Star Trek veteran and “out” pathfinder George Takei doesn’t care for John Cho‘s Hikaru Sulu suddenly being revealed as a closeted gay guy in the forthcoming Star Trek Beyond (Paramount, 7.22). Cho recently told Australia’s Herald Sun that Sulu will be revealed in the new film as a closet case. What’s the beef? Takei says it feels to him like a facile decision on the part of director Justin Lin and screenwriter/costar Simon Pegg.

Takei, who played Sulu in the 1960s Trek TV series, told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch that it would be better if Pegg and Lin could “be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.”

Takei said that he’s “delighted” there’s a gay character in Star Trek Beyond, but called a gay Sulu “a twisting of Gene Roddenberry’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

So now we have two topics of conversation above and beyond what Lin’s film will be — (a) Cho’s closeted Sulu and (b) poor Anton Yelchin‘s last and final outing as Chekhov.