These Are the Voyages of William Shatner

LOS ANGELES (June 8) - The SUV pulls to an abrupt stop on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. In the middle of the westbound lane is a man in a loud shirt, his body coiled with energy, darting across traffic toward a strip mall.

The driver jumps visibly, and not merely at the presence of a human being on the pavement. It's who that human is: Without the hasty application of power brakes, one of the most recognizable faces in the history of American television would have become one with the road.

But it's lunchtime, after all. Good sushi is across the street. And a guy like William Shatner is not about to be stopped by something as mundane as traffic.

Why did William Shatner cross the road? Why has he ever? To get to the other side. To see what's out there. To find out stuff and inhale the universe in his singular Shatnerian way. It's the story of his life - and the lives of the characters he has breathed, spoken and shouted into existence over a 50-year performing career.

It's the story of "Boston Legal" bombast Denny Crane, racing to experience all life's pleasures before Alzheimer's drags him not-so-gentle into that good night. It's the story of the Priceline Negotiator, that discount-travel maniac who barnstorms across the planet to get us better deals on hotels and flights. It's the story of James T. Kirk, the wise and womanizing starship captain who led a crew of 23rd-century explorers across interstellar backroads.

And it's the story of Shatner himself - a man governed by his passions and interests, a man who crosses new roads every day, gleefully ignoring those who dismiss him and conquering frontiers he never dreamed possible. A cultural phenomenon who, despite tales of his galactic ego, seems strikingly down to Earth as he shapes and basks in the third golden age of his career.

"I'm trying to fill the cracks in the bricks that have been written. I'm the mortar," he says. "That's what an actor should be doing."

Yes, he's been pilloried over the years - perhaps justifiably here and there - for his roundhouse method-actor style, for his apparent obliviousness of his own over-the-topitude, for his primal, all-encompassing Shatnerness.

But being snide about William Shatner is so 1997. He is 77 now, post-post ironic, doing precisely what he wants to - and, finally, no longer terrified about making a living. "Live life like you're gonna die, because you're gonna," he sang a few years ago. And he does: "There is so much going on with me right now, it's difficult to believe all of it," he says.

After the brutally honest 2004 album "Has Been" with Ben Folds, after the Emmy in 2004 and the second Emmy in 2005 and the new autobiography this spring, if you're still stuck parodying Shatner's staccato delivery and making T.J. Hooker toupee cracks, the joke, friend, is on you.