Parallelepiped Ream

Apparently there's a Ferengi Rule of Acquisition somewhere that says, “dead people are good for business”

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Generations, William Shatner and the widow of Leonard Nimoy have produced a monstrosity. In what feels more like a shameless advertisement for software company OTOY than a proper homage to Trek history, “765874 Unification” gives us uncanny-valley Kirk walking in creepy silence through a series of lore references calculated to tickle viewers' nostalgia bone, culminating in a deathbed scene with Spock that can only be described as a desecration of Nimoy's image and legacy.

Everything about this short movie is wrong. It's wrong that it exists, it's wrong that anyone thought it needed to exist, and it's wrong that there's a fan culture that keeps demanding empty trash like this.

Positions are divided, as one may expect. If you had no problem with the digital necromancy that put Peter Cushing in Rogue One or Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus, I guess you won't share my outrage this time either. This short movie may become another litmus test for nostalgic fans: those who celebrated the depressing self-cannibalism of Ghostbusters: Afterlife or Jurassic World: Dominion or Spider-Man: No Way Home or Picard season 3 will in all likelihood feel moved and uplifted by “765874 Unification.” They'll jump with Pavlovian predictability at each prop, recycled bit of dialogue and change of uniform. They'll feel relief that Kirk and Spock finally got the farewell they supposedly deseved. They'll finally get the last laugh against Star Trek: Generations.

“Go back and fix it” is a poison in today's fandom. It was the force (pun intended) behind every bad choice in The Rise of Skywalker. Star Trek: Generations is by no means a perfect movie, but this breed of entitled fans can't allow anything short of (their very specific idea of) perfection. Perhaps the fact that I didn't grow up with TOS makes me immune to the reverence for Kirk that made some people angry at the unceremonious way he's dispatched in Generations. But I grew up with TNG, and I was unmoved by the cheap nostalgitis of Picard season 3.

There's a good chance that Paramount will continue to listen to the loudest fans and keep greenlighting more terrible ideas, like the much-threatened Star Trek: Legacy. They've done it before: the entire concept of Strange New Worlds was, and still is, a very bad idea, as demonstrated every time the show stops itself to sing the praises of a young James Kirk who at that point of the timeline is supposed to be just a random shmoe.

Paramount basically agreeing that they owed the fans a different end for Kirk continues the ongoing chain of dangerous precedents in Hollywood. Giving fans one more last scene between Kirk and Spock rewards a misguided and obnoxious attitude that views art as customer service and assumes that viewers' investment in a story gives them the right to demand infinite free refills until every detail is tailored to their capricious satisfaction.

—Arturo

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