"Let us sit upon the ground now and tell sad
stories about the death of kings (Shakespeare's Richard the Second, Act Three,
Scene II)." Let us sit and tell stories of a starship captain who served
aboard a great white angel named Enterprise.
After six big screen adventures, servant monsters at Paramount Pictures banished forever from our eyes Captain James Tiberius Kirk to make room for a new captain beamed aboard, Jean-Luc Picard. In their foul conspiracy, they forgot that Kirk carried the baton for that most noble serial prince, Flash Gordon.
O heavy burden! A Kirk belonged in the center chair, not a Picard. It
was Kirk's father who named the Enterprise --- Commander George Kirk, who
served under Captain Robert M. April, founder of the Federation's starship
program. What a piece of work was that man! How noble in reason! How infinite
in faculties! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a
god!
"Bridge to Engineering: Scotty! Full impulse power or thy franchise will never survive the transition!"
It survived. And so did Kirk. William Shatner opened a communications
channel with Simon and Shuster Publications to write a series of cliff-hanging
novels extending Kirk's journey. It didn't have to end, he said. It wasn't
meant to end.
Today, in addition to keeping Kirk alive in his novels (and poor Picard as well now that he's been banished), Shatner is busy with a new television series, "Boston Legal," on ABC, "a hit, a very palpable hit," as Shakespeare's Hamlet might describe it. Ay, the actor's royal Emmy "makes us hear something."
But "it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who (for the most part), are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise (Hamlet: Act Three, Scene II)."
Dammit, Ophelia! He belongs on the Enterprise!