Dear Captain Kirk: Why Unification Is the Star Trek Story I Needed

Watching 765874: Unification made me cry.

Not a sniffle, but ugly, snot-nosed tears — the kind where, if you’re civilized, you reach for a Kleenex. If you’re a peasant like me, you wipe your nose on your sleeve.

When I saw the notification from notable film critic, Critical Drinker’s YouTube about this short film, I didn’t want to hear his thoughts on it first. Instead, I went straight to The Archive to watch it myself

Thus, this unconventional letter to a fictional character who is the foundation of my real-life well of imagination was born.

Only one line of audio permeates the entirety of this picture, but it doesn’t need more. James T. Kirk walks through a paradise of vibrant greenery. People who have come before or after welcome him. Then, he finds himself — literally.

The brash, young captain of his early years meets the seasoned admiral of later years.

And then, the moment: Kirk is reunited with his friend, Spock. They clutch hands, and look toward the morning.

I bawled my eyes out at this part. This eight-minute film does something the franchise hadn’t done in years.

Remember me.

Years ago, I watched in dismay as he-who-shall-not-be-named cheerfully destroyed the Vulcan home world. I nearly fell out of my seat in the theater in horror. One of the founding members of the Federation — gone.

That’s what the current franchise feels like now: a franchise missing a crucial element of its foundation: logic.

It’s not logical to have writers and creators who have never watched a single episode of Star Trek, or who don’t understand it, direct and write for it. How can they capture what the fans have cherished if they don’t even know why we loved it?

In Drinker’s review of Unification, he made a comment that resonated with me:
“The older you get, the more things you lose.”

Friends, family, naïveté — they all fall away.

See, for me, Star Trek isn’t just a franchise. It’s home. It’s intertwined with my family life. It was passed down from my parents to me like a generational torch. With each new series, from The Next Generation to Voyager, and even Enterprise (which I admittedly didn’t watch — there’s no captain before James T. Kirk), I followed it. Star Trek was with me as a child and stayed with me to my teen years and into adulthood. Different characters, expanded storylines, exotic locales — it was still the same Star Trek.

Until it wasn’t. I watched as it became something it was never meant to be. Eventually, I turned away.

Star Trek represented the boundless limits of mankind’s imagination. How far can we go? To the farthest star, wherever that may be.

And straight on till morning.

When the Webb Telescope showed us a deep field snapshot of galaxies, some people had an existential crisis, feeling small in the vastness of the universe. Others — some people of faith such as myself — saw the same picture and thought: “Wow. Look at God’s handiwork. Let’s go explore.”

I think that’s why I’m so on board with what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX — making mankind a multiplanetary species. Expanding our footprint to foreign worlds. Bringing life to barren planets. Soaring through the darkness of space until we find another star.

Scripture says, “Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” In context, it refers to spiritual maturity and improvement.

But does it have to stay there? Are we not meant to grow, to learn, and to expand our knowledge in the natural world, too?

What if we seek extraterrestrial life — and find it? So often, we imagine extraterrestrial life as a threat, projecting our own flawed nature onto it. But what if we were the ones to bring life to them? What if we are the answer to their prayers?

And what if we discover it’s just us alone? Then what a magnificent playground we have! What treasures shall we unearth? What technologies shall we build to enhance our understanding of the universe and ourselves?

Star Trek embodied all these ideas — and Captain Kirk was unafraid to explore them.

Unification brought all of this home for me in a poignant, bittersweet way.

James T. Kirk at the end of the grand adventure of his life, meeting again the one friend that made him who he was — Spock.

Spock, the one that encouraged him to boldly go where no man had gone before. Through that imperative, so should we go boldly forward in God’s grace and speed.

Goodbye, my dearest Captain Kirk. Thank you for the adventure.

Yours in imagination and in life,

Yeoman Cole