The Captains

William Shatner wrote, directed and appears in this documentary, in which he seeks out the actors who have played starship captains across the Star Trek franchise. The film centres on his conversations with Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew and Scott Bakula, the performers who followed him into the captain's chair on the various television series, and it also includes Chris Pine, who took on the role of James T. Kirk in the later feature films. Shatner's own time as Kirk is the starting point for a project that looks at what the part meant to each of them and how the series passed from one generation of commanders to the next.

The Captains was released in 2011 and runs 97 minutes. It is the third film Shatner directed, arriving more than two decades after Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and nine years after Groom Lake, and he also wrote the screenplay, with J. Craig Thompson producing. Audience response has been moderate: on IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from around 3,200 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.4/10 from roughly 125 votes, a smaller but slightly lower-scoring sample. The documentary's appeal rests largely on the reunion of actors associated with one long-running science fiction series.