William Shatner thinks Gene Roddenberry "is twirling in his grave" over new Star Trek

With a property as sprawling as Star Trek, of course everyone has their own opinions on which entry is the best and which entry is their favorite. (Those might be two distinct answers!) It shouldn’t be a surprise that OG Star Trek star William Shatner thinks OG Star Trek is the truest version, not just because of his involvement but because of creator Gene Roddenberry’s particular vision. “He was in the military, and he was a policeman,” Shatner says in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “There are strict rules and you abide by the rules. Around that, [the writers] had to write the drama.”

Roddenberry steered the series with “the discipline of ‘This is the way a ship works,’” Shatner explains, and that includes crew members not making out with each other. “Well, as Star Trek progressed, that ethos has been forgotten [in more recent shows],” the actor observes. “I sometimes laugh and talk about the fact that I think Gene is twirling in his grave. ‘No, no, you can’t make out with the lady soldier!’”

Shatner, who hasn’t “watched the other Star Treks very much,” recalls “big” fights between Roddenberry and the writers of Next Generation. He reiterates that Roddenberry wouldn’t approve of the romances between crewmates on the new shows, adding that “the difficulty in the beginning, between management” of Next Generation and Roddenberry “was all about Gene’s rules and obeying or not obeying those rules.”

Shatner got his own shot at the pilot’s seat directing the movie Star Trek V, which he lists as one of his biggest regrets. “I wish that I’d had the backing and the courage to do the things I felt I needed to do,” he reflects, saying management altered his original concept of “Star Trek goes in search of God.” From there, “it was a series of my inabilities to deal with the management and the budget. I failed. In my mind, I failed horribly,” he says. “When I’m asked, ‘What do you regret the most?’, I regret not being equipped emotionally to deal with a large motion picture. So in the absence of my power, the power vacuum filled with people that didn’t make the decisions I would’ve made.”

That said, he would be willing to return to the Star Trek universe under the right circumstances, so long as it wasn’t a “stunt” like Leonard Nimoy’s cameo in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. Shatner states, “If they wrote something that wasn’t a stunt that involved Kirk, who’s 50 years older now, and it was something that was genuinely added to the lore of Star Trek, I would definitely consider it.”