Captain Kirk is remembered as one of the all-time greats. He is a hero that is so well-known that even people who have never turned into an episode of Star Trek can tell you all about him. In that sense, he has transcended hero status and become a pop culture legend. Of course, one of the brutal truths of the world is that legends often don't live up to their reputation. There are very dark elements to Kirk's past that fans either don't know or simply choose to look past. And once you discover these thing things about Kirk, it's tough to see the character in the same way ever again!
Sometimes, we find out just how bigoted this enlightened Starfleet captain can be. Other times, we discover the horrific throwback attitude he shows towards various women. And on more than one occasion, he destroys entire cultures because he is convinced he knows what is best for them. Don't believe us? Fortunately, you don't have to go check with the Guardian of Forever, and we won't even make you slingshot across the sun and hurl yourself back in time. All you have to do is keep scrolling to read sketchy secrets about Captain Kirk!
15 CHEATER CHEATER
One of the things that Kirk is known for is beating the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru test. It’s meant to be one of the things that shows what an awesome Captain he is: he “doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario.” However, there is something a bit darker there. Kirk is usually held up as an exemplar: the ultimate officer, the ultimate man, and so on.
However, he canonically got where he is in life by cheating his way through anything that was difficult.
And to top it off, the 2009 Trek movie showed how stupid his technique was: he basically input cheat codes into the system. Rather than being the best Starfleet has to offer, he comes across as nothing more than a very lazy gamer!
14 DIMENSION DISRUPTER
One of the most iconic Original Series episodes was “Mirror, Mirror.” This episode introduced us to the idea of a dark Mirror Universe where Kirk, Spock, and all the rest were evil members of a Terran Empire, and Kirk had to survive this universe when he was sent there via transported accident. Along the way, though, he managed to break the universe.
Kirk finds out that Mirror Spock is also logical (in his own ruthless way), and he appeals to Spock to try to reform this evil empire. Later, on Deep Space Nine, we find out that Spock did so… and then the Terran Empire (and very nearly humanity itself) was wiped out by an Alliance of alien races. Kirk, who is sworn not to interfere in cultural developments, single handedly changed the entire Mirror Universe and caused countless deaths!
13 CONDEMNS PEOPLE TO THEIR END
Captain Kirk’s disdain for the Prime Directive is downright legendary. Sure, there are occasions where he talks about how important it is. But when the mood strikes him, he doesn’t hesitate to condemn entire cities to death and destruction! In the episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” Kirk and crew encounter a planet with an interesting gimmick.
Instead of waging actual war on one another, they do everything via simulation.
However, real people report to disintegration chambers in order to die and represent the casualties. Kirk ends up destroying the simulation computers so that this society could once again experience and fear the horrors of actual war. He leaves the planet convinced they will find peace, but it’s entirely possible they nuked each other out of existence the moment he left.
12 FORCED MELD
One of the most awkward bits of the otherwise awesome Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the mind-meld with Valeris. Spock eventually figures out that his Vulcan protégé Valeris is in on the conspiracy to disrupt peace talks between the Federation and the Klingons. In order to find out who the co-conspirators are, he forcibly mind-melds with her.
It’s an ugly scene. A mind-meld is supposed to be a relatively intimate act, and the onscreen portrayal of this forced act looks really bad. It’s weird to see Spock doing it, but Kirk completely permits this act instead of ordering Spock to stop. It seems that Kirk, in a pinch, supports emotional and physical torture in order to get the information that he needs.
11 DITCHES HIS KID
In Wrath of Khan, we meet David Marcus. This is a character that confirms what we’ve always known: Captain Kirk has been getting busy all over space, and in this instance, he’s left a kid behind. To top it off, this kid has never known his dad!
Now, Kirk defenders will be quick to point out that this was the mother’s choice -- Dr. Carol Marcus wanted to raise the kid on her own.
However, it seems like Kirk was all-too-happy to get away from his happy little accident, and we see how David’s daddy issues had messed him up for his entire life. If Kirk had stepped up as a father, his kid would have ended up being much more well-adjusted and that much happier!
10 REVEALS HIMSELF TO PRIMITIVE ALIENS
Many Star Trek fans have a lot of good reasons to hate Star Trek Into Darkness. One of those reasons is just how cavalier Kirk is at the beginning when it comes to disrupting an alien culture. Granted, he is on a mission to save the population from certain annihilation, but he ends up completely altering their destiny. In this movie, Kirk inexplicably hid the Enterprise under water instead of in orbit.
Had it been in orbit, the primitive culture could never have detected it. On the planet, though, the natives not only see Kirk and McCoy, but they see the ship rising out of the water, and when we last see the natives, they have begun worshiping an image of the Enterprise. Thanks to Kirk, these people will be worshiping aliens centuries before they make it to space themselves!
9 WARMONGER
The Klingons were always a background threat in The Original Series. And looking back, it's tough not to wonder if things could have been different with them. However, the unease with the Klingons can be blamed pretty directly on James T. Kirk! In the first appearance of the Klingons, Kirk and crew are dealing with an alien race known as Organians.
Kirk sees it as his job to protect them from the Klingons, despite the aliens repeatedly telling Kirk to give it up and not start trouble.
Predictably, Kirk starts blowing things up and generally doing his best to stir the pot, and this causes the Organians to reveal their true power and force them to sign a peace treaty. It's easy to say "all's well that ends well," but it looks like a peace treaty wouldn't have been necessary if Kirk wasn't dead set on starting an interstellar war!
8 HAS ODD FORMS OF DISCIPLINE
Kirk is not someone who is known for being very progressive. In fact, he often comes across as the exact opposite (more on this soon). However, on one memorable occasion, Kirk threatens a childish punishment in front a planetary leader in front of her people! In “Elaan of Troyius,” Kirk deals with a petty woman named Elaan. She looks down on who she sees as “inferiors” and is generally a petulant tyrant. Eventually, though, she annoys Kirk to the point that he threatens to give her "a form of punishment administered to spoiled brats!”
It’s a bit gross and shocking, and to fans who think she had it coming, notice that Kirk never threatened this to any of the many petty and petulant men that he encountered!
7 WOMANIZER
One of the ickier legacies of Captain Kirk is that he often comes across as a big creep. After all, part of his reputation is that he is this kinda of amazing, futuristic ladies' man.
However, if you scratch the surface of that reputation, there is something a bit ugly underneath.
In the rebooted Trek films, we see that Kirk comes on strong to pretty much anyone who is a woman. And as we mentioned, he doesn't hesitate to present women with odd punishments like a spanking. The most damning thing about Kirk's harassment is that when a transporter creates an evil Kirk clone and that clone assaults Janice Rand, she fully believes it is the Captain acting of his own free will! This certainly speaks to what she sees him regularly doing.
6 HATRED OF KLINGONS
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was a great Trek movie. Part of what made it great was how unconventional it was: we got to see not only the strengths of our heroes, but also some of their weaknesses as well. And that meant getting to see what a weird racist Kirk is.
As Kirk himself admits, he has a complete hatred of Klingons. This is fueled not only by his decades of fighting them but also by a Klingon killing his son, David. Nonetheless, it’s disconcerting listening to Kirk and Spock talk. Spock points out that the Klingons are dying, and an angry Kirk blurts out, “let them die!” While his views seem to soften over the course of the movie, this does change how we view the morality and ethics of Captain Kirk.
5 DESTROYS CULTURES
For better or for worse, one of Kirk's biggest traits is that he is domineering. He genuinely believes that he knows what is best for individuals, for Starfleet, and even for entire planets.
And on one memorable occasion, he destroys an entire culture because they aren't living up to his own standards!
In the episode “The Apple,” Kirk and crew encounter a planet that has lived essentially the same way for ten thousand years. They live in relative paradise because of a kind of machine god named Vaal that runs everything, and Kirk ends up destroying it and telling the natives “That's what we call freedom. You'll like it. A lot.” Not only is this patronizing in the extreme, but that planet almost certainly descended into violent anarchy the moment Kirk left!
4 FEEDS SCOTTY'S MISOGYNY
Captain Kirk considers himself a booster, and he goes above and beyond when it comes to the health and safety of his crew. However, it gets pretty weird in “Wolf in the Fold” when he finds out that Scotty had been injured by a woman and is now experiencing “a total resentment of women.” The solution? Go visit a bunch of dancers! Kirk puts the brakes on whatever Starfleet wants him to do to take Scotty to “a hedonistic society” on Argelius II.
On this planet, women dress in sexy clothes and dance for the pleasures of men, so Kirk is assuming this will help Scotty get over his resentment towards women. Ultimately, it’s pretty gross and shows what a throwback Captain Kirk could be: his solution to Scotty seeing women as objects of hate was to get him to see them as objects of lust!
3 PLANETARY CONQUEROR
A weird conceit of The Original Series was that the crew often encountered the equivalent of “what if” planets. These were Trek's answers to things like “what if there was a Nazi planet” or “what if the Greek gods were real?” On one occasion, we see what is basically a gangster planet...which Kirk proceeds to take over! The whole planet is based on the gangster culture of '30s Chicago.
Kirk stuns and threatens various people until he is the top gangster and then demands a percentage of 40 percent.
He later justifies this by saying that his profit will be deposited into the planet's treasury to help them discover a better way. Not only can we not prove that, and not only does Kirk never follow up on this planet, but he is also casually asserting that the ends justify the means!
2 ARMS OTHER RACES
It’s a little weird in retrospect, but the Klingons in The Original Series were very different from their modern incarnations. From a plot standpoint, they functioned much more like the Communists during the Cold War. We see that pretty literally realized when Kirk starts giving advanced weaponry to primitive aliens in order to defeat the Klingons!
In “A Private Little War,” Kirk discovers that Klingons are giving one tribe on a planet more advanced weaponry than another tribe. Rather than try to remove the advanced weapons, he decides the best thing to do is mass produce advanced weapons and give them to the other side as well. Kirk even describes these weapons to Scotty as “serpents for the Garden of Eden,” showing he knows that he is destroying paradise once and for all.
1 GOT KHAN'S PEOPLE ENDED
There’s no real debate: Khan is the ultimate bad guy in Star Trek. Part of what made him so cool was that he was a returning villain, having previously appeared in the Original Series episode “Space Seed.” Unfortunately, many people overlook how Kirk got Khan and his people killed!
In the original episode, Khan made his inevitable attempt to take over the ship. Once Kirk and crew defeated Khan, they didn’t take him to a Federation penal colony.
Instead, they beamed Khan and his people to Ceti Alpha V to start new lives. Later, the planet was knocked out of orbit and plenty of Khan’s people were killed by alien brain worms. Sure, Kirk couldn’t have predicted these things would happen, but if he had made any effort to check up on the people he exiled, he might have been able to save lives!