Only Star Trek could get axed after three seasons, spend a few dodgy years with next to no money, and still end up a canonical TV legend. The Original Series is often remembered not for its high-budget sets—there were none—but for poking holes in social norms and giving us a crew worth rooting for. William Shatner has been at the centre of that legacy for decades, and now he’s front and centre again with a new documentary all about the show’s six decades shaking up telly and culture.
The Sixty-Year Mission documentary lands exclusively at Regal cinemas this 9 October.
Shatner’s Mission: Reliving Star Trek
This autumn, Regal Cinemas is offering up a serious treat for Trekkies: limited screenings of The Sixty-Year Mission: How Star Trek Changed Television and the World. The project isn’t just a nostalgia fest—it’s packed with interviews and old bits of archive footage you’ve likely never laid eyes on. Shatner himself is the documentary’s executive producer, partnering with Mark A. Altman (who you might recall from 2016’s 50 Years of Star Trek).
If that’s not enough, Shatner’s turning up in person for post-screening Q&As, not just for the ego boost but to actually talk the thing through alongside George Takei (Sulu) and Walter Koenig (Chekov)—fellow alumni from Kirk’s earliest voyages. Producer Michael S. Broder’s thrown the net wider for this one, roping in faces from across the franchise: The Next Generation lot (Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Denise Crosby) and Nana Visitor, best known as Major Kira from Deep Space Nine.
The Legacy – and Stumble – of Kirk
It’s hard to overstate how much Shatner has milked the Kirk role. Over 100 appearances if you count the Animated Series and seven feature films—right up to Kirk’s rather anticlimactic demise in 1994’s Star Trek Generations.
That death still gets up Shatner’s nose. In an interview with ScreenRant, he aired his regrets about how that exit went down, arguing it lacked the spark Kirk would’ve wanted. Here’s how Shatner himself put it during that chat:
"When he faced death, he would face death with a sense of adventure, [like], 'Oh, what's going to happen now?' ... I never quite got that nuance that I was looking for."
If you’re wondering why we haven’t had Kirk popping back up in someone else’s spandex, Shatner has always said a resurrection has to feel meaningful, not just fan service. He’s had his arm twisted more than once to bring Kirk back, always turning it down. Strangely, he did want to do another round as ‘Kirk Prime’ for the rebooted Kelvin timeline movies in 2009, but J.J. Abrams thought that might be pushing credulity after Generations had already killed him off.
Star Trek: Still Going (Boldly, Yes)
Star Trek’s footprint in sci-fi is pretty much impossible to miss. Created by Gene Roddenberry, it kicked off exploration, diplomacy, and the moral headaches of meddling with the unknown. What started as three seasons for a buck-fifty has turned into a sprawling shared universe—TV, films, books, comics, and more—spanning centuries (in and out of universe) and tying itself into every major moment of pop culture science fiction along the way.