The Problems With William Shatner and Captain Kirk

By trying to manipulate tragic news, the actor reaches "peak Shatner"

Mar 11, 2023

I suppose that I'm prepared for the hate, but I just can't remain quiet.

It's finally time to be out with it.

We writers often have ideas that live and gestate in the backs of our minds and it just becomes a question when — and whether — we ever let them see the light of day.

And for the longest time I was content to let this one just be, perhaps even fester a bit.

However, within a matter of moments reading a recent news story, my brain went from, “Oh, well, there's one you'll never tell,” to outright outrage and the determination that this has to come out now.

What, for the love of the Great Bird of the Galaxy am I talking about?

Just how toxic and problematic is one Bill Shatner as well as, really, his equally famous alter-ego, Captain Jim Kirk. Because you can't separate them.

That's what.

Shatner lives in this nether-region of sorts, in terms of being acceptable to criticize.

On the one hand, he's kind of spent his life being something of a professional asshole.

But on the other is that Shatner's hit the astounding age of 91 years old. And it seems unseemly to jab at such an elderly senior citizen in the last years of their life.

That aforementioned article finally cut it for me, however, and got me off the fence.

The piece was headlined, “William Shatner Reveals Devastating Health Announcement That Has Fans In Tears,” and my mind of course immediately ran to thinking that he's come out with a cancer diagnosis or something of that sort — and the end was truly near for the man.

And despite my abiding animosity for all things Shatner, for an instant my heart actually went out to him. “We're losing one of the last surviving cast from the original series,” I thought to myself.

I even momentarily prepared myself to write an obituary and appreciation for Shatner in this very space, and reminded myself to make it as positive and charitable as I could.

But when I dug in to read the article, my blood began to boil just the same as a Vulcan male in the throes of pon'farr.

Shatner isn't dying. Well, at least he isn't dying anymore than anyone else.

And that's kind of the point of this decidedly non-news story. Shatner, at his advanced age, is merely coming to terms with the same mortality we all face:

William Shatner didn’t receive a devastating medical diagnosis or anything of that nature, it is simply a scientific fact that a man of his age will, inevitably, die someday. “Whether I keel over as I’m speaking to you or 10 years from now, my time is limited,” he concludes.

Worse yet: the actor is monetizing this newfound clarity to promote a new documentary that covers the highlights of his career called You Can Call Me Bill, which will premiere at the South by Southwest film festival.

So basically he intentionally played on the sympathies and care of millions of fans…for what?? To hype a project and make a buck.

This just has to be “peak Shatner.”

He wants our sympathy — wants we the fans and the public to care.

But his history is one where he's hardly given the same.

Shatner famously did not get along with most of his former Star Trek castmates, which has been well-documented for decades.

James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, really disliked Shatner's selfish ways.

But the other castmates also took a dislike to Shatner as well.

George Takei, for instance, never been shy about telling the world what he thinks about his former co-star.

Shatner usually will punch back at least as good as he gets:

The actor then doubled down on his Takei-bashing. He was asked, “Do you wish George Takei was dead instead of Leonard Nimoy?”
“What a terrible question,” Shatner said, before jokingly adding, “Yes.”

It is probably his relationship with co-star Leonard Nimoy which, sadly, best depicts Shatner's sheer odiousness.

Shatner once described Nimoy as “the only friend I ever had,” and he even managed to destroy that relationship.

A few years before Nimoy passed away, Shatner was putting together an even earlier attempted cash grab, er, documentary. And Shatner asked Nimoy for his involvement.

The original actor behind Spock turned Shatner down. But Shatner secretly filmed Nimoy during a convention appearance and used it in his little movie anyway.

The result was that Nimoy never forgave his old co-star.

In one of Leonard Nimoy’s final interviews on television, he was speaking with Piers Morgan in 2014. When Morgan asked him if he had seen Shatner, he replied, “Not in a while… we don’t have that kind of relationship anymore. We used to.” Shatner says that he had tried over the following years since The Captains to reach out to Nimoy, but all attempts failed. He said his final letter to Leonard Nimoy read: “I have had a deep love for you, Leonard—for your character, your morality, your sense of justice, your artistic bent. You’re the friend that I have known the longest and the deepest.” This letter never got a response and Shatner is not aware if Nimoy actually ever even read it.

He's even jumped in as some sort of “elder statesman” of Star Trek and arbiter of the franchise, going so far as to claim that franchise creator Gene Roddenberry would be “turning in his grave” over the new incarnations of Star Trek.

And yet, now the man wants to evoke our sympathy for some false cry of mortality?

“What Comes Out Is William Shatner As Himself”

It's even worse when you realize that Bill Shatner and Captain Kirk cannot really be separated.

That's not me saying that, but rather Shatner himself.

He's made it clear that there's much Shatner in Kirk.

Roddenberry interviewed Shatner in 1976, an encounter included on the Inside Star Trek LP which was popular among fans at the time.

And Roddenberry asked, “How much of Bill Shatner is Captain Kirk?”

Shatner responded: “Well, Gene, the act of putting on a television show — television series — it's such a back-breaking, all-encompassing task.

“The hours we put in are so enormous that, to be able to make up a character — and sustain it for the years we did it — would be impossible for anyone but certainly impossible for me,” he added. “What essentially comes out is William Shatner, as himself, saying the lines that were written for me to say in a situation that I was placed in.

“I think that the people you see on television, playing leads in television series, that's what they're like,” Shatner continued. “When people ask, 'What is So-and-so really like — the lead on a television show — what you're seeing is what you're getting.”

If we take Shatner at his word here, which seems reasonable since he knew best his own creative process, then it would seem to almost force a certain reevaluation of the Kirk character from the lens of Shatner's own deep failings.

Yes, Kirk's lines were manufactured by others, TV writers with entirely different motivations than Shatner's.

But at the end of the day, the animus, the ego and the bile which we see from Shatner must by definition live within Jim Kirk as well.

And to my mind, that almost calls into question the entire character, his arc, and his supposed humanity and the heroism ascribed to him.

If “what comes out is William Shatner as himself” in Kirk, I would argue that Shatner himself has proven that's probably not as great as maybe we might have once thought.