Up Till Now: The Autobiography

very last instant, until that last bit of being aware that you are no longer going to be aware. And then.
    That was my plan. That was the way I was going to play it. I wanted Captain Kirk to look at death and have a moment and I knew what that moment would be: it would be everything he saw in the voyages of the Enterprise, every strange monster, every bit of human understanding in an instant—and at the end he would see this extraordinary thing that was nothing like he had ever seen before. But rather than being afraid of it, his reaction was: isn’t this the most marvelous experience. How do I deal with it? I wanted to give Jim Kirk that moment of seeing whatever it is you see at death while he was still alive and reacting to it as I knew he would: oh my... isn’t that interesting?
    It was all technical. As I prepared I had to remind myself that this was just another performance. I was determined not to get overly emotional about the death of this character. And I was able to do that right up until I got up the next morning and realized Paramount was going to kill Captain Kirk.
    Kill Kirk? What are they, out of their minds? How could they kill a franchise? Why did I agree to this?
    Gradually I managed to calm down. It’s science fiction, I reminded myself, they can bring me back when they want to. In the movies, I knew, a character is only as dead as his grosses. After the studio realized there was a demand for Kirk, they would find a way to resurrect him.
    Patrick Stewart, Malcolm McDowell, and I did Kirk’s death scene. Kirk’s last words, spoken with awe and humor as he saw something that was never shown to the viewer, were “Oh...my...”
    I went home that night with a great sense of satisfaction. I didn’t feel it was the end of an era, just the end of a character. I was satisfied. Kirk had been given the noble end he deserved. And then I sat down and wrote a forty-page treatment for a story in which Kirk comes back from the dead.
    I called it The Return, and a couple of days later presented it to the producer. As I explained, there was a very important reason to bring back Kirk. Eighty million dollars. “That’s very interesting,” he told me. “But I think we’re going to go on with the Next Generation .”
    Well. Kirk may have been dead in the movies, but there was no reason he had to be dead to the publishing industry. I sold my treatment to Simon & Schuster and Star Trek:The Return became a bestselling novel. Co-written with Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, in my story, “the Borg and the Romulan Empire have joined forces against the Federation and the ultimate weapon is James T. Kirk, resurrected by alien science to destroy the Borg’s most formidable weapon: Jean-Luc Picard.” Actually, they reanimated my dead tissue and gave me back my katra. But what they really did was implant false memories that turned me against the Federation.
    To my surprise, and admittedly my pleasure, when Paramount screened Star Trek: Generations test audiences hated the ending. They had too much invested in Kirk to see him die so simply. They wanted Kirk to have a spectacular death. So the writers created anew death for him. It cost Paramount $4 million to go back into the desert and film this new ending.
    In this version Kirk dies saving an entire universe. Now that’s an ending. In this ending Picard and Kirk are desperately trying to stop Soran from launching a missile into this universe’s sun. I’m forced to leap from one side of a collapsed bridge to the other to get the device that enables me to uncloak the invisible missile, and Picard destroys it. And then the bridge collapses and Kirk falls to his death—but not before getting that last line, “Oh...my...”
    Actually I had written some other lines for this scene. When I leaped onto the bridge I said to Picard, “Captain on the bridge,” which was the way I had always announced my presence on the bridge of the Enterprise . And when the bridge collapsed on me I managed to say, “Bridge on the captain.”
    Those lines were cut out of the scene.
    The only hesitation I had about making this film was the fact that once again I would be working with Walter Koenig and Jimmy Doohan, both of whom had taken every possible opportunity to say unpleasant things about me. I wasn’t sure how they would react to me. In fact, both men were very professional on the set and we had no problems. In fact, after a couple of weeks of working together I was able