Star Trek: 10 Biggest Wasted Opportunities

1. Kirk's Death

If the meeting of Picard and Kirk was a mishandled mess, the death of James T. Kirk was a total system failure crash. When it was announced that one of Star Trek's most iconic characters was to be killed off, many expected it to be a glorious death, one that would give Kirk the heroes death he deserved. After all, many had tried to kill Kirk so if the villain in Star Trek: Generations was to actually succeed, it had to be spectacular. It had been done right in the past, the death of Spock was brilliantly written, he died saving the ship and his demise had all the emotional gravitas you would expect. Spock's death scene still has the power to tug at the heart strings 21 years later. The original plan was to have the villain in Star Trek Generations, Dr Tholian Soran, shoot Kirk in the back and have him die that way. Both the director David Carson and Shatner were not happy with the ending, it seamed like a poor way to kill off the Captain and not to mention, quite unimaginative. David Carson explains;

Kirk was to be shot in the back. What was written and what was accepted by the studio and the producers was never acceptable as far as I was concerned. I mean, here€™s this great icon. This Captain Kirk is an icon. He means a lot to people. So to have him die in an ignominious way, when you€™re shooting in this incredible mountain area€ I fought for that not to happen, but lost the battle. And when we were out on the set I remember that Bill and Patrick and I called the studio to say, €œPlease, can we not do this? Can we do something else? Let€™s stay here. Let€™s re-write it.€ Because we didn€™t feel it was going to work. They did it as well as they could, but frankly, shooting somebody in the back on a narrow ledge on a mountainside is not the most dramatic way for someone to die, especially when the baddie, Malcolm McDowell, also got shot. So it was like an antiquated gunfight, if you like.

Eventually the studio listened and realised the ending didn't work. They gave the green light for a rewrite and extending the shoot. The death now was to have Kirk save the day but moments later die after being crushed by a falling bridge. Carson recalls;

So we shot for another two weeks, which cost a huge amount of money, and it was so disruptive of the final process. Dennis McCarthy, who wrote the score, wrote the score for the whole movie up to that point. He had 10 minutes to add and was waiting, waiting for us to finish editing it. However, I will say that the reshoots were very exciting. The crew loved doing it because it was such an action ending and much more fitting for Kirk. Captain Kirk€™s death now meant something. Before, being shot in the back, it meant absolutely nothing. This time he really saved the day. So it was well worthwhile in the end, I think.

Carson is right in regards to the scene having more action but is totally wrong if he thinks it was a more ''fitting' way for Kirk to meet his doom or that Kirk's death ''meant' something. It would have meant something if we cared for the Veridians that Kirk and Picard were trying to save. We hadn't seen them, we knew nothing about them, they had never been mentioned in Star Trek before, they were just a passing comment. Kirk and Picard were trying to save a species that we have no emotional ties to. When Spock died in Wrath Of Khan, we knew he was trying to save the Enterprise and its crew, a ship and crew that we cared for and loved. The Veridians were a poor reason for Kirk to die. As I said before, it would have been a much better film if Kirk had somehow found himself on the Bridge of the Enterprise and died that way. They needed to get rid of the Enterprise ''D'' from the TV show and that is why it was destroyed in the film, so why not have Kirk die on the Bridge with the Enterprise? Instead his death involved a different type of bridge altogether and left the door open for jokes such as ''Captain under the bridge.'' At the Star Trek convention in London last year, I did ask writer Ronald D. Moore if he had any regrets with the way Kirk's death had been written and he said that Generations was his and Co-writer Brannon Braga's first feature and that both of them were inexperienced. At the time it apparently seemed like the right thing to do but overall both of them were too green to be handling something momentous like the death of Kirk, a death which should have had much more impact than it did. While it is good to see Moore being honest about the film's shortcomings, it doesn't distract from this iconic moment being a missed opportunity. If they couldn't think of a way to kill him, they should have let him live. Even his burial at the climax of the film with Picard burying him under a pile of stones on a planet that no one cared about was a total let down. He needed a heroes welcome on Earth, dead or alive.