William Shatner will turn 94 in March, but the acting icon seems to be as busy as ever. He’s set to appear in the Jason Priestley-directed hockey comedy “Keeper of the Cup,” and recently provided the voice of Keldor on the animated series “Masters of the Universe: Revolution.” Must be that clean Canadian living.
Since he’s still plugging away, you might be tempted to wonder if he could make one last visit to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. If so, you must not be a “Star Trek” fan, because as anyone up on the franchise’s overarching narrative knows, Kirk is, canonically, quite dead. He was killed on the planet Veridian III by a falling bridge while battling the villain Soran (Malcolm McDowell) alongside Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and there’s no “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” scenario – which cost us a Khan spinoff – through which he could be resurrected. In the future, death is still a permanent state for human beings.
So the “Star Trek” faithful were caught a tad off guard last week when Shatner dropped by Fan Expo Vancouver and announced that he might be returning to play Kirk one last time. How could this possibly work? There’s one reasonably good option, and one that would require a whole bunch of dumb stuff to happen — and, considering where the franchise is right now, the latter option seems most likely.
Could Shatner’s Kirk visit the Kelvin universe?
When asked about his future in the “Star Trek” universe, Shatner dropped this tantalizing morsel of information:
“I have been asked to come back as Kirk so many times. If Kirk is going to come back, it has to mean something. It has to be the show. But I was so impressed by this writer, so I said let’s talk after I’m done in Vancouver. So I’m awaiting a pitch to make it the show, it should come on Monday or Tuesday.”
He stressed that it’s “the show,” which I’m afraid wipes out the one plausible option for a Kirk curtain call. The obvious option would be to flash-forward in the Kelvin universe, where Kirk’s death has yet to occur, for a bittersweet cameo of sorts (or maybe more if Shatner is up for it). But that would likely be a movie, and, last we heard, the Kelvin universe is on pause.
The other possibility is that they could find a place for a nonagenarian Kirk to turn up, via the magic of bad science, somewhere in the Picard era — which, if nothing else, would explain why they revealed on “Star Trek: Picard” that Kirk’s remains are interred on Daystrom Station. I can’t imagine anyone being satisfied by this, but with Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman knocking about in “Star Trek,” it just feels like the right kind of wrong. In any event, this sounds like it’s coming together pretty quickly, so we might know how/if Shatner returns to “Star Trek” fairly soon.