As the Kirk and Chekov run through what’s left of their disgorged, crashed starship, I kept thinking, “It looks like a Best Buy after a tornado.” In one scene, I’m pretty sure I glimpsed a mangled, overturned LG refrigerator.

Is this the best mankind’s material science will produce? Remember, in the Trek universe, starships like the Enterprise are supposed to be the pinnacle of humanity’s technological prowess. Yet the innards of the Enterprise, with its metal gangways, ladders and wires (so many wires), seems to take its design inspiration from a submarine--a World War II submarine.

There are numerous egregious examples of “old tech” in “Star Trek Beyond.” At one point, Lieutenant Uhura flips a switch--a freakin’ red switch!--to initiate a shipwide announcement.

In the original, 1968-69 television series, Gene Roddenberry, bless his visionary heart, more than once portrayed glowing conduits when the crew had to fix something under a bulkhead. The impression was that light was being used to carry power or information throughout the ship. Roddenberry was on the right path, of course. Today’s Internet, with its insatiable appetite for data, wouldn’t be possible without fiber optics. Fiber is now, albeit slowly, making its way to the so-called last mile, and into your house.

The Trek movie now in theaters does offer a few imaginative ideas about future technology, including an ancient, alien weapon that behaves like a swarm of locusts. (One character calls it a “bio weapon,” which is all well and good, although that left me wondering why it destroys clothing as well as tissue and bone. Okay, let’s not quibble.)

But I couldn’t get past the running-and-hand-to-hand-fighting scenes in the trashed Best Buy. The fact that these scenes were long and boring didn’t help.

If humanity in the 22nd century is still creating material goods as screwy--i.e., containing metal screws--as the starships portrayed in “Star Trek Beyond,” I say we stay home. The universe doesn’t need our detritus.

Future material goods will, I suspect, be able to repair themselves when damaged (“machines” will behave like organisms in this future), or at least have the good graces to decay, safely and quietly, into the surrounding environment.

Let’s hope the set designers on the next Star Trek movie free their imaginations. Interstellar submarines and trashed Best Buys aren’t the future.

[phone rings]

"Hi there," she says, her voice bright and enthusiastic. "This is Amy. Are you busy?"

I hear this voice once or twice a week, typically at 10 a.m. or thereabouts. The caller ID tells me the number comes from Texas. I imagine a stack of servers in a dark closet in a building on the outskirts of Dallas. I decide to have some fun.

"Amy, are you a robot?"

There's a pause, and for an instant I doubt my instincts.

Amy laughs. "No, I'm not a robot," she says, her voice bright and enthusiastic.

Shaken, I hang up.

It’s Saturday afternoon, and you’re in a Toys "R" Us with your eight-year-old son evaluating the new stock of Mutant Leader action toys. This has become a part of your weekend routine, especially on rainy days. Besides, in the last two weekends, you’ve met three other bachelor dads at the store, including a guy from work you didn’t even know had been married, let alone a dad.

Your son is agitating about Mutant Leader Gold Edition, a six-inch tall spider-looking thing with gold accents on two of its plastic tentacles. He wants you to buy it for him.

“Dave, can I have this?” he pleads.

You wince. He’s been calling you by your first name for months, having decided for his own unexplained reasons to abandon “Dad.” Your ex thinks this is adorable, and tells you not to make a big deal about it.

“He’s dealing with the separation, Dave,” she tells you, while you stand in her new kitchen drinking coffee. “Let him process it.” Easy for her to say. She’s still “Mom,” and probably always will be.

Behind you in the toy store, a couple walking with a little girl overhears your son making his case for the purchase. “Dave, the Gold Edition works with my Green Edition. They go together. Can’t we buy it, Dave?”

You catch the eye of the other dad and smile sheepishly. He smiles back, but you already know what he’s thinking: So sad. That stepdad is trying to buy the boy’s affection.

You consider telling him what’s really going on. “No, no. I’m not his stepdad. He’s mine. I was in the delivery room when he… See, I’m going through a divorce, and my wife … my ex wife … she thinks I shouldn’t make a big deal about him calling me by my first name. I think it’ll blow over. What do you think?”

But the couple is already at the end of the aisle, turning right. They’re headed to Barbies, you say to yourself. Your son has put Gold Edition back on the shelf, and is now holding a miniature plastic machine gun, pointing its red-tipped muzzle nonchalantly at your zipper. “Can I have this, Dave?”

Last night, along with millions of other “Walking Dead” fans, I watched the series spin-off, “Fear of the Walking Dead” on AMC.

Here’s what I learned:

• The spin-off of a massively popular zombie franchise can impose a laughable number of commercial breaks into its inaugural episode, and we the audience will silently sit through them, immobile as the dead, and take it.
• Heroin addicts in Los Angeles are phenomenally attractive people who look, move and sound eerily like a young Johnny Depp.
• According to AMC, a blended family in L.A. isn’t Hispanic/White, Hispanic/Black, Hispanic/Korean or even Mexican/Guatemalan. No, “blended” refers to a white woman and a New Zealand guy of Maori descent. In fact, there aren’t any major Hispanic characters in episode 1. Have the producers ever been to L.A.?
• In the zombie Apocalypse, the guy you want on your team is a New Zealander of Maori descent who teaches English Lit. He’ll bravely search the abandoned church that serves as the neighborhood heroin shooting gallery/zombie rec room. At night. By himself. Armed only with a small flashlight. That’s one badass teacher!

 The top thing I learned from “Fear of the Walking Dead”? It doesn’t matter whether you’re an exceptionally attractive black teenager dating a pouty white girl or an exceptionally attractive, gentle and polite young black male (who in reality is a ruthless heroin dealer). You’re doomed, brother. Before the excruciatingly slow first episode ends, you’re destined to be a flesh-chomping zombie.