Star Trek: Picard Showrunner Reveals His Idea for a Kirk and Picard Crossover

Star Trek: Picard brings back Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Fans of Star Trek: The Original Series shouldn’t expect James. T. Kirk to get a similar treatment. Star William Shatner made it clear that he’s done with playing Kirk. Still, some fans wonder what could have been if the creators behind Picard brought the two great Enterprise captain together on television instead of their meeting in the film Star Trek Generations, a meeting that ended with Kirk’s death. A fan posed that question to Picard showrunner Michael Chabon via Instagram. Chabon had a simple answer: Midnight Run in space.

Midnight Run is the 1988 buddy cop movie directed by Martin Brest. The film blended action and comedy, taking full advantage of the talents of its dual leads, Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Now imagine a version of that set in space with William Shatner and Patrick Stewart in the lead roles.

Though Star Trek Generations brought Kirk and Picard together, it wasn’t the satisfying crossover fans hoped for. Co-writer Ronald D. Moore has said that he wished the film could have more like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” In a 2017 interview, co-writer Brannon Braga admitted the film didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped.

“We wrote ‘All Good Things,’ it was a pure piece of writing, it was beautifully made,” Braga said. Whereas Generations was a little more laborious and serving a lot of things and I think that shows.

“I think Ron and I envisioned the two Enterprises kinda locked in battle and somehow they would meet, but they would get together and fight the bad guy, and Kirk would go down on his bridge, instead of a bridge falling on him.”

Despite not being what the writers hoped, Shatner did his best to put the spirit of Star Trek into his death scene, including the line “Oh my,” Kirk’s final words.

“I thought about dying, my death and this beloved character who’s going to be put to rest,” Shatner said in 2018. “How do I play it? You know there’s got to be a moment, you’re alive, and you’re going to die, now you’re alive, and now you’re going to die. There has to be a moment when we all, at that moment of death, we say, ‘Holy cats, I’m dying!’ And you’re dead. How do you treat that moment? And I think we die the way we live. If we live filled with fear, a fear of flying, a fear of leaving the village, you’ll be fearful, you’ll lose your breath, you’ll panic, and you’ll die. Or if you look forward to the next adventure, maybe you’re conscious, maybe we’re conscious when we die. Maybe, we’re aware. A lot of people believe in heaven. We’re all going to go to a lovely place and see somebody. I don’t know what age we see our mother and father. Are they still old? Or are they young? We don’t know. That would be a lovely thing to happen, but we don’t know. It’s how we die that’s interesting. And I think we die the way we live.”