Last Week Tonight with John Oliver paid tribute to Patrick Stewart twice Sunday night, first with an image of the late actor in the final frame of its opening montage, then with a deep-cut callback to Stewart’s role in one of the show’s earliest running gags.
After Sunday night’s end credits, the HBO show tagged the episode with a 2014 clip of Stewart looking directly into the camera and issuing four simple words: ‘Go get those geckos.’”
The clip dates back to one of Last Week Tonight’s Season 1 obsessions: Russian space geckos.
In July 2014, Russia lost contact with a satellite carrying four female geckos and one male gecko as part of an experiment studying reproduction in zero gravity. Oliver seized upon the plight of what he dubbed the “space sex geckos,” arguing that rescuing them might be the rare problem humanity could actually unite to solve.
Thus was born #GoGetThoseGeckos. Oliver urged viewers to contact Vladimir Putin through the Kremlin’s website with suggestions for retrieving the satellite, while the show assembled an unusually starry coalition to spread the message.
Among them were actual astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Richard Branson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tim Gunn, Regis Philbin, and Stewart—whose years playing Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard made him the group’s most distinguished fake astronaut.
Each delivered the same plea: “Go get those geckos.”
Russian mission did manage to re-establish contact with the satellite, prompting Last Week Tonight to declare victory a week later with #WeGotThoseGeckos—even though Oliver acknowledged the satellite had actually been recovered before his original segment aired.
The story took a darker turn a month later, when the capsule returned to Earth and all five geckos were found dead. Oliver marked their passing with “five mournful flicks of the tongue” and a performance by A Great Big World:
