Kirk steps onto a rickety catwalk and falls to his death. His last words to Picard are: “It was fun.” Picard buries him under a pile of rocks, and presumably leaves him there to decompose.
Of course, Kirk has been resurrected in small, non-canonical ways ever since. In William Shatner’s 1995 novel “The Return,” Kirk’s body is located and resurrected by the Borg, operating under pressure from the Romulans (!). More recently, fans saw Kirk traversing the afterlife (?) in a 2023 non-canonical short film called “765874: Unification.” That same year, on an episode of “Star Trek: Picard,” it was canonically declared that Kirk’s body had indeed been salvaged from the planet where he died, and was being kept in cold storage at a secret Starfleet black site.
Extrapolating from that latter story thread, a new IDW comic book will once again resurrect James T. Kirk, this time many hundreds of years beyond the “Next Generation” era. According to a new press release, the new story will be called “The Last Starship.”
