Just finished watching the first episode. That transition — you know the one I mean — was really great.

(And Faldor, you of all people have no room to complain on this one. I've read that QI can never be shown outside the UK, 'cause obtaining worldwide licensing for all the art on the big screens is impossible. Maybe we could work out some kind of strategic exchange: we get QI, you get … hmm … let's say … Maine. Deal?)

Oooh. Oooh. Can I be Fedmahn Kassad? He was a badass who got to have sex with a superhero girl from the future.

Um. Spoilers.

I saw them in the same room once. It was freaky.

Root canal is considerably funnier than that movie.

Goddamn, what an ending.

(Er. Except we'd need a reason why the plane isn't simply diverted to a military airfield in Alaska and the passengers put into quarantine and treated. Damn.)

You even went for authentic livery. Impressive.

The suits are probably gonna make us set the opening in Equatorial Kundu, though, for legal reasons.

Ever read "The Hot Zone?" The hard part about telling a story about hemorrhagic fever is making it sound even remotely plausible. Truth is stranger than … and so on.

I have zero problem with the basic premise and here's why.

The bioterror angle Zarb explored is easy, but just to think out loud for a second … what if not? Organs for transplant are carried on commercial flights all the time, as carry-on packages in the passenger cabin.

We open on a narrow, winding road somewhere in the tropics. It's sunset, magic hour. From an aerial shot of rolling jungle-covered hills, we zoom in to a helmeted motorcyclist — obviously a woman, from her skin-tight leathers — tearing down the otherwise empty road.

Suddenly holy shit! There's a water buffalo in the road or something! She lays the bike down, skids a hundred feet down the road head-first into a tree. Smash-cut to black.

We fade in to the rider's POV. It's after dark now, but headlights light the scene with a cold glare. We see what are obviously paramedics working over her, chattering away in unsubtitled local yabber-yabber language. We see them put a mask over her nose, and inject things into her body, but the shot begins to iris out. We cut to a close-up of her face as her eyes go dead.

Next we're in a hospital. She's being rushed through corridors into an operating room. It all looks very normal, but the foreignness of it makes it somehow sinister. We're not sure what's going on; are they trying to save her, or is it something darker? She gets rushed into the OR, they cut the rest of the clothes off of her, then we get a gore-discretion montage of incisions and retractions and dissections, and then wet, dark, not-quite-seen things being dropped into stainless steel basins.

Then we do a continuity cut to a tight close-up on a small styrofoam cooler, about the size of a lunchbox, otherwise nondescript but for the big red official-looking label on it: HUMAN ORGAN. It's being carried through airport security by a young, scruffy-looking guy. He's our protagonist. Think somebody in the Bradley Cooper vein; improbably handsome, but just dorky enough to be plausible.

We're in an international airport, someplace exotic but civilized. Ho Chi Minh City, maybe. We see our guy make his way through security with like zero grasp of the local language, probably all MOS cause we're rolling the opening titles. He finds his way to his gate just as they're closing the door, and flops down in a window seat on the upper deck of the 747, in business class.

There he has a meet-cute with a Vietnamese girl next to him. She's barely legal, maybe 19. Rich parents, sending her to New York to go to school. Her English is terrible, but they flirt and laugh a lot. Because she can't read well, she doesn't realize what's in our guy's cooler. When she asks him, he awkwardly spins it around to hide the label against the bulkhead and changes the subject.

They take off, order drinks — he knows he shouldn't, but it's a long flight, and it's just a beer — and talk. She's gorgeous, and exotic, and clearly into him. We see an obvious mile-high-club opportunity in his future.

It's about this time that we hear an ominous creaking, groaning sound. For serious. It sounds like the Titanic's about to break up. The captain comes on the intercom, delivering a long speech in Vietnamese. The girl tries to translate for him. "Turbulence," she says, finally spitting out the word, grinning 'cause she got it. "That's it? That's all he said? He talked for like three minutes, and you give me one word?" They're laughing about it, but our guy is visibly anxious.

Then the captain starts repeating his little speech, this time in surprisingly unaccented English. (Commercial pilots speak English to air-traffic control; they're good at it, regardless of their native tongue.) But just as he gets to the part about rough air, the window by our guy's seat suddenly, and with absolutely no warning, explodes inward, the seal around the plexi failing catastrophically. It comes inside with the energy of a bomb, practically vaporizing our guy, his new girlfriend and, most importantly, the styro container with the transplant organ in it. That's right, folks, this is Psycho and they're both Janet Leigh.

The bulky business-class seats contain the force of the rupture for the most part, but our until-now presumed protagonists (and our mystery organ) are basically aerosolized, spraying the other passengers in the compartment with a thin mist of blood and tissue. (It'll be tricky to do this graphically enough to get the point across but not so bad we nauseate the audience.) Alarms are going off, oxygen masks are dropping from the overhead, people are start screaming once the second and a half of shock wears off, it's chaos.

But all things considered, it's not a catastrophe. Yeah, two people are dead and an international flight high over the Pacific is in danger, but it's not unprecedented. There are protocols for this kind of thing. All they have to do is declare an emergency, descend to under 10,000 feet so nobody suffocates in the unpressurized cabin, turn around and fly low and slow to the nearest airport. It'll take hours — low and slow, remember — but everybody's gonna be fine.

Until people in the upper-deck business-class cabin start getting sick.

(The contagion is definite blood-borne, and might be airborne through aerosolized mucus and saliva via sneezing and coughing. It's not spraying virus particles out the window as the plane circles, because Viruses Do Not Work That Way, but the way it spreads through the plane makes it clear that it'd be very difficult to reliably contain on the ground in a country with no real disease-control infrastructure like Vietnam. So the choices are let it land and let those guys take their chances, possibly causing a pandemic; get global ATC to divert the plane out over the ocean outside ground-based radar coverage and then covertly shoot it down; or redirect it to the United States where at least CDC containment guys have a chance of keeping the infected people secure, and just maybe curing some or all of them.)

That's just the thing, you see. It's not the only possible definition. Other people have different definitions; QED. Nobody says you have to agree with their definitions, but it's not reasonable to just pretend they don't exist just because they don't jive with your own interpretation of what "Christian" means. The same is true for any named ethos, obviously.

If you want a substantive discussion on this — and for god's sake, please no — then it has to start with ideas, not bickering over semantics. Okay, fine, some people who self-identify as Christian do or say things that you don't think Christians should do or say. So what? They still do that stuff, and they still self-identify as Christians, and its not like anybody can sue them for trademark infringement for using the word without permission, so … what? What's the point of hauling out the "they're not really" thing?

Now. On the other hand. I could get tee shirts made up that say "I'm so Christian you just can't believe it" and then go on a killing spree and murder like a hundred toddlers. Would my actions say anything at all about Christianity? Not a damn thing, not any more than if I'd described myself as a Democrat or a Cubs fan. Unless there's some apparent causal link, or even compelling correlation, between two aspects of somebody's behavior, saying "That guy was X, so X is bad" is just fucking stupid.

I have a great story about Reykjavik that I heard from George Schultz some years ago. I can't promise to get every last detail right, 'cause I'm doing it from memory, but I'll try my best.

Reagan, not many people recall, was a staunch anti-nuclear guy. Not like "nuclear weapons are bad," but no, seriously, the guy wanted to abolish all nuclear weapons, everywhere. Early in his presidency, the Soviets moved their SS-4, SS-5 and SS-20 rockets in eastern Europe. To counter them, the US moved cruise and Pershing missiles into western Europe. Now, cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles are what's called "medium-range" weapons. They're not something you'd use to hit Moscow from Boca Raton. The US put them in Europe to counter the threat of a nuclear-backed Warsaw Pact invasion into Germany. But from Berlin to Moscow as the crow files is almost exactly 1,000 miles … and the Pershing II had an operational range of about 1,100 miles. With a flight time to Moscow of only two minutes, the US had unintentionally deployed a first-strike weapon. The Soviets, unsurprisingly, were not thrilled.

So Reagan came up with an idea he called the "zero option." It was nothing less than the total nuclear disarmament of Europe. The US would remove all Pershing II and Tomahawk missiles, if the Soviets would remove all SS-4, SS-5 and SS-20s. That was his offer: Let's just totally disarm the European theater.

It might not be apparent in retrospect, but this was a very big deal.

Now, this was 1981. The guy in charge of the USSR was named Brezhnev. As in the "Brezhnev Doctrine." The USSR had a rock-solid hegemony in eastern Europe — East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia (yes, they used to be one country), Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria — and they weren't interested in anything that could weaken that bloc. So the zero option went nowhere, and Europe sprouted ballistic missile launchers like forests sprout mushrooms.

Around about the same time, work was ongoing on what was then called "High Frontier." It was a Department of Energy-funded (and Reagan-supported) initiative to develop defensive technologies to counter ballistic missiles. See, at that time there were only two conceivable defenses against a ballistic missile: To convince the other guy never to launch it, or to destroy it yourself before the other guy got a chance to launch it. Once the keys were turned and the birds were in the air, it was all over but the shouting. High Frontier was the name for the search for ways to — crazy as it sounded — shoot down ballistic missiles on the very edge of space.

Now, we'd had anti-ballistic missiles for years. They're just what they sound like: missiles that you use to shoot down other missiles. But a couple things conspired to make them less-than-ideal. First, missiles with multiple warheads — MIRVs — were extremely difficult to target with ABMs. And second, the 72 ABM Treaty, which had been signed largely for political reasons, limited the deployment of anti-ballistic missiles regardless of whether they were effective or not.

So in the late 70s and early 80s attention turned to more exotic types of countermeasures. The leading candidate was called a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser. Basically you set off a relatively small nuclear explosion in high orbit (where it won't hurt anything) and use the resulting burst of X-rays to power an extraordinarily intense laser, which you then use to burn through warhead head shields before they reenter the atmosphere.

In the spring of 83, some guys working at LLNL had a major breakthrough in nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers, the technical details of which I can't remember right now. But Reagan got briefed on it by Edward Teller, and just days later he gave what's now known as his famous "Star Wars" speech. That's the televised address from the Oval Office where he talked about his vision for a world in which nuclear weapons were "impotent and obsolete." Yes, the president of the United States said "impotent" on live television. What can I say; it was a different time.

Anyway, he took what had been High Frontier and expanded the hell out of it, and renamed it the Strategic Defense Initiative, but everybody called it Star Wars anyway, 'cause trailers for Return of the Jedi were already in theaters and you know, why not.

Flash-forward two years. It's 1985, in Geneva. Brezhnev is dead. His successor, Andropov, is also dead. His successor, Chernenko, is also also dead. Those Russians had a penchant for elevating really old, really sick guys to be their heads of state. Anyway, for about ten minutes the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been this kid — almost literally; he was in his early 50s — named Mikhail Gorbachev. None of the eggheads at Foggy Bottom knew anything about him. He was a complete mystery. But there he was, sitting across the table from Reagan, both of them flanked by about a million translators and advisors.

Before long, the subject turned to SDI. The Soviets hated it, wanted it to go away. They saw it as destabilizing; if the US were protected from ballistic missile attacks, what's to stop them from lighting off some of those Pershing IIs and destroying the USSR? Reagan countered by offering to give it to them. Seriously. This stuff is vitally important to the future of the human race, he said. We'll just give you all the technology, every bit of it.

Gorbachev laughed. He actually laughed. He said, "How can I trust you? You won't give us the technology for milking machines!"

What with one thing and another, the Geneva summit ended. Nothing substantive was accomplished. The two leaders did agree, finally, on the language of a joint statement that said … nothing, really. It was, in a sense, a complete waste of time.

But for the first time since the 70s, the leaders of the US and the USSR were talking face-to-face.

Flash-forward again, this time to Reykjavik in 1986. The summit was scheduled to end at noon on Sunday. On Sunday morning, Gorbachev introduced the topic of medium-range missiles in Europe. The Soviets still had a bazillion SS-4s, SS-5s and SS-20s; the Americans still had a bazillion Pershing IIs and nuclear-tipped Tomahawks. It was the same impasse they'd faced for five years. But this time, things went different. After hours of arguing — it was now well past noon, and there'd been no break for lunch — Gorbachev finally said, exasperated, "Let's not leave even a hundred missiles! Let's abolish them completely and go for the zero option!"

Reagan smacked the table. "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" he demanded. Then he started talking about the original zero option, from way back in 1981: the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons in Europe.

But Gorbachev stopped him. He hurriedly clarified his position: He wasn't talking about getting rid of the missiles in Europe. He was talking about everything. Dismantling the entire strategic nuclear arsenals of the US and the USSR.

Reagan was speechless. Which, if you know anything about Reagan, is saying something.

Then Gorbachev dropped the other shoe. Quietly, almost apologetically, he said, "Of course, you must agree to confine SDI to the laboratory."

Now, you have to see this from the perspective of the times. Back in the 70s, Soviet military spending had stabilized at a growth rate of about one and a half percent per year. The Red Army was five million men strong. The USSR had absolute dominance over all of eastern Europe, they were in the middle of an invasion into central Asia, and for years they'd publicly espoused the doctrine of converting the entire world to totalitarian socialism by force if necessary. The only thing keeping the tanks from rolling into western Europe was nuclear parity with the US; we had far fewer troops and far less materiel in Europe, and would have no change of winning a conventional shooting war. The peace — and it was peace, if a peculiar sort of peace — was only maintained because the US and the USSR had continent-scorching arsenals pointed at each other.

And here was the leader of the USSR offering, then and there, to eliminate those arsenals completely. And the only thing he was asking was the abolition of the only line of research that showed any hope of someday rendering those arsenals obsolete.

For two solid minutes, nobody said anything. The room was dead silent. Then finally, Reagan shook his head. "I can't," he said in a very small voice.

Gorbachev pressed the issue, and again Reagan sat in silence. Finally he scribbled a note, and passed it to George Schultz, who was his Secretary of State and chief diplomat. "George, am I right?" it said. Schultz wrote one word and passed the note back: "Absolutely."

The summit wound up quickly then, if a bit anticlimactically. There were handshakes and formalities, and photos to be taken. But it was late, and they were behind schedule, and really nobody wanted to linger anyway. Reagan and Gorbachev put on their coats and walked out into the bitter Icelandic night. Their limos were lined up out front as determined by protocol: Reagan's in front, Gorbachev's behind. Gorbachev walked Reagan to his car. As they shook hands, Gorbachev said through his interpreter, "You know, we could still go back in there and finish this business."

Reagan just shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry."

Betcha know the rest of the story. Gorbachev came back from Reykjavik empty-handed, which got under the skin of the already disillusioned hardliners in the Politburo. The next year, the two countries agreed to a separately negotiated treaty to limit, and finally eliminate, all ground-launched nuclear and conventional ballistic missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,000 miles. This was seen as an even more abject failure by the hardliners, who believed that the Soviet strategic rocket forces in Europe were the linchpin of their hegemony and the key to the eventual socialization of the continent. These perceived betrayals of Soviet foreign policy — compounded by Gorbachev's reaction to Baltic separatism and his advocacy of the New Union Treaty — led directly to the August Putsch of 1991, and the formal dissolution of the USSR on Boxing Day.

Would those events have played out if Reykjavik had ended differently? If Reagan and Gorbachev had shaken hands that day and begun taking apart their respective nuclear arsenals bolt by bolt, would the USSR still exist as a political entity today? Heck if I know. Maybe things would have been better, maybe things would have been worse, maybe they would have been just the same only different, with different flags and different maps but fundamentally the same old world. Nobody can know for sure, and I can't even guess.

But let me just say this. You wanna hear about the Cold War was a different time? The Cold War was an era when two guys, sitting in an uncomfortably cold room just talking, defined the history of the world for an entire generation. Not by starting a war or ending one, or forming or dissolving a nation. But just by one of them saying, "How about we do this?" and the other one saying no.

The world was balanced on the head of a pin, and we all knew it.

(Holy crap, this turned out long. Sorry, fellas.)