Set your faces to stunned, and behold the trailers from the Star Trek prequel, in which Winona Ryder plays Spock's mother.

But before you let your imagination take flight, and fancy that her headscarf conceals a pair of pointy ears, remember that Spock was only half Vulcan. The whereabouts of Sarek, the career-driven, Botox-eyebrowed extraterrestrial who knocked up Winona are unknown at this stage, but the new movie is said to explore the underlying roots of Spock's tortured personality. Of course, this was previously assumed to be the result of the Enterprise's mixed-species first officer being torn between his Vulcan logic and his human impulses.

But looking at the pictures - and it's always heartbreaking watching a child have to do the parenting - it seems likely that Spock in fact harboured residual trauma from having to attend Final Frontier High dressed in Marc Jacobs outfits positively riddled with holes where Mommy had chewed off the security tags.

And so to the latest dramatic episode in Ms Ryder's story arc. By now you may have heard that Winona was took bad on a flight from LA to Heathrow this week, slumping forward in her seat in a manner that apparently caused the pilot to consider diverting to another airport. As you will be aware, however, international law protects movie stars from having to go to Luton, so the craft soldiered on to Heathrow, where medics boarded the plane and gave the now-conscious Ryder some unspecified treatment before she left on a stretcher.

The facts as we know them are those, though we should add that Winona was later given the all-clear at nearby Hillingdon hospital, and flew on to Madrid yesterday. Yet none of this should prevent all truthseekers from turning their brooding gazes heavenwards and whispering: what in the hell happened up there?

Well. Several reporters have attempted to mind-meld themselves into a position of being able to speculate, but this column is not convinced that their implied explanation - Winona is back on the Percocet/Xanax speedballs again - is credible.

And so it was that Lost in Showbiz spent yesterday afternoon's occupational therapy session assembling a case file/mood board of theories. They follow presently:

1 Contemplating her forthcoming Star Trek outing, Winona, 37, collapsed at the sudden realisation that she has made the Stygian crossing from "romantic lead" to "mother". Sure, she's currently in the Fields of Asphodel limbo of the "hot mother" category, but Winona knows Hollywood is a swift and brutal town, and she'll be receiving scripts looking for "a Dianne Wiest type" before the decade is out.

2 At some point, probably 39,000ft above Greenland, Winona realised she had theoretically been pregnant with Leonard Nimoy, and freaked out accordingly.

3 Seemingly the most likely explanation centres on the painful truth that Winona is a recovering shoplifter, whose lawyer successfully argued that she should attend rehab in lieu of jail time, following her 2002 conviction for that unauthorised Saks trolley dash. Though her recovery has appeared to stay on course since this treatment for the compulsion to acquire high-end Alice bands by any means necessary, she can only take one day at a time, and it is all too possible that some point after the evening meal service on this fateful flight, Winona's resolve simply snapped, and she was found in the first-class restroom, failing to succeed in utilising the post-9/11 cutlery to hack the tag off a duty-free mini lip-gloss pack.

However, upon further consideration, all these theories were discounted in favour of the obvious explanation. What was this saga, if not an eerie mirror of approximately 437 Star Trek episodes in which the Enterprise is struck down by a mysterious illness, which will precipitate an ethical dilemma, wherein the crew realise that the extraction of a cure for the afflicted will in the process destroy a primitive culture or a delicate ecosystem - barring the insanely unlikely eventuality that they find a way around it?

Of course, the craft in this case was not a warp 5 starship, but a British Airways plane with a marginally better pretzel selection than that boasted by the Enterprise ... But something must have been at least tentatively sacrificed to ensure Winona's return to health, and until BA come clean about it, you are advised to cancel all flights with the airline out of consideration for your own astral safety.