George Takei and William Shatner have seen so much together – like new planets, new civilisations and possibly Uhura’s labia.

But despite their 40-year professional obligations to each other, George Takei and William Shatner are still happy to take chunks out of each other in public. Like yesterday, for instance, when William Shatner went on the internet to endlessly bitch about how psychotic George Takei was for not inviting him to his wedding.

At the time, George Takei told everyone that actually he had invited William Shatner to his wedding but, just in case anyone missed it, he’s decided to reassert his claim – while throwing in some new jabs about Shatner’s stability for good measure. On television. Honestly, this is just like that movie Grumpy Old Men, only worse because neither of them are dead yet.

Just a quick heads up, everyone – it looks like we might be heading into a new Phase Of Shatner. The old phases of Shatner were pretty good – like the one where William Shatner’s ego heavily outweighed his hammy talents, and the one where he countered all the ridicule he gained from the first phase by pretending to be in on the joke – but this one looks like it might be a doozy.

That’s because in the Third Phase Of Shatner, William Shatner has let the ego back in and he’s old enough not to care. We first saw flashes of this when William Shatner didn’t get a role in the new Star Trek movie and went slightly berserk about it, but this stuff about George Takei’s wedding invite seems to have pushed Shatner over the edge.

For the uninitiated, George Takei gay-married his partner last month, and William Shatner didn’t turn up. And in a completely confusing internet video this week, William Shatner claimed that he wasn’t invited to the wedding because George Takei suffered from ‘psychosis’.

In the wake of this, George Takei had already issued a counter-statement claiming that he did invite William Shatner to the wedding, but that didn’t really hit the mark, so instead he went on TV and repeated it. The LA Times quotes:

“It is absolutely baffling to us because, in fact, we did invite Bill and we didn’t hear from him… I think his stability is quite questionable. … Bill likes to be the star of the show. He likes the attention that is focused on him. It’s a big, shiny, demanding ego. … It’s all typical of Bill. … [His] ranting and raving is just silliness.”

What happens now is anyone’s guess. Technically it should be William Shatner’s turn to lay into George Takei again, but we get the feeling that if he got angrier about it all he’d end up squirting jets of burning blood out of his bumhole, so maybe that option is out.

In a way it’s upsetting that two old men like William Shatner and George Takei have resorted to slagging each other off in such a humiliatingly public way. But really we’re just upset that this fall-out didn’t happen back in the mid-1980s – because then we’re pretty sure that the bloody awful Star Trek film about those poxy whales wouldn’t have ever been sodding made.