Star Trek Still Hasn’t Replaced a Perfect Character With Less Than 2 Minutes of Screen Time

Star Trek‘s best and most pivotal characters tend to be given a substantial amount of screen time. Of course, this is all relative. Some Star Trek characters only appear in a single episode or movie, but many are given a good amount of time to shine during the only story in which they feature. That isn’t a universal scenario, though.

There is still one Star Trek character, quietly essential to the long-running sci-fi franchise, who only appears on-screen for less than two minutes. I timed it myself, and the total time he features clocks in at around 1 minute and 40 seconds. Sadly, his death shortly after his debut means he can’t actually return. This is sci-fi, though. There is an interesting workaround. Star Trek even proved it recently.

Chris Hemsworth Is Still Star Trek’s Only Version of George Kirk

JJ Abrams’ Kelvin Timeline trilogy began with a movie simply called Star Trek in 2009. The saga acted as a creatively soft reboot of the franchise, with no Star Trek shows in production at that time. Set largely during the Original Series era, Abrams and company recast every single beloved character for a reality that diverged from the Prime Universe right at the beginning of the movie.

As well as introducing new versions of known Star Trek figures, Abrams seized the opportunity to give Captain Kirk’s father his first screen time. Before 2009, George Kirk had only ever been referenced, but never directly shown. The role was given to Chris Hemsworth, but George died after less than 2 minutes of screen time, heroically going down with his ship, the USS Kelvin.

His sacrifice allowed his son, James T. Kirk, and his in-labor wife to escape the deadly chaos. Because the destruction of the USS Kelvin is what caused this timeline to splinter from Star Trek‘s Prime Universe, the reality shown in this sequence is essentially still the same one that features in the TV shows. As such, we can assume that this is indeed how George Kirk would have acted in the Prime Universe as well.

However, George’s service aboard the Kelvin, which wasn’t canon until 2009, didn’t end this way in the franchise’s core reality. The attack on the ship never happened at all. As such, James was actually raised by his father, who is still alive off-screen in The Original Series. Seventeen years on from the 2009 movie’s premiere, Hemsworth is still the only face associated with the Kirk family patriarch.

That said, there is a good reason for that: there’s been very little need for George to show up in the Prime Universe. It could still have happened since 2009, though. The thing is, it would be a tricky thing to navigate, given the nature of George’s debut.

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Has Come the Closest To Bringing Back George Kirk

The Star Trek franchise as a whole turned 60 this year, and it celebrated in a really exciting way. Although George didn’t actually show up, a Strange New Worlds Season 4 episode fleshed out his timeline via a figure from his past. Admiral Simon Reeger (Joe Morton) in “Orders of Magnitude” turns out to be the one responsible for the fact that George’s Starfleet career never resulted in a command of his own in the Prime Universe.

The reveal also comes with some great bits of lore about James’ (Paul Wesley) upbringing, as well as some heroics from George that happened in the Prime Universe rather than the Kelvin Timeline. The episode resists the urge to show it all via flashback, as it would presumably have muddied the waters a little.

It would have been fun to have Hemsworth reprise the role, but the rule is that no actor can play both the Kelvin and Prime versions of themselves. There was, however, the potential for James to call his father toward the end of “Orders of Magnitude,” which would have opened the door for a more age-appropriate actor to cameo as George Prime, as Hemsworth is actually slightly younger than Wesley.

In the end, there was no real need for George to show up at all in “Orders of Magnitude,” monumental though it would have been. If anything, the story is more powerful without actually seeing him, but still hearing about what happened with Reeger all those years ago. This was probably the most logical time George Prime could have received his on-screen debut, and now it seems unlikely that Star Trek will ever get around to showing him.