The on-screen death of an entertainment icon can be hard to see for many fans. Saying goodbye to a hero viewers enjoy is a gut punch to fans that have come to love and identify with the character. When someone as beloved as Star Trek’s Captain James Tiberius Kirk dies, the void it leaves can feel bigger than the emptiness of space. After 1994’s Star Trek Generations, it’s something many fans and the man behind the uniform seem to agree on.

The end of Captain Kirk came about as the Star Trek franchise was pushing ahead with doing more feature films. But the brand wanted to transition away from the original franchise crew of the Enterprise-A to showcase members of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D, led by Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Star Trek Generations was used as a transitional hand-off from one era to the next. But with still only a 47% ‘Fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes decades later, the execution didn’t live up to a lot of expectations. Many critics and fans were unhappy with the plot and how it felt more TV-like than cinema. With some details too specific for casual Star Trek fans, like the brief flash of Whoopi Goldberg’s TNG character, Giunan.

The plot centered around an inter-dimensional energy beam moving through space that has trapped Captain Kirk inside of it. After 78-years of believing he was dead, TNG’s crew discovers Kirk is alive and happy in another dimension. But when the movie's villain (played by Malcolm McDowell) wants to destroy an entire planet to try and get back inside the energy beam himself, Picard and crew need Kirk’s help to stop him.

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Much of Captain Kirk’s time on screen is spent looking unhappy, concerned or nonplussed about what was happening around him. A sentiment that extended to the actor, as well, who didn’t agree with what Paramount had in store for his character. Killing Kirk was a decision many fans have still struggled with, decades later.

At the time, actor William Shatner said that the producers had already decided to take the movies in a new direction with the TNG cast. Production got rolling as the final season of The Next Generation was wrapping up. Shatner believed that pure profit was the big push behind the decision to leave his crew in the past. In an interview at the time, he said “Paramount had decided that the ceiling that they could reach in our box office had been reached and they thought that by putting in the Next Generation cast, that they would reach a higher box office.”

KIRK AND PICARD IN STAR TREK GENERATIONS

According to Shatner, he was left with little choice on the matter and had to either get on board or get out of the way: “It was either I was going to appear and die, or they were going to say he died. So, I chose the more practical of the two.”

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From that practical standpoint, Paramount was in the awkward position of having two popular Enterprise crews – but from different generations. Making separate movies wasn’t feasible, so the transition was a natural evolution of the brand after 6 films with Kirk and his crew before the cross-over in Generations.

While the movie managed to connect the decades-long gap between the crews for the cinematic handover, the ending could still have worked without Kirk ending up dead on a bridge. While Kirk has been long dead in the franchise since the last century, Shatner still looms large over Star Trek. He has even expressed a willingness to return to a show like Picard if there is a creative way to make it so.

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