Star Trek Generations' Original Plans Featured A Different Death For Kirk
David Carson's 1994 film "Star Trek: Generations," contained a very, very convenient contrivance. It seems that there was a small, free-floating energy ribbon, nicknamed the Nexus, that regularly traversed the galaxy. The Nexus contained a seemingly infinite micro-universe where time never passed. When a humanoid was sucked inside of the Nexus, they found themselves in what was essentially Heaven. Some unexplained psychic force in the Nexus provided its denizens with their deepest wishes. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) was sucked into the Nexus at the start of "Generations," and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) was sucked in 87 years later. Because time had no meaning in the Nexus, though, the two men could meet at the same moment.
Picard explains to Kirk that he was sucked into the Nexus while trying to stop a mad scientist named Dr. Soren (Malcolm McDowell) for destroying a star and wiping out an inhabited planet that orbited it. Picard then convinced Kirk to leave the Nexus and return to the mountaintop where Soren was arming his star-killing missile. Kirk and Picard attack Dr. Soren together, throwing punches and racing across rudimentary metal catwalks that Soren built on the mountain. The fight leads to a moment when Kirk is on a crumbling catwalk, about to plunge over a precipice. Kirk manages to stop the missile with a remote right before falling to his death. Picard raced down to Kirk's broken body to catch his last words. "It was fun," Kirk said. He then perished. "Oh, my," he muttered.
"Generations" was written by longtime Trek writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, abiding by a long series of studio mandates that they hated. At a 2017 "Star Trek" convention (covered by TrekMovie) Braga also noted that his script underwent multiple changes during its development. Braga seemed to recall a draft of the script wherein Picard's Enterprise-D would engage in a space battle with Kirk's Enterprise-A, and Kirk would die on the bridge of his ship.
Kirk was originally going to die on the bridge of the Enterprise-A
1994 was a very, very busy time to be working on "Star Trek." The final episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," called "All Good Things...," aired in May, and it rolled directly into the production of "Generations," which opened in theaters the following November. In the middle, there were new episodes of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" being produced, and Braga was gearing up for the January 1995 premiere of "Star Trek: Voyager." Everything was going full blast.
As such, Brannon Braga felt understandably overworked. He was overseeing "Next Generation" while coming up with treatments for "Generations." At some point during the development, he and Moore struck upon the idea of the Enterprise-D and the Enterprise-A locked in a heated space battle. They figured their tagline could be "Kirk vs. Picard: One Must Die." Sadly, neither Braga nor Moore could invent a non-contrived story that would have brought the two Enterprises together.
Braga doesn't quite remember the details, as everything was moving so fast, but he did say the following:
"It's kind of a blur. It just worked. We wrote 'All Good Things...' [and] it was a pure piece of writing. It was beautifully made. Whereas 'Generations' was a little more laborious and serving a lot of things, and I think that shows. [...] I think Ron and I envisioned the two Enterprises kinda locked in battle. Somehow they would meet, but [then] they would get together and fight the bad guy, and Kirk would go down on his bridge, instead of a bridge falling on him."
An Enterprise vs. Enterprise battle might sound cool on paper, but it would have strained credulity to see two shows, set a century apart, so conveniently overlap. Eventually, Braga and Moore hammered out the details, and wrote the scene where Kirk plummets off a broken catwalk. It was less climactic, perhaps, but it was what we got.