Star Trek: 10 Biggest Takeaways From 'William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill'

Sybok wasn't necessarily there this time to dredge up the bad memories, but most of us will have seen the images of William Shatner as he tearfully recounted his experience aboard Blue Origin to a less than impressed Jeff Bezos. Not unlike meeting the false god in need of a lift in Star Trek V, it was the difference between reality and expectation that was so deeply affecting for Shatner. As he told The Guardian in 2022,

I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures. I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before. I was absolutely wrong.

As Shatner then related in You Can Call Me Bill, and also in his book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (2022), excerpts of which were published in Variety,

When I looked […] into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold… all I saw was death.

When he looked back down at the Earth, Shatner discovered "that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us". He realised just how fragile the Earth was and how much human beings are doing to destroy it. "It filled me with dread," he said in Boldly Go (via Variety), and, as he put it in You Can Call Me Bill (and elsewhere), he was "in grief for the Earth".

Of course, you don't need to go to space to come to the same conclusion. After all, Star Trek (like any other form of fiction) is the story of our own planet — it just uses starships to tell it. But the trip was that existential experience for Shatner, in that existentialism is a humanism.