James Doohan – Scotty from Star Trek – will always be remembered for looking tubby in jumpsuits and screaming endlessly about dilithium crystals while William Shatner was busy teaching sexy lady aliens about love, so sending his ashes into space was a fitting goodbye.
What probably wasn't such a fitting goodbye, though, was sending Scotty's ashes into space only for them to plummet 72 miles back to Earth and land in a mountain range where nobody could find them. And, as luck would have it, that's exactly what's happened. The remains of James Doohan are now somewhere up a mountain in New Mexico in a location that can't be reached by foot, just like they have been for the past two weeks. While the tale of Scotty's missing ashes sounds like a farce, in reality it has started off a Star Trek trend – when the actor who played the engineer in Star Trek: The Next Generation dies, the exact same thing will happen to his remains – only with slightly better production values and more boring talky bits.
Despite being a 42-year-old sci-fi show that keeps looking ropier each time it's viewed, Star Trek is still in ridiculously strong demand. When Star Trek auctions are held, people throw down tens of thousands of dollars just to get their hands on memorabilia. When Star Trek movies are announced, big-name directors like the man who invented Lost sign up to be a part of things. And when William Shatner urinates out an agonising kidney stone, everyone wants a piece of Captain Kirk's pissy salt crystals.
This Star Trek mania extends to James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original series and films. When James Doohan died in 2005, not only did he kickstart a weird pan-Scottish debate about where his fictional character was actually born, but plans were quickly made for his ashes to get slung up into space on the back of a rocket. Thanks to a company called Space Services, human remains can be fired up 72 miles into the air – to the point where sky meets space – before descending and being handed back to the relatives of the deceased.
Which is all well and good until the ashes fall back to a part of the Earth that nobody can retrieve them from, which is what happened to James Doohan's ashes on April 28. More than a fortnight later and Scotty's ashes are still nowhere to be found. E! Online reports:
A rocket that blasted into suborbital space two weeks ago from a remote area in New Mexico and contained ashes of late Star Trek star James Doohan has fallen back to Earth and landed in a mountainous region of the state that's made it difficult to recover, according to a spokeswoman for the company … "It's not like Mr. Doohan's lost. The rocket did hit its landing target, but it's in a very mountainous and rugged terrain. They can't get to it by foot or by vehicle. They have to take a helicopter up there."
As well as James Doohan's remains, the ashes of 200 other people were onboard the lost unit – but none of them were as famous as Doohan so they probably don't count as much. While hopefully the relatives of James Doohan are coping with the loss of his ashes, perhaps this is the start of a new celebrity fad – the ironic funeral. Maybe in the future the stars of, say, 24 will have their ashes hidden and the relatives of the dead will have to locate them within a day by using brutal interrogation techniques. Or the stars of Heroes get to load up on heroin and paint premonitions of their own gravestones to be displayed at the funeral. Or the stars of Sex And The City could drown in shit. You get the idea.
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Phil Stubbs says
“200 other people were onboard the lost unit – but none of them were as famous as Doohan so they probably don’t count as much”
What a ridiculous and insensitive statement, to think one human being is indeed more or less important, you should be ashamed !
Every sole / remain are sacred and should be treated as such !
Phil Stubbs
Gilbert Wham says
Why? I don’t care in the slightest where you are to be buried, and I very much doubt you care about my final resting place either. I would like to be blown up, as it happens. Boom! Like that.