We Almost Got Evil Kirk on Star Trek: Enterprise

Given that it’s been on the air for almost 60 years at this point, it’s not a surprise that Star Trek has a large amount of behind-the-scenes lore surrounding it. Whether it’s original casting decisions that might have been, or potential spinoffs that never happened, Trekkies have plenty of options to consider when it comes to the roads not taken. But one of the most famous involves one of the franchise’s most beloved performers.

Over a decade after his last appearance as James T. Kirk in the film Star Trek Generations, William Shatner almost ended up on the spinoff Star Trek: Enterprise. But since Enterprise technically takes place well before Kirk’s era, he wouldn’t have been playing the famous starship captain, but rather his dark Mirror Universe counterpart: Tiberius Kirk. And his return would have not only been a fun bit of fan service, but it also would have answered some lingering questions about the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror” along the way.

While the fact that the late showrunner Manny Coto wanted to bring Shatner aboard to help boost the series’ flagging season 4 ratings is fairly known among fans, we now have a few more details about what his return would have involved, thanks to a TrekMovie.com podcast interview with former Enterprise writer/producer Mike Sussman. 

“Manny, one of the ideas he put on the board at the beginning of season 4 was that he wanted to do a Mirror Universe episode, preferably a two-parter,” Sussman told Trek Movie’s All Access Star Trek podcast. “There was a long discussion [about] getting Bill Shatner on the show —we were trying [for months] to make it happen, but ultimately the network or the studio wouldn’t meet his quote.”

This is a shame for many reasons, not the least of which being that the story proposed by Shatner and by writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens actually sounded kind of great. The episodes would have seen Shatner play Kirk’s evil doppelganger again, in a story that both introduced him to Enterprise’s Captain Archer and tied into the mysterious Mirror Universe weapon from The Original Series known as the Tantalus Device. Its larger purpose was never explained, but this idea would have rewritten it as a sort of time travel grenade.

“They cooked up a story about Tiberius, whom Shatner would have played. We’d find out he went back in time after being zapped by the Tantalus Device by Mirror Spock,” Sussman said. ”And now he and Archer — who start off initially as adversaries — end up having to work together in order to somehow create the Mirror Universe. I’m sure that would have been a super fun show, but like I said, we couldn’t make the deal.”

That’s not just a timey wimey plot worthy of any episode of Doctor Who, it also sounds heaps better than what we got instead, which was the widely criticized “In a Mirror, Darkly” two-parter, which (messily) served as both a prequel to “Mirror, Mirror” and a sequel to The Original Series installment “The Tholian Web”. And while it’s certainly unlikely that a Shatner guest appearance could have gotten Enterprise a fifth season — Sussman speculates that the decision to cancel the show had already been made by that point — it’s yet another interesting entry in an intriguingly long list of what-ifs. At any rate, it certainly would have been entertaining to watch evil Kirk and Archer face off — and maybe even become friends (frenemies?). This is Star Trek, after all; anything’s possible.