The list isn’t as long as you may think, because Captain Kirk slept with or tried to seduce women he obviously didn’t love. I’ll cover a couple of those, which are actually kind of sad to think about. I’m going to skip some who don’t belong on the list.

Keep in mind that this subject is highly debated. Today his greatest love doesn’t even place in most people’s top five, and that’s unreasonable. The woman he gave his whole heart to should be obvious.

As the decades slipped by, different audiences got to enjoy the original series and, eventually,  the remastered version which changed the Enterprise and other ships, planetoids and special effects like ship damage, aliens, quasars and a host of other goodies. The soundtrack was overhauled and even character sequences enhanced. It was a true labor of love and the results were magnificent. Now another generation and more to come will see a series that debuted in 1966, with a low weekly budget, that’s better than almost anything on CBS online. I don’t like the idea of paying for internet and then paying for a subscription to watch the two new series, especially since I hate the storyline of Star Trek: Picard. It’s an insult to fans who have stuck with the franchise since the fall of 1966. And there are still plenty of us left.

When Desilu picked up production, it was because the studio had vision and saw something special in Gene Roddenberry’s space opera.

They were right, although NBC completely bungled the day and time slot for the show. A move to Friday at 10:00PM doomed it to low ratings. Everyone who liked the show was out on dates, at sock hops, high school football games and cruising, rock and roll blaring from their monologue speakers. Or going off to basic training.

It’s still considered a death slot for broadcast TV although there were always exceptions. CBS scored well with CBS Friday Night at the Movies”, grabbing up some good titles.

This was the year Dark Shadows premiered. Of Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird entering service. Of escalating war in Vietnam and the Freedom of Information Act being signed into law. The year the Flintstones and Dick Van Dyke left the air in primetime.

It was the year the National Organization for Women (NOW) formed. Of the first race riot in Cleveland. Of the infamous Watts riots.

Airline crashes near Tokyo international make the news. Walt Disney dies. Indira Ghandi is prime minister of India and Israel and Syria fight on the ground and in the air over the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River.

Truman Capote holds a huge party and the Sound of Music wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

On September 8, Star Trek debuts with the episode “The Man Trap” and the phenomenon began. The fall had distinct firsts: It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas began their annual showings.

A TV set was not cheap. Color sets were most expensive and usually housed in huge consoles. Many people owned black and white sets, more portable and cheaper. TV sets came with two round dials for changing channels. The upper knob was VHF band and usually had the big three networks, CBS, NBC and ABC. UHF channels required a round antenna separate from the rabbit ears. Independent stations, usually difficult to tune in, specialized in local programming and children’s shows, some of them repeats like Astroboy and Diver Dan. They often showed old films at night. Many of those films no longer exist as the method for preserving film was so casually adhered to.

Into this medium and this world came Star Trek. It had favorable yet still tepid ratings and was watched mainly by a core of young fans of science fiction. Others might casually watch a segment and hate it right away. Still more said that the series hooked them on science fiction for the first time and it became their favorite genre. A fact made obvious by legions of fans who wrote uncounted letters to keep the show on the air, books that were written to continue the adventures of Kirk and crew, model kits that never stopped selling, an animated series by Filmation and finally so much demand that eventually everyone returned for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979.

Never forget that this franchise is one of a kind. High ratings during syndication, high sales of merchandise and constant demand brought Paramount Pictures to use it to answer Star Wars. It worked, too. Almost a dozen motion pictures followed, along with The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise and an absolutely magnificent fan-produced web series that continued the original series five-year mission of Enterprise titled “Star Trek Continues”.

In every example I just listed, several things combined to make the effort a success.

First was the writing. Good characters can’t be good without a thoughtful script. Then came casting, and I never disagreed with any main cast choices, and few guests. Finally, editing and direction were not perfect but, most often, were magical. The difference between “Shore Leave” and “The Way To Eden” isn’t just the script or casting but everything from start to finish. The former is a first season romp with a Japanese Zero, a tiger, a Samurai who chases Sulu, Alice and the White Rabbit, a black knight and a soundtrack that doesn’t let up.

The latter is a third season downer in which Spock jams with Space Hippies searching for the mythical planet Eden. Ugh.

Then there’s the Enterprise herself. With crude methods a giant model on a track ran past a static camera but she was beautiful, and our imagination was engaged picturing such a huge ship that was crewed by 430 people. The sequences in her corridors were cleverly shot from different angles and what was in reality only a few small separate sets looked like thousands of continuous corridors on a real spaceship.

Combining the deftly filmed ship flybys and the sets that forced us to fill in the blanks, Roddenberry hooked us and never intended to let us go.

The crew was a reflection of Roddenberry’s vision of humanity’s future, where racism wouldn’t exist, science and exploration were the main quest between an alliance of humans and aliens.

Conflict was inevitable, but didn’t always end in combat. Sometimes the Federation surprised new alien species, as when the ultra powerful race called the Metrones stopped a war between the Federation and Gorns from starting. They put Kirk and the captain of a Gorn ship alone on a deserted planet to fight it out, with the loser and his ship to be destroyed. In the end, Kirk refuses to deal the death blow to the Gorn he’s felled, and the Metrones are duly impressed and allow both ships and crews to live.

Perhaps the diverse crew and deep social issues addressed combined at the perfect time in our history to make it so special. I believe that was a big part of it; at no time did the series shine more than when its story embodied mercy, forgiveness and civility in the face of hopeless opposition. The things that Roddenberry believed our future would be like with the best parts of us surviving.

So we come to James T. Kirk, the man in the center seat. The captain’s chair. Only a dozen heavy cruisers like Enterprise exist, and that makes the job prestigious and coveted. Unfortunately not everyone is cut out for it. Kirk…is the best of them.

Early on, we think we know why. He loves his job and he loves the Enterprise almost as a man loves his wife. In “The Naked Time” we get a glimpse of this; McCoy’s cure for the infection has the desired effect, but Enterprise got to him first, and even as Kirk reaches toward Janice Rand in his loneliness, the ship yanks him back. A whiplash of the heart. This is why some claim that Kirk’s greatest love was always the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Carol Marcus

Appeared in: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”

In a sense this is true. Repeatedly, romances stop before they get started because his duty is to ship and crew, and he cannot turn his back nor spare the time for marriage and romance. He has, at some point, an illegitimate child with Doctor Carol Marcus, and a son isn’t enough to keep him from chasing through the stars, which is the one thing Carol Marcus won’t tolerate for her son. She keeps full custody and breaks it off with Kirk. They don’t meet again until David is grown and a doctor like his mother.

But considering they had a child together, was Carol Marcus Kirk’s greatest love?

No. By the time they meet again in The Wrath Of Khan, there’s no romance between them. There’s a sort of bittersweet affection, and Carol is really sympathetic, but they’re not in love and probably never were. An infatuation, a passing fling, maybe. One where Kirk refused to wear a condom, obviously.

Carol gets testy when Kirk asks why she didn’t tell David who his father was and she gives a cynical “huh” and says, “How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be?”

Obviously the answer to both is no. They weren’t together and never wanted to be.

Ruth

Episode: “Shore Leave”

In the aforementioned episode “Shore Leave”, Kirk sees Ruth, a woman from another past Romance. She evokes in him a genuine awe that she’s there, that she hasn’t aged, and it’s obvious that his feelings for her run deep. As far as I know she never appeared again and in this episode is not real, but a manufactured m amusement park prop. But even after Kirk realizes this, he opts to take shore leave and spend time with her anyway. This seems illogical and indeed irrational until we remember how lonely he really is. As far as the real Ruth goes, yes, he loved her, but she belongs in his past and he’s content with that.

Elaan

Episode: “Elaan Of Troyius“

Elaan is to be given in marriage to the ruler of Troyius, a gift to end hostilities. She is to be transported by Enterprise to the ceremony and her new home. Kirk has no initial liking for her as she behaves in an uncivilized manner and even stabs her tutor who is trying and failing to tame the shrew, as it were. She attacks Kirk, who isn’t even hesitant to offend her and hits her back. Then she acts sad, says she doesn’t know why people don’t like her, and cries. Kirk, weaker for women crying than he is for women in scanty outfits, wipes away a tear, not knowing that Elasian women have a love potion on steroids in their tears.

Kirk is infected and can’t keep his lips off her and is caught in the act by Spock and McCoy, who as a doctor gets frantic to find an antidote. Even a pursuing Klingon battle cruiser can’t alarm Kirk enough to stop trying to get her in the sheets. Eventually though the battle and his devotion to his ship get Kirk to snap out of it.

After the battle there is a touching goodbye scene; they’re both visibly and deeply hurt at their parting. They were both genuinely in love.

France Nuyen plays Elaan.

Rayna

Episode: “Requiem For Methuselah”

An immortal human is found living on a planet far from Earth, claiming to be thousands of years old. He outlived wives and friends and finally fled the planet. Kirk and his landing party have no knowledge of his presence and were looking for rare material to cure a plague, and find instead the immortal and his ward, Rayna. Kirk is struck by her beauty, infatuated immediately. Her innocence gets the better of him and he becomes convinced he’s in love. We’ve heard that before, huh?

But Rayna holds a secret. She’s not human like Flint, her mentor. She’s Flint’s creation. An android so complex that everything about her appears human. As Kirk and Flint get into a fight for her affection, she dies of the grief she feels and the pressure they’ve put on her. So if she’s an android, can Kirk Really love her, and can she reciprocate?

We don’t know how she felt toward Kirk, but yes, he really loved her.

Rayna was portrayed flawlessly by Louise Sorel.

Edith Keeler

Dr. McCoy is psychotic and paranoid after an accidental overdose of Cordrazine and transports to the planet below. Kirk and a search party follow but are understandably distracted by an ancient gateway that calls itself the Guardian. It can open up a portal to any place, any time. As it shows Earth history, McCoy jumps through and is transported to New York during the Depression. Kirk and Spock find out that somehow McCoy has changed history and though they are still alive on the planet surface, the Enterprise, and everything they know, is gone.

Episode: “The City On The Edge Of Forever“

They get the Guardian to play back history to the approximate time McCoy went through and they jump through to stop him from doing whatever it is that changed history.

Spock and Kirk meet Edith Keeler while hiding from the police because they were caught stealing clothes that would help them blend in. Spock rigs a way to display the tricorder readings from before and after McCoy went through. He deduces that McCoy saved Edith from a fatal traffic accident, and she, being a pacifist, met with FDR and delayed the US entry into World War Two, allowing Hitler’s Germany to build the first atomic bomb, changing the future.

It’s a good story, if a bit farfetched, but it may be Trek’s finest episode. Well, maybe if Jim and Edith didn’t pause in front of Floyd’s barber shop from the Andy Griffith Show. Yeah, look it up. They’re in fucking Mayberry, not New York, stock footage of the Brooklyn Bridge be damned.

Kirk has to find a way to stop McCoy but it works out simply because they meet, and Edith crosses the street to get to them when a car comes along. McCoy turns to get her out of the way, but Kirk stops him.

Kirk is in agony. He fell in love with Edith and she had to die. One of the most unforgettable lines in the whole series occurs when Spock says “Jim. Edith Keeler must die.”

As he clutches McCoy, Kirk’s got his face twisted with horror, his eyes shut tight, fighting back tears. McCoy, horrified, says to him, “Do you know what you just did?”

Spock, sympathy in his voice, says softly, “He knows, Doctor. He knows.”

This episode is fast-moving and yet the feelings between Edith Keeler and Kirk are well played. Joan Collins will be forever remembered for other roles, but to trekkers she’s Edith Keeler and, some swear, Jim Kirk’s greatest love.

But that’s hardly the end of the story. In 1994, Rolling Stone Magazine printed a collector’s issue of all things Trek, approximately when the movie crossover “Star Trek Generations” released to theaters.

One article was about the many loves of James T. Kirk. I consider it accurate because I can watch the Edith Keeler episode but there’s one I can’t bear to watch.

Well, there’s actually several episodes I can’t bear to watch, but that’s because they’re not watchable. There’s “Spock’s Brain”, “The Devil In The Dark”, “Operation Annihilate!”, both episodes with Diana Muldaur, “The Lights Of Zetar”, “A Private Little War”, “Obsession”, “The Way To Eden”, and “The Omega Glory”, and that’s not even all of the horrible ones. The episode “And the Children Shall Lead” is creepy but very, very bad. Ugh.

There is one episode that I can’t stand to watch, however, not because it’s bad, but because I always wind up crying at the end. It is the episode in which Rolling Stone said Kirk found his greatest love, the love of his life.

Episode: The Paradise Syndrome”

There is an accident in which Kirk is lost to the landing party and is left behind. Regaining consciousness but not knowing who he was, he steps out of what the natives thought was a temple. With an appearance and culture like Native Americans, the simple people think of him as a god. He tries to sound out his name but can’t finish it and they call him “Kirok”. He is given the beautiful Miramanee, played by Sabrina Scharf. When the god Kirok goes to the temple and can’t stop an impending disaster from happening, the people stone him and his bride, who is pregnant. Spock and McCoy arrive, the people flee, and Spock mind melds with Kirk, helping to repair his memory. Having successfully done that, he gets into the temple which is really an advanced alien asteroid deflector. The disaster is averted, but McCoy can’t save Miramanee. Her injuries slowly kill her and the episode ends in a really sad scene. Probably the saddest of the original series.

William Shatner could make sparks fly with (almost) any female co-star, but he and Scharf convince you it’s for real. Perhaps because Kirk doesn’t remember who he is, he doesn’t remember the Enterprise even though he does have dreams about it but doesn’t know what it is. The dreams are actually nightmares.

He’s therefore free to give all of his heart to Miramanee and she feels the force of it, and loves him as fully, as fiercely and as intensely.

Whether or not you agree, someone thought that all those losses should haunt Kirk, especially the ones who died because of him. And they do. In the fan-made continuation of the original series, the awesome web series “Star Trek Continues”, there’s an episode where Kirk actually starts to see them, or their ghosts. This series is very well done and Roddenberry’s son said he imagined his father would consider it canon. That’s high praise, but not misplaced at all. Actor Chris Doohan, son of James Doohan who played Scotty, actually takes over his dad’s role as Mr. Scott.

Star Trek Continues

Episode: “The White Iris”

In this episode, an injury causes Kirk’s memories to release the tremendous guilt in him over the women who died becauseof him. He has most of his heart damaged, and must find a way to forgive himself. If it can be done.

The web series is excellent and actually ends with Enterprise entering the space dock we see it leave in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. How cool is that?

There you are. James T. Kirk is a lonely man, haunted by broken romances and the few women he loved, some now dead. Especially his beloved Miramanee.

The U.S.S. Enterprise is all he has left after Miramanee has died. He never sheds the loneliness he feels after her death.

The only time we see love in his eyes again is in Star Trek: The Motion Picture as he returns to her in space dock and Scotty indulges him with a slow fly-by in the shuttle craft. He’s lost the greatest love of his life, and she can’t be replaced, and seeing Enterprise again fills him with a rather selfish joy. Now he has something to do, a thing he loves doing, on the Starship he loves.

His return to the Enterprise is inevitable; on desk duty as an admiral he is always thinking about his former command, and certainly it gave him too much time to brood about his lost love.

When the V’ger entity becomes a threat to Earth, he lobbies strongly to Admiral Nogura to let him take Command from Captain William Decker, presumed son of the late Commodore Matt Decker, whose U.S.S. Constellation was destroyed by the Doomsday Machine, which similarly threatened Earth. The film is actually a treatment on the same theme seen in Trek’s second season episodes “The Doomsday Machine”, “The Changeling” and “The Immunity Syndrome”.

It is fitting that Kirk, who loves Enterprise more than Decker, who needs her more than Decker, is the man on the bridge when she returns from her five-year mission and the next time she leaves after two years of refitting.

In the end, Kirk doesn’t so much love Enterprise as much as he needs her. She fills in the blanks that were there before and after Miramanee. She gives him a purpose and a reason for being because he has a broken heart and will never love anyone again as much as Miramanee. He had to watch her die. He carries the heartbreak and guilt with him for the rest of his life.

“Star Trek: Generations”

In “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” Kirk meets Dr. Gillian Taylor, who some claim was one of Kirk’s love interests. Played flatly by Catharine Hicks, who had absolutely no screen chemistry with Shatner, Taylor tricks him into beaming her aboard the Klingon bird of prey containing two live humpback whales and headed from 1986 back to the future. She screams “I have got to help those whales!” but promptly signs on to a Federation science vessel, leaving him with the most insincere kiss on the cheek in big screen history.

The last time we see Kirk is in the crossover film “Generations”. He is an admiral, probably retired, a guest aboard a short ceremonial maiden flight of the just-christened Enterprise-B. Captain Harriman, who isn’t even Crewman First Class material, asks Kirk for help when he has to answer a distress call. Kirk takes the captain’s seat while Harriman (Alan Ruck) goes below to modify the deflector dish. Kirk goes instead, and a tendril of energy from the Nexus breaches the hull, presumably killing James Kirk although his body is not found.

70 years later, Picard is sucked within the Nexus and finds himself face to face with Kirk, who tells him never to retire or let anyone get him “out of that chair, because while you’re there…you can make a difference.”

This scene has him agree to join Picard’s quest to stop Soran (Malcolm McDowell at his bad guy best; in that 1994 issue of Rolling Stone, McDowell recalls telling Shatner, after reading the script and meeting him, “I have been positively bragging about killing you!”). In the fight that follows, Picard does stop Soran, but Kirk falls and sustains mortal injuries. Picard scrambles down the cliff and finds Kirk trapped, dying. Kirk asks, “Did we do it? Did we make a difference?”

Picard says, “Yes”, and Kirk says softly, “It was…fun…”

He stares far away and says, “Oh my…”

His last words.

In the Nexus, he thought he’d gone back in time to the day he told his then-lover, Antonia, that he was returning to Starfleet. We have no reference to his real feelings except that he came out of retirement and left her behind. This would have been after the events of Star Trek IV, possibly a rebound affair after Gillian Taylor couldn’t get far enough away from him after claiming she wanted to help George and Gracie, then promptly went into space.

James T. Kirk wasn’t always in love. In the episodes “Catspaw” and “Wink of An Eye”, he used his seductive powers to get deadly aliens to give up their power over his ship and crew. It worked, too. Sylvia and her fellow explorer were killed when suddenly reduced to their true forms. Oddly, they resembled vegetables with flower parts. But they were no bigger than golf balls. It was satisfying to watch them wither and burn, unable to withstand the atmosphere.

Well, there it is. Kirk wasn’t just about sex and the power of command. He did what he had to do not because he liked freaking with aliens. He did everything for the men and women who served under him, and went on to become a legendary member of Starfleet.

Along the way he discovered new life and new civilizations and boldly went where no one had gone before. When I see the old “Kirk vs. Picard” argument, I wonder why Archer, Garrett, Bob Wesley and Janeway and many others aren’t also mentioned, but I think it goes without saying that James T. Kirk was the first in a long and revered list of the captains of Starfleet’s ships of the line who went forth to explore the Final Frontier.