Image Credit: James De Leon/PR PhotosJackie Earle Haley is just starting to embrace his inner geek. At San Francisco’s WonderCon over the weekend — where he promoted the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street — he gave an endearing video interview to Collider (watch it after the jump). The highlights:
• It wasn’t until he starred as Rorschach in Watchmen that he discovered comic books. “It’s literature. There’s writing in the drawings, you know what I mean, that’s not words,” he said. “The layers in there is just phenomenal. It’s mind-boggling.” It wasn’t until he saw J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek that he knew what it meant to be a geek. “Dude, I had a nerdgasm watching Star Trek. It’s like I really started to get what this whole geeky thing was, man. At the end of that thing, there was such a wonderful reverence to my childhood but yet, these guys completely owned it in today and what they made. It was awesome.” He wanted to get the dolls (to go along with his Watchmen collection).
• Given an opportunity to back track on a statement in which he referred to the makeup process he endured to play the new Freddy Krueger as “a total b—-,” he did not. “The makeup was a total b—-. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to be there,” he said. In the end, he found a way to channel the agitation of 3.5 hours in the makeup chair, contact lenses that he couldn’t see out of, and knife fingers and fake fingertips that made it impossible for him to put anything in his pockets into his performance. “All of that was incredibly motivating to hand off to Freddy between action and cut,” he said. “‘Cause it was really kind of otherworldly. Like, who glues s— all to their face and just leaves it there? You don’t do that.” If the movie does well when it opens April 30, he expects to put himself through it again.
• Speaking about his Fox show Human Target — and its ’80s “action movie of the week” popcorn vibe — his face lit up so much that it’ll make you want to tune in if you haven’t. He said the season 1 finale is his favorite episode, and he’s yet to hear about a season 2.
What was the “Aha!” moment that made you realize you were a geek?
“The Conscience of the King.” “Who Mourns for Adonais? ” “The Omega Glory.” “Bread and Circuses.” “The Gamesters of Triskelion.” Are these Led Zeppelin songs? Chapter headings for a Russian war epic? One-act plays your high school drama teacher loved? Nope: they’re just a few of the incredible episode titles from the original run of Star Trek. Earlier this month, Mack Elder, a Trek megafan with a Trek villain name, set a world record by naming all 79 titles of the original series, in order, in just under 100 seconds. The 
First things first: My apologies for missing my Big Bang Theory recap last week, fellow Big Bang Theorists. You can blame the amoebae that have taken up residence in my tummy and fell me but good last Monday night. (I’ll spare y’all any further description other than to relay that, stemming from my best guess for the complicated scientific names for the little buggers based on what my doctor told me, my boyfriend has decided to call the amoebae Butch and Nana. Sheldon would so not approve.) I was especially bummed that I didn’t get to commiserate with you about last week’s Big Bang, too, since a night out as Raj’s wingman brought out a delightfully unexpected flirtatious side of Sheldon Cooper — even if Sheldon himself was completely unaware that he was, in fact, flirting with a co-ed with a rather improbable fetish for super-hero merch. (As opposed to Sheldon’s completely probable fetish for super-hero merch.)
In honor of the premiere of the final season of Lost, Prof. Doc Jensen looks at competing theories of time-travel in popular sci-fi franchises. Warning: this course may cause a migraine. Students are advised to take an aspirin before reading. (Getting stoned may also help, though this cannot be condoned by the faculty.) For more crash courses in pop culture, enroll in 
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
