Thirty years ago today, Star Trek‘s cinematic legacy boldly stepped forward as the heroes of the original series and The Next Generation teamed up on the silver screen in Star Trek: Generations. The Enterprise-D met her end, the Star Trek movie franchise passed the torch to a new age, and, of course, William Shatner’s Captain Kirk gave it all to save the Veridian system from the sinister Dr. Soran. And now, to celebrate, the Roddenberry Archive has once again teamed up with OTOY to create a fitting, fond farewell to not one, but two of Trek‘s original heroes.
“Unification,” a new short created with the use of a combination of archival footage and CGI imposed over actors (with Kirk himself played by both William Shatner and actor Sam Witwer, and Spock by Lawrence Selleck), takes Captain Kirk on a brief trip though his memories, before watching the sun rise with an ailing Spock. It’s a mostly silent short, save for a single line from Kirk lifted from The Wrath of Khan: “There are always possibilities, Spock said. And if Genesis is indeed life from death… I must return to this place, again.”
There’s some fascinating connections to a whole gamut of Star Trek lore here, from OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive’s previous use of Mahé Thaissa as Yeoman Colt from “The Cage” all the way up to the inclusion of Yor, a Betelgeusian Starfleet officer from the Kelvin Timeline who briefly appeared during the events of Star Trek: Discovery season three. But you’re mostly here for the uncanny valley being overridden by tugs at your heart strings to give Kirk and Spock alike one last shared farewell.
“Unification” is the latest in a series of shorts produced by OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive under the banner “765874,” titled for the Starfleet serial number given to Yeoman Colt in ancillary Trek material. Previous shorts have paid homage to “The Cage” and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, while last year around the climax of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season there was “Regeneration”, which took a bittersweet look back at the recovery of the Enterprise-D’s saucer section (and Kirk’s combadge after his death) after the events of Generations. Now, with the release of Unification it would seem like OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive are done mining this particular moment in Star Trek history, but we’ll just have to see what technical wizardry they get up to next.
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