I am – Hercules!!


Both J.J. Abrams and William Shatner acknowledge that Abrams met with Shatner on the set of “Boston Legal” not long before Abrams was announced as director of the new “Star Trek” movie due next summer. But Abrams has long maintained that Shatner’s Jim Kirk will not appear alongside Leonard Nimoy’s Spock in the project.

Now Abrams says the original plan was to include Shatner in the project!

From a “Fringe” interview at AMC.com:

Q: How do you react to William Shatner's ire at not having a role in the movie?

J.J. ABRAMS: It was very tricky. We actually had written a scene with him in it that was a flashback kind of thing, but the truth is, it didn't quite feel right. The bigger thing was that he was very vocal that he didn't want to do a cameo. We tried desperately to put him in the movie, but he was making it very clear that he wanted the movie to focus on him significantly, which, frankly, he deserves. The truth is, the story that we were telling required a certain adherence to the Trek canon and consistency of storytelling. It's funny -- a lot of the people who were proclaiming that he must be in this movie were the same people saying it must adhere to canon. Well, his character died on screen. Maybe a smarter group of filmmakers could have figured out how to resolve that.

Would a smarter group of filmmakers have written a story in which an aged Spock travels back in time to Kirk’s Starfleet Academy days to avert some sort of Romulan mischief? Would those filmmakers have had Spock (since he’s gone to the trouble of jumping back to Kirk’s youth) maybe hand a Marty McFly note to young Kirk warning him to steer clear of the Enterprise-B’s maiden voyage? Would those filmmakers have shot a scene in which Spock returns to the future to greet a resurrected Kirk sharing a cocktail with Admiral Sulu? Would those smarter filmmakers go to elaborate lengths to keep 77-year-old Shatner’s appearance a secret?

I guess we’ll never know.

Shatner responds to Abrams’ AMC comments:

Dang! Abrams went to the trouble of writing a scene for Kirk, but couldn't be bothered to tell Shatner about it!

C'est la vie, I say!

Well, I'm off to re-watch Julianna Marguilies' last episode of "ER."