As a television show, Family Guy has made quite a name for itself, satirizing religion, political correctness, pop culture, racial and ethnic stereotypes, stereotypes of racial and ethnic stereotypes, and the drug problems of various celebrities. What keeps Family Guy  from getting too comfortable with the crap at the bottom of the barrel is its smart take on two loves of the show's  creator, Seth MacFarlane - Star Trek and Star Wars. To date, Family Guy has released two full-length  Star Wars parodies - "Blue Harvest", "Something, Something, Something Dark Side", with the upcoming "It's A Trap!" set for DVD release in December. While the Star Wars-themed episodes are very popular in their own right (seriously, just look at the detail of their Wikipedia articles), I'm going to focus on MacFarlane's other science fiction love. I daresay there'll be enough written about the Star Wars episodes. Well, that, and I haven't seen any of the Star Wars movies (nope, not even the originals).

Even before JJ Abrams made Star Trek cool again in 2009, MacFarlane was never shy about his love of the series. As far back as 2001, when Star Trek: Voyager came to its forgettable conclusion and Enterprise made its forgettable debut (and we were a year away from the forgettable Star Trek: Nemesis),  "A Very Special Family Guy Freakin' Christmas" saw Stewie Griffin refer to Jeffrey Hunter's claim to fame as the captain of the USSEnterprise in the first Star Trek pilot (before William Shatner landed the role). Think about it - not only do we have a Star Trekreference back in the days before Star Trek became cool again, but we have an obscure reference to the unaired pilot of the original Star Trek series. There is so much nerd in that one thought (and sentence) that I'm sure I just sprouted a pimple somewhere.

What impresses me about MacFarlane's tributes to Star Trek is that they're not just token references. Anybody can come up with a "Beam me up, Scotty!" joke, or pun on the "Where no one has gone before" line, but there's nothing throwaway about MacFarlane's use and understanding of Star Trek imagery or canon.

A favorite target for MacFarlane (and, well, everybody) is the thin line between William Shatner and Captain-Admiral-Captain again James Tiberius Kirk. "I Never Met The Dead Man" (1999) shows has an (obviously fictional) episode of Star Trek where Kirk makes a mundane entry in his Captain's Log, dramatically leaping around in his captain's chair before his pants finally rip. MacFarlane voiced Shatner in the controversial "When You Wish Upon A Weinstein" (2003), screaming "KHAN!"  while acting inFiddler On The Roof. When Brian accidentally sells Stewie's teddy bear Rupert in 2007's "Road to Rupert", Stewie imagines himself giving Kirk's eulogy from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, using the moving tribute to a fallen friend verbatim ("Of all the souls I have encountered on my travels, his was the most….human"). 

Seth MacFarlane wisely stays away from ribbing later Star Trek series like Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise (even though he had a brief recurring role on the latter show), instead using the far more popular original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation for his comic fodder. There is the one "Quark Griffin" joke, but it's The Next Generation that has received two of Family Guy's most memorable riffs. 

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