Toupee
SHATNER SPEAKS!
"I wouldn't pay to go into space. Throwing up is a lonely sickness and not something I'd like to pay for. But if it's thrust upon me, it might be a good adventure."
"I wouldn't pay to go into space. Throwing up is a lonely sickness and not something I'd like to pay for. But if it's thrust upon me, it might be a good adventure."
There are two major problems with the "Starfleet Academy" concept, which has been floating around since the late 1980s (including one attempt which would have turned it into an sf version of Police Academy!).
The difficulty comes if William Shatner does indeed make an appearance, other than a voiceover. He does look notThe first is that it will feature new actors in familiar roles, just as Paramount considered in the lead-up to the first Trek movie. This isn't an impossible hurdle to jump (Adrian Brody as Spock? Greg Kinnear as Kirk? Anything's possible..), but there will be resistance. That said, not even the hardcore fans complained that James Cromwell played the same role in First Contact that Glenn Corbett portrayed in the 1960s (perhaps he shrank after leaving Earth).
icably older than he did in ST: Generations, though maybe that can be fixed with the same software used on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the third X-Men movie. On the other hand, you could get away with Leonard Nimoy chatting with Stewart about Kirk, given they both knew him and are still alive in the ST universe.
The biggest problem, however, is getting Kirk and Spock in the Academy at the same time. We already know from the unscreened pilot "The Cage" that Spock was science officer aboard the Enterprise under Capt Pike. Even if he went straight from the classroom to the Enterprise, he was part of the crew for the best part of two decades before Kirk joined the ship. We know a little of Kirk's earlier career from such episodes as "Court Martial", "The Conscience of the King" and "Obsession", but it's quite obviously much shorter than Spock's. How could they possibly be contemporaries?
Nor would this pre-graduation Kirk be the same character we know and love from the show. We know from "Shore Leave" that he was a humourless bookworm, frequently the target of bullying. He was also infatuated with a woman, Angela, who asked him to choose her or the stars, a decision which still haunts him.
Of course, JJ Adams could simply ignore all this backstory and create his own alternate Star Trek. In which case, why bother, unless it's just another trip back to the cash cow?
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