Star Trek should never resurrect William Shatner’s James Kirk

Star Trek should never, ever, resurrect William Shatner’s James Kirk.

Star Trek did the right thing in the 1994 film, Star Trek Generations, by deciding to kill off William Shatner’s version of James Kirk. The death scene was a tad anti-climatic, sure, but the decision to close that part of the franchise was the right call. It’s something more franchises should do, especially with modern Star Trek.

Too often fanbases get high on the concept of nostalgia, without ever realizing that what they’re getting is just a watered-down, wannabe facsimile of something they can never have. You can go home again, but you truly can never go back again. The march of time is relentless and the past can’t be brought back.

Killing off Shatner’s Kirk was the right call, and it’s one that should stick. We’re not the only ones who agree with that, as ScreenRant also wrote that it won’t work. They’re steadfast in the same idea that bringing back Kirk won’t work.

So why does it seem like we’re the only ones who know this?

Star Trek keeps trying to revive the past

We know that they can’t bring back Shatner’s Kirk, thinking that it’ll work once again like it did in the 1960s. Heck, Paramount and Star Trek probably know that it’s time to move on from a 92-year-old. So why does Star Trek keep thinking that octogenarians and older will save the franchise?

We know Shatner and Kirk are long gone, yet we’re still getting rumblings of Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard getting more adventures. Feature-length adventures, at that. Stewart is 83, and he’s just as past his prime as Shatner. It’s time to lay to rest the idea of bringing back Stewart, just as much as it is time we lay to rest the idea of Shatner ever coming back.

You can’t recreate the past, you can only tarnish its memory. Let’s move on, and embrace the future. One a bit more detached from what’s come before. Let’s remember what The Next Generation and Enterprise tried to do, and keep doing that.

Let’s tell new stories.