The Federated States of Bad Robot have made a global sweep of the world's press, starting in Sydney and ending in Los Angeles. We put a call into sick bay and had the good fortune to speak with Karl Urban, back on board the Enterprise as the lovable curmudgeon Dr. Leonard H. “Bones” McCoy. Urban's take on Starfleet's finest chief medical officer is a welcome bit of comic relief in 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' so much so that it took great self-restraint to keep from begging him to shout “dammit!' over the phone. We did, however, touch upon other topics.

He does, however, get to do a little scientific work in the picture, and some of it involves medical tests from some old fuzzy franchise friend – the Tribbles.

Sharp-eyed viewers saw a Tribble in the 2009 picture (it's on Scotty's desk during the Delta Vega sequence) but this time he's front and center. We asked Urban about working with a Tribble and he told us a surprising fact.

It eschews the first film's colorful, over-the-top action and wacky comic relief for the sort of grimy, sadistic ultraviolence found in the '70s exploitation films that inspired the creation of the Dredd character in the first place, and it's a surprisingly entertaining movie for something that's so unsettlingly violent. You've never had so much fun watching people get shot in the face in super slow-motion.