William Shatner's Kirk Made His Return In A Star Trek Short Film You Probably Missed

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In 2024, a computer graphics company called OTOY teamed up with the Roddenberry Archive to make a sanctioned, perhaps even canonical "Star Trek" short film called "765874 – Unification." The 11-minute short, directed by Carlos Baena and written by Jules Urbach, was released on the Roddenberry.x.io website on November 18, and many Trekkies were surprised to see the presence of notable actors such as William Shatner, Gary Lockwood, and Robin Curtis. Shatner and Lockwood were especially surprising, as Shatner is 93 years old, but looked exactly the same way he did in 1994 when he shot "Star Trek: Generations." Lockwood, 88, was de-aged to look like he did in his 1966 "Star Trek" episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before." At the end of the short, Leonard Nimoy, who died in 2015, was digitally resurrected for a brief encounter between Kirk and Spock. 

"Unification" was the fourth of four such experimental digital shorts that served as a means to exploit new technologies in order to expand the "Star Trek" universe, but with avatars of the original actors. The four shorts, all under the "765874" title, attempted to expand established "Trek" canon into the realm of fan theories and expanded-universe novels using a clever combination of stock footage and digital recreations.

The first of the shorts came about in 2022 when OTOY CEO Urbach and Gene Roddenberry's son Rod were conducting interviews for the Blu-ray release of "The Cage," the original "Star Trek" pilot episode. They had intended to interview actress Laurel Goodwin (who played the character Yeoman Colt in "The Cage"), but she passed away that February. The initial plan was to — just for fun, really — de-age Goodwin and place her on a digital version of the "The Cage" sets, making the interview look like it was a vintage conversation from the 1960s. They would be able to use Urbach's wife, Mahé Thaissa, as a stand-in model for Goodwin, as the two just happened to bear a canny resemblance.

Urbach and Roddenberry, however, came up with what they thought was a fun idea. Expounding on a 1998 "Star Trek" comic book called "Star Trek: Early Voyages," the pair came up with a short film featuring the Colt character (her officer's serial number was 765874), and starring Thaissa as the character's digital stand-in. The short featured Colt traveling through time and witnessing small snippets of "Star Trek" history, reaching an ineffable sense of nirvana as a result. The idea was that Colt had somehow evolved into an "Observer," a being that had an expansive, nonlinear view of history.

In the second short, called "765874 — Memory Wall" (2022), Thaissa returned to play Observer Colt, this time visiting the events of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." The short expands on a passage from that film's novelization, which implied that Spock's mind-meld with the massive, all-encompassing machine V'Ger transformed the Vulcan into an Observer. He, too, now had an expansive view of history.

Actor Lawrence Selleck stood in for Leonard Nimoy. He wore prosthetics to match Nimoy's features, and his performance was "enhanced" by the OTOY team to make him look more realistically like Nimoy. (Yes, the filmmakers got permission from Nimoy's estate to do this.) The third short in the series, "765874 — Regeneration" (2023), was extrapolated from William Shater's 1995 novel "The Ashes of Eden," wherein Kirk was resurrected following the events of "Star Trek: Generations."

This brings us to "Unification," which is a vision of Kirk's afterlife. The short was born from many fans' frustrations over the circumstances of Kirk's death in "Generations" and Spock's death in "Star Trek Beyond." The two characters never got to give each other a proper sendoff. 

The short sees Gary Mitchell using his godlike powers (acquired in "Where No Man Has Gone Before") to look into the future. He sees Kirk's death. Kirk, as old as he was in "Generations," awakens in a garden-like afterlife surrounded by people. He sees Saavik (Robin Curtis) there, but she is much older than the last time we saw her in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." She is standing next to another Vulcan we have never seen before, but one can intuit that it's her son, Sorak (Mark Chinnery). More on Sorak in a moment. 

Kirk also encounters a mysterious gray-skinned alien in a "Next Gen"-era uniform, a character we have never seen. This is Yor (Gordon Tarpley), a character once only mentioned in an episode of "Star Trek: Discovery." Yor was said to be one of the only people to have traveled from the Kelvin timeline (where the J.J. Abrams "Star Trek" films take place) to the main "Star Trek" universe. Yor hands Kirk a Starfleet badge. 

The badge, in a previous "765874" short, was actually Kirk's, recovered by Spock from Kirk's gravesite. While Spock was dying in the Kelvin timeline, he gave this badge to Yor. Yor, now a mysterious afterlife figure, was merely passing it back to Kirk. It's all very mysterious, but connects the disparate threads of "Star Trek" canon in a somewhat clever way.

Yor then seems to transport Kirk into a long and mysterious hallway, where he transforms into a younger version of himself, looking the way he did in the original "Star Trek." (Actor Sam Witwer stood in for Shatner in these scenes.) Kirk, now young, sees a version of himself the way he looked in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." The digital effects have an uncanny quality, but are impressive nonetheless. The Kirks vanish, and 1994-era Kirk enters a mysterious bedchamber on the planet New Vulcan (in the Kelvin universe) ... where Spock is laying on his deathbed. Kirk sits and holds his friend's hand as they watch the sunset. Spock presumably dies with Kirk at his side. One might assume that Kirk was merely an ethereal being in this sequence, so he is not stranded in the Kelvin timeline thereafter. Yor, it seems, was merely allowing the two to have a final moment together, something they never had in their respective timelines. 

It's sweet enough, I suppose, and one may want to accept "765874" as canon, seeing as it was made with the participation of the Roddenberry camp, Nimoy's estate, and Shatner himself. Of course, if it is canon, then the Sorak character mentioned above was indeed Spock's son. In an early script for "Star Trek IV," it would have been revealed that Spock and Saavik had a child together, a fact that was reinforced in Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz 1999 novel "Vulcan's Heart." 

The "765874" shorts are more experiments than legit "Star Trek" movies, though. They are obscurities for fans and SFX tech obsessives. On that level, they're kind of fun.