Star Trek's Captain Kirk Rescues Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars

Yeah, with The Walking Dead going on, it took us a while to get to this one... William Shatner showed up tonight via satellite as Star Trek's Captain James T. Kirk, to warn host Seth MacFarlane that tomorrow, the newspapers will lambaste him as the worst Oscar host of all time, and he'll never get over the stigma. He knows this, of course, because he comes from the future. Captain Kirk showed up less than 10 minutes into the telecast to cut off MacFarlane's (predictably) almost-blue and somewhat offensive jokes. He claimed it was his job to "stop you from destroying the Academy Awards," and held up headlines that read, "Seth MacFarlane, Worst Oscar Host Ever." He then showed off some of the famously terrible material that MacFarlane would air if he wasn't stopped. Unfortunately and ironically, the reviews are in and while everyone's pretty excited to have seen Captain Kirk appear, not everyone thinks the joke worked. Here's TV Line on the bit:

But was it enough to fend off his fated bit of bad press? At minimum, Kirk's "intervention" — though semi-inspired — ran several minutes to long and should have been much more tightly directed. MacFarlane's monologue proper, meanwhile, could have been 10 percent more improper and edgy, instead of covering well-tred (and thus "safe") ground. (Kirk at one point commented that "Amy and Tina should host everything," and truly, their infamous Kathryn Bigelow/James Cameron zinger was more pointed than anything on display here.)