It’s no secret that our educational system is no longer the platinum standard on the world stage that it once was. This is simply my way of continuing to do what I’ve always done, just in a different medium.”

Star Trek‘s George Takei will be performing with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Ode to Joy later this month.

Ode to Joy will be performed on February 25 and 26 at the Robinson Center Music Hall in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Takei will act as narrator for Schoenberg‘s “A Survivor from Warsaw” piece. The narration for this piece “depicts the story of a concentration camp survivor from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.”

Takei and his family were sent to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas during World War II. The actor is chairman emeritus and a trustee of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Takei was also appointed by former President Clinton to the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission.

Tickets can be purchased from the Arkansas Symphony.

For Noel Clarke, one of the newcomers signed for Star Trek 2, the audition for the latest Trek movie was just another audition.

“It was just an audition like all the others, really,” he said. “You do your lines and see what happens, and luckily this time I got the job. It was just a standard audition.”

Although happy about being cast, when Clarke received the news, he tried to keep calm about the good news. “I was at home, in my kids’ room, because they were making noise in the living room,” he said. “So I went into their room. And, yeah, I was told I’d got it, and, yeah, I was happy. I was happy. I don’t get over-excited about things because I’m just kind of like that. I was happy, but a job is a job. You get some and some you don’t get. You can’t get over-excited about stuff because that would mean if you got a review that was good you’d have to be really happy and if you got a bad review you would have to be distraught. I can’t switch it off, so I just read ‘em all. So I got the job and was like, ‘Hey, I’m in Star Trek.’”

Being cast in Star Trek 2 might have a positive impact on Clarke’s future career. “I think it’s just one of those things where it’s another level of accomplishment, where you’ve done another job that is bigger than the ones you’ve done before,” he said. “All of that stuff helps in your career, so hopefully it will just help me in mine, but I have no idea. How people look at me is up to them.”

Clarke was signed to play a “family man with a wife and young daughter”  in Star Trek 2.

Although he had a television resume dating back to the 1970s, Robert Picardo‘s life changed after signing on for Star Trek: Voyager.

Part of the reason that Star Trek was so different was the fandom associated with it. “One of the odd things about getting a Star Trek role that doesn’t have anything to do with any other kind of television show is that the moment your agent calls and says, ‘Well, you got the part,’ you also got your first two convention offers,” said Picardo.

“I don’t know if it’s just science fiction fans, or specifically Star Trek (fans), that they like to meet the actors as well as just watch the show,” said Picardo.

But before the conventions and fan adulation, a show has to succeed first. “The way I used to describe it when they first started airing the Voyager episodes,” said Picardo, “and people who were loyal fans of the Star Trek franchise became accustomed to the new faces of our cast, is that there’s a certain amount of fear as to whether or not they’ll embrace the show, and like it, and stick with it.

“But once they do embrace it, you feel a little bit like you’re boarding a bus that’s already going eighty miles per hour. It’s kind of a shock to jump on, but then it’s a nice ride once you’re there.”

Of course, that bus can slam into a wall if an actor makes the wrong move, like dissing fandom. “What I’ve learned is you can make fun of yourself, and Star Trek fans react well to that,” said Picardo. “You can make fun of pretty much anything, except their interest in the show. You don’t want to belittle their interest in the show, because it means something serious to them.”

Picardo will be appearing this weekend at the St. Louis Science Center.

Just days after the news that The CW picked up Shelter, a pilot produced by J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk, comes the news that another Abrams pilot has been picked up by another network.

This time, the network is NBC and the pilot is Revolution, a dramatic thriller, to be written by Abrams, Bryan Burk and Eric Kripke (Supernatural).

In Revolution, a “group of characters” is “struggling to survive and reunite with loved ones in a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist.”

Plot Summary: A group of Federation ambassadors comes to Deep Space Nine to see the wormhole for themselves, but they all have complaints, ranging from the uncomfortable Cardassian beds on the station to the fact that Sisko has asked Bashir to look after the guests while he is busy in Ops. When Odo recovers Lwaxana Troi’s latinum brooch from a thief, the Betazoid ambassador becomes intrigued with the shapeshifter, whom she says is the first man she doesn’t have to mold and shape herself. Odo tries to avoid her. The ambassadors watch as the wormhole opens and an alien probe passes near the station, but when O’Brien and Dax try to download its data, the series of minor computer malfunctions that has been plaguing the station grows exponentially worse. Lights fail on the Promenade, the transporters refuse to work though there is no apparent malfunction, and Odo is trapped in a turbolift with Lwaxana shortly before he needs to regenerate. O’Brien finds that the computer is now more cooperative when he gives it orders yet it refuses to accept commands that would allow him to leave it running on its own, as if it had developed the personality of an eager-to-please child. He and Dax theorize that they may have downloaded an intelligent entity from the probe. Though Odo is at first annoyed to have to listen to Lwaxana’s nonstop chatter, he is relieved to find her sympathetic when he can no longer hold his shape. O’Brien tries to return the entity to the probe, but it resists, causing explosions and trapping Bashir with several ambassadors in a burning corridor. Guessing that the entity wishes to stay, O’Brien designs a subroutine to contain it and restores power to the station. The ambassadors consider Bashir a hero for protecting them during the fire and Lwaxana accepts Odo’s thanks for her discretion about his change of form, suggesting that she would like to see him again. Sisko is a bit alarmed to learn that O’Brien has adopted the alien entity in the computer but O’Brien assures him that it will be busy with his subroutines from now on.

Analysis: I’m of an entirely split mind about “The Forsaken.” It’s really not a good episode: the stories are disjointed and never really mesh, the Bashir plot feels entirely contrived to improve our opinion of him and smells a bit like a Wesley Crusher drama, and Sisko and Kira seem to have little to do despite the fact that there are ambassadors visiting their station and an alien entity controlling the computer. It’s rather boring and not very memorable. On the other hand, as far as I’m concerned, the final scenes with Lwaxana and Odo make up for pretty much all the rest – not only in this installment, in fact, but for a number of misdeeds committed by the writers against Lwaxana Troi, both before and after. The writers (of both DS9 and TNG) seem to believe that there is something innately hilarious about a middle-aged woman who believes that she’s attractive, has no inhibitions about expressing her sexuality, and expects men to be as interested in her as she is in them. They set Lwaxana up as the butt of jokes over and over, and the only saving grace is that Majel Barrett plays her as utterly unconcerned with what anyone thinks of her. As far as Lwaxana is concerned, the fact that she’s the Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed – oh, and apparently an accomplished Federation ambassador, though it’s all too rare that we actually get to see her in that capacity – should far outweigh anyone’s prejudices about her age and flamboyant behavior. I keep expecting her to burst out singing “I Am What I Am” from Jerry Herman’s musical version of La Cage Aux Folles.

As Lwaxana demonstrates when she pulls off her wig to show Odo, she isn’t afraid of her age, being perceived as outrageous in her manner of dress (which Deanna has suggested is extreme for a Betazoid), nor the fact that even colleagues are put off by her pushiness. She loves being different. She doesn’t care if most of the people she encounters would find it absurd for a woman of her stature to be girlishly flirting with a security professional and she doesn’t seem to consider that for someone as different from herself as Odo, her behavior might border on harassment, which I might find more troubling if we didn’t have so many examples in Trek of male aliens assuming their advances will be welcomed by every physically compatible female in the galaxy. She claims that her interest in Odo is based on the erotic possibilities of being with a shapeshifter, along with a misguided guess that a man who can change his form must have a perspective on life’s joys that’s as flexible as her own, but she often seems as lonely as he does – her ongoing efforts to find a mate, whether it be Jean-Luc Picard or Minister Campio or the scientist Timicin, make it obvious that she’s not as self-sufficient as she likes to claim. We’ve seen her pull stunts that aren’t that different from the rambunctiousness of the alien who gets into the station’s computer, creating inadvertent jeopardy when all she wants is a little attention and fun.

It’s not a strong enough connection to make the episode gel – I suppose “The Forsaken” is supposed to refer to Odo, Lwaxana, and the probe entity, though it doesn’t really apply to any of the above – but it keeps the episode from being entirely forgettable or annoying. I like what character development we get for Odo; we already knew that he protested too much about humanoid romantic connections, though he’s quite funny he doesn’t get what cut flowers and bad poetry have to do with procreation, but to see how different and self-conscious he feels about his need to revert to a vulnerable liquid form is very moving (and it’s rather erotic when he literally melts into Lwaxana’s lap). Sisko seems a bit amused at first that Odo won’t even try humanoid romance, laughing about the fact that Odo is more comfortable around thieves and killers than a woman, but when Odo uses the phrase “diplomatic incident” it brings Sisko to his senses. Interesting that Lwaxana has such calm recollections of being kidnapped with Deanna aboard a Ferengi cargo ship and that Sisko can recall wryly how he once hit an ambassador who was annoying him…I guess diplomacy isn’t what I thought it was. No wonder humanoid behavior confounds Odo. I’m also surprised that he goes to Sisko rather than Kira for help with Lwaxana, both because Kira is a better friend and because, since Sisko’s preoccupation is the reason the Federation ambassadors have been dropped onto the rest of the senior officers, I would think she’d be in a better position to get Odo off Lwaxana Watch. My personal theory is that, whatever he may claim, Odo already knows that he has romantic feelings for Kira and is therefore already buying into humanoid binary gender expectations, though sadly we will never really learn how reproduction works for the Founders, let alone sexual desire. Again, no wonder Odo is confused.