This was what kicked me in the teeth hardest. TUC was the absolute best send-off they could have asked for and it would have been fine leaving it like that.
Spoilers Was it a mistake to kill Kirk in Star Trek Generations?
- Thread starter The Overlord
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This was what kicked me in the teeth hardest. TUC was the absolute best send-off they could have asked for and it would have been fine leaving it like that.
They needed to leave him alive in the 24th century and kick off a massive Star Trek Cinematic Universe where any and all characters could cross over. Spock, McCoy and Scotty were already there....
Not letting Kirk out of the Nexus and onto the "D" to interact with the crew and maybe even take command for a minute was a massive loss IMO. He should have swapped places with Picard, and had to work with the crew to get Picard out of his family fantasy.
Not letting Kirk out of the Nexus and onto the "D" to interact with the crew and maybe even take command for a minute was a massive loss IMO. He should have swapped places with Picard, and had to work with the crew to get Picard out of his family fantasy.
Not seeing kirk on the Ent D bridge interacting with Riker, Data, Troi,and especially Worf was a massive missed opportunity.. probably easy to do just had him spat out on the bridge with picard on the surface.. maybe he ends up saving the Ent D from crashing
I would leave the Nexus a mystery at first - and have the D encounter it accidentally while engaging Soran the first time. Picard disappears - and in his place appears Jim Kirk. He was trapped until Picard's entrance allowed him to slip out - after all, its Kirk, and he figured out he was in a fantasy long ago. This is when Guinan can step forward with some ancient lore of some sort, an urban legend from her people, and Kirk, being the senior officer, takes command to handle the crisis and figure out how to get Picard out of his family-life fantasy while handling Klingons from the bridge of the Enterprise, as he was born to do.
I don't think it was a necessarily a mistake to kill Kirk only that it was a mistake to kill Kirk this way and in this script. It's the same with blowing up the D in this film. I don't mean that the death would have to be more heroic, just more engaging somehow. Maybe even this same death would be fine at the tail end of a better script, I dunno. Maybe. I think of the time eaten up by Data's bullshit and Picard crying and rolling around on rocks in the desert heat and I wonder where is the scenes where Picard and Kirk challenge each other on a course of action just in some room or are put on different sides of some argument. Something like in Trek VI when Kirk and Spock are arguing about what to about the Klingons. That's what I wanted to see. This film just feels like checking off boxes on a checklist and now Kirk gets shot or now Kirk falls off a bridge was the last box.
I would've rather Kirk not show up at all in Generations, the writers never explored Kirk's real wants or desires and arbitrarily made his fantasy to retire. From the moment we first see Movie Kirk, his desires was to become Captain of the Enterprise. Period. He gets a chance again in TWOK, and then again in the horrible III, and later TVH. Everything about that character tells me a person or officer would have to pull him away with a phaser at his head from leaving the Captain's chair. It wasn't Kirk's nature to leave the chair unless a stupid writer who knows nothing about the character to make it so. What's shocking was that writer claimed to be a diehard Star Trek fan and wrote Generations???
???
Everything Kirk does in that movie was more like William Shatner being William Shatner than James Kirk. When did we had ever seen Kirk ever interested in horseback riding??? Not taking charge in a serious situation. Not relieving that incompetent Captain of the 1701- B and taking over the reigns to save lives. Pretending to be an engineer to a new Starship, a state of the art Excelsior Class??? Jumping on a broken bridge to press a remote??? This proves once again in Hollywood writers will sh*t all over the iconic character just to make their characters look better. That movie was a disgrace!
If so, they corrected it in the novels.
Tell us how?
About covers it.
And although I understand the people against bringing him back, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Kirk taking command of the D as Picard was otherwise 'engage'd woudve tapped into that whole Picard vs Kirk TV Guide stuff of that era- 'Who's the best captain of the Enterprise' or 'if earth was in peril which captain would you feel safer commanding the Enterprise'.. y'know what people expected of a crossover film amongst other stuff (so maybe Generations had abit of that subvert expectations thing that the Last Jedi got pulled up on..including the new lead encountering the sagas central character being unwilling to help at first and then an unsatisfactory exit )
No. The execs thought the torch had to be passed on film, a very questionable decision but understandable given that TNG started airing later internationally. So if a crossover was necessary, it would be ridiculous that Kirk continues alive some 80 years after his era especially when the point is to pass the torch. Although I did, do like The Return as a novel and Shatner/Pocket was able to continue Kirk living in the 24th century.
That the TNG films flamed out doesn't mean you need to keep using Kirk and shouldn't try to have, use, focus on other protagonists rather than try to keep using and bringing back the originals (let alone when the reboot films also flamed out).
That the TNG films flamed out doesn't mean you need to keep using Kirk and shouldn't try to have, use, focus on other protagonists rather than try to keep using and bringing back the originals (let alone when the reboot films also flamed out).
I think TNG was generally willing to show and admit that its protagonists were fallible rather than always glorious so that's OK.
That's pretty much my take on things. It would have been far better just to leave the fates of the TOS crew to our imaginations. It was a pretty foregone conclusion that (sans Spock and McCoy) they had all most likely passed away by the time of TNG, and I was fine with that. I didn't necessarily need to know the circumstances behind that.
If you think Kirk died in a shitty way, that's nothing compared to the original ending where he simply gets shot in the back by someone who he didn't even know and really had no connection to other than Picard telling him that Soran needed to be stopped.
But getting back to the actual way he died...yeah, it's simply one instance of a fundamentally flawed script. Kirk's greatest fantasy was not being retired. It was being back in command of a starship. And if he had to die, that's how it should have been. He should have been in charge of the Enterprise-D during the second go-around and prevented the ship from crashing, rather than dying by falling off a bridge. He would save the Enterprise, yet again, one last time.
I’ll always be mystified at how Moore & Braga wrote All Good Things simultaneously with Generations, and in less time (1.5 months vs nearly a year for GEN), and the former ended up being the tighter and more satisfying script. Goes to show the destructive tendencies of having too many cooks in the kitchen.
By bringing him back, naturally.
You could just, y'know, read the books, or the Memory Alpha/Beta synopses.
He is brought back to life in a novel called The Return by a Borg/Romulan Alliance.
I suspect AGT had fewer studio dictates.
Hell, proportionally speaking it may have had a bigger budget too. At least it didn't deflate a major sequence via stock footage.
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