https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2023-01-06/william-shatner-still-boldly-going/

William Shatner, Still Boldly Going

By Richard Whittaker, January 6, 2023, 6:00am, Picture in Picture

If you write the words William Shatner says to you and read them back, you automatically hear them in William Shatner’s voice.

Somehow, transcribing them almost feels like a disservice. Those warm, impish, sonorous, immediately recognizable, oft-imitated, never-replicated tones seem too big for the keyboard. That voice is forever associated with his greatest and most enduring creation as an actor, Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise; and Kirk’s greatest moment may still be Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

And if you want to hear the words of William Shatner in that voice, you can at a special screening of that film at the Long Center, complete with post-screening Q&A with Shatner himself.

There are many parents and grandparents of science fiction – Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Rod Serling, to name a few. Yet Shatner (Bill to his friends) is its roguish uncle, the raconteur who delivers stories of adventure and mirth. It’s how he has transcended the traditional convention circuit conference rooms and taken his show to grander stages. Yet he’s not searching for bigger crowds, but more individuals. It’s the interactions that matter, he explained, the back-and-forth with the audience that gives him that vibrancy. It’s the pleasure of making an intimate moment between himself and one question-asker, at that moment, at that place.

Maybe that’s why Wrath of Khan was the perfect vehicle for Shatner as Kirk, the psychedelic Shakespearian who balanced its pulp roots and its grandeur. Forty years after its release, even in an era of multiple Trek spinoffs across media, it is arguably the high point of all Starfleet’s adventures. It’s the simplicity and relatability of the story, Shatner says, of a truly great villain in Ricardo Montalbán’s genetically engineered warlord Khan, of the way that both he and Kirk are driven by family and vengeance.

It’s also a story about aging and loss, of lost opportunities and lost friends. Yet Shatner keeps going, and he says there’s no secret to his longevity. It’s just luck, he says, and having been spared illnesses and bad accidents. After all, he’s 91, and that’s an age at which a bone break can be fatal. And he’s never been more aware of the frailty of life: not just his own, but all life.

Consider the ubiquity of Shatner as a cultural entity, and how it seems almost impossible to consider a world without him. Yet, briefly, that happened. In 2021, Shatner traveled above the Kármán line, the divide between Earth’s atmosphere and space, as a passenger on the New Shepard capsule. Once in brief orbit, he experienced what is known as the overview effect – a deep metaphysical epiphany about one’s connection to Earth, common among space travelers. On his return he looked shocked, a moment captured by the camera crews expecting simple ebullience. He never expected that instant to go viral (he says he didn’t even notice he was being recorded at the time) and it wasn’t until he wrote his latest book (his 40th), Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, that he was able to publicly express the most unexpected of emotions: dread.

Yet that experience didn’t trigger despair. If anything, he’s more driven than ever to his environmentalism, with a new eco-minded music project, spinning out from his appearance last April at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra and his old friend Ben Folds. Maybe there could be a music video, he muses, one with celebrity guests to get the message over about our frail little planet. Kirk would be proud.

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