The Star Trek Universe panel at New York Comic Con ended with a 60th anniversary retrospective, and then William Shatner walked out on the Empire Stage to a standing ovation. Ben Stiller hosted. What followed was part interview, part episode-by-episode walk through Kirk’s biggest moments, and part Shatner being Shatner.
How he became Kirk
Shatner started at the beginning. NBC hated the first Star Trek pilot. “We hate the pilot, we hate the cast.” But the network saw “a magic to the idea” and paid for a second pilot, something Shatner says he has “never heard of before or since.” That’s when they called him in New York. He flew to Los Angeles to watch the original pilot, “and I thought, wow, that’s magical.”
Regret, and a New York hotel
Stiller asked about regret as a theme that runs through Star Trek. Shatner took it straight to where he’s staying this week:
“We’re in a hotel here in New York. I wish we weren’t in that hotel. I really regret being in that hotel. And I make sure that the people who put me in the hotel regret.”
The room lost it.
The Enemy Within, and Kirk’s tunic
They screened the final confrontation from The Enemy Within, the 1966 Richard Matheson episode that split Kirk into two halves. Then came the reveal: Ben Stiller owns Kirk’s tunic from that episode.
“I bought that tunic at an auction.”
Shatner asked if he paid millions. Stiller: “Not millions, but a lot.”
Shatner tied the scene to what he’s doing now, a heavy metal album and a tour after a big show in Chicago. The fear is the same in both: “I wonder if they’re going to laugh me off the stage.” Stiller’s answer was that Shatner’s success comes from always taking that risk. “I could watch that episode over and over again.”
Arena, and the Gorn
Next was Arena, and Kirk’s double-fisted swing at the Gorn. Shatner remembered shooting at Vasquez Rocks, full of “shattered glass and rocks”:
“It’s like, what have I done? Why am I here? I want to go back to that terrible hotel.”
His verdict on the fight: “That fight sequence was just so bad.” And when Stiller asked whether Kirk knew the Gorn’s ears were so sensitive that boxing them would work: “Captain Kirk knew everything.”
Then Stiller unveiled a Gorn head under glass, from his own collection. He bought it at auction “like 20 years ago,” and says “it’s worth a lot more now” than he paid. Shatner, asked what Star Trek memorabilia he owns: “Nothing.”
The City on the Edge of Forever
The City on the Edge of Forever came next: Kirk holding McCoy back as Edith Keeler dies, giving up the love of his life for the greater good. Shatner on what he thinks about as an actor in a scene like that:
“We all live with that question. You know, why did I, why did I marry that girl?”
It turned into his philosophy of regret:
“You’ve got to live with the choices you made, realizing that the choices you made were done with the amount of knowledge you had at that moment… So regret is spurious. You’ve got to relieve yourself of regret.”
The Wrath of Khan, and Leonard Nimoy
The last clip was Spock’s death in The Wrath of Khan. Shatner connected it to Leonard Nimoy’s own death. Years ago, in a limo full of actors, one by one they all gave up smoking. “The only one who didn’t give up smoking was Leonard.” Nimoy died of emphysema, and Shatner believes his last moments were like that scene. “It was life imitating a fiction.”
On their friendship: “We were very much the same, born four days apart. He in Boston, me in Montreal. The cities are very similar.”
Sixty years
Sixty years in, the original captain is still on stage telling the stories himself: a pilot NBC hated, a fight on Vasquez Rocks he calls “just so bad,” a friend he lost, and a New York hotel he regrets.
Which Kirk moment is yours? Tell me in the comments on the channel.
