Captain Kirk’s Star Trek Replacement Confessed To Horrific Crimes In Real Life
Stephen Collins, who played Captain Will Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, admitted to sexual crimes against young girls.
While some fans diss the movie for being boring, Star Trek: The Motion Picture provides a fascinating examination of Captain Kirk as a character. William Shatner plays Kirk as a heroic captain dealing with middle age and the prospect of being replaced, and this Star Trek movie emphasizes that by having Stephen Collins play Captain Decker, Kirk’s younger replacement. But as USA Today reports, that entire movie is tainted after Collins admitted “that he inappropriately touched one young girl and exposed himself to two others from 1973 to 1994.”
This admission comes long after Star Trek: The Motion Picture aired back in 1979, and many fans feel that Stephen Collins didn’t go far enough in trying to make amends to the underage girls that he once touched and exposed himself to. At the time, Collins acknowledged that he apologized to one of the women and was surprised to discover she was “extraordinarily gracious.” But he claimed that he avoided trying to apologize to the other two women in question because he was afraid that his attempts to do so might open up old wounds and hurt them all over again.
As bad as it is for Star Trek fans to discover Stephen Collins committed horrific crimes, it is perhaps even worse for fans of the religious television show 7tth Heaven. The actor was only in Star Trek for a single film, but he headlined the television show for a staggering 11 seasons. Compounding the awkwardness is the fact that he played a Christian reverend, and countless fans looked up to him as a kind of spiritual icon before the startling revelations that he exposed himself and made inappropriate contact with victims who are younger than most of his onscreen children.
One of the more fascinating things about Star Trek featuring Stephen Collins as Decker is that we likely would have gotten a different actor for the character if not for the runaway success of Star Wars. Before setting his sights on making Trek movies, franchise creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to create a live-action sequel series named Star Trek: Phase Two that would have prominently featured Decker as a new character. The television role was never cast, and Collins was only picked when Roddenberry and Paramount pivoted to making Trek movies after they saw how profitable both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were at the box office.
Strangely enough, Star Trek continued to feel the influence of the character Stephen Collins played for over a decade after that first film was released. A number of scripts were already written for Phase Two when it got canceled, and some of those scripts got dusted off during the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation even as the new show borrowed characters from the old one. Beloved character William Riker was actually based on Will Decker and his relationship with Deanna Troi was meant to mirror the relationship Decker had with the beautiful and exotic Ilia.
Ultimately, Star Trek featuring an admitted sex pest like Stephen Collins in the first feature film will always be something of a stain on the franchise. That stain might be worse if not for the fact that The Motion Picture (which fans at the time called “The Motionless Picture” because it was considered so boring) was overshadowed by The Wrath of Khan in almost every way. As for Collins, though, rehabilitating his reputation in Hollywood proved to be the ultimate “no-win scenario.”
