I don't know if this is relevant but I'm just letting my mind run around a bit. One thing I think of when I think of 'Kirk' is
Star Trek and Captain Kirk. Gene Roddenberry was a
futurist and, specifically, for the movie
Star Trek: The Motion Picture shows a clear belief in transhumanism.
While it was subjected to furious rewrites, the ending that is known seems to only exist because of these two points:
During the rewrite of the final scenes, the studio executives clashed with Roddenberry about the script's ending, believing that the concept of a living machine was too far-fetched. The executives consulted Asimov: if the writer decided a sentient machine was plausible, the ending could stay. Asimov loved the ending...
A final draft of the third act was approved in late September 1978, but
had it not been for a Penthouse interview where NASA scientist Robert Jastrow said that mechanical forms of life were likely, the ending might not have been approved by the studio.
V'ger, or Voyageur 6, is a fictional NASA probe the was believed to have been lost in a black hole. It was apparently found by an alien race of intelligent machines who interpreted it's programming to mean "learn all it can and return to its creator". The probe accumulates so much knowledge that it becomes sentient and returns to Earth. This sounds like AI.
The two crew members, Ilia and Decker, are the ones who end up fulfilling V'ger's mission. Ilia (pronounced in the movie as
eye-LEAH-ah, but looks a lot like
Ilya, Illja, etc. (aka:
Illion) which is derived from
Elijah) gets killed (or
digitized and assimilated? aka: Tron meets Borg?) by a plasma probe and later returns as the Ilia robot- a replica body with Ilia's original consciousness becoming part of the "V'ger AI" which does the speaking through V'ger's Ilia probe- to learn about the "human infestation" on the Enterprise. Decker was previously in love with Ilia and still longs to be with her. At the finale, V'ger needs to merge with "the creator"
directly in order to transmit all its information and fulfill its mission to which Deckard volunteers. The human merges with the machine, transforming into ???, and disappears to which the rest of the 'away team' witness and conclude as a "birth".
Originally a Southern Baptist, Roddenberry (memory of berry bushes and farie folk) later rejected religion and, while he wasn't a true Atheist, became a
humanist. He was also an
antisemite.
He had a similar disdain for Judaism. Despite working closely with Jewish writers and stars such as Shatner, Nimoy, and Koenig for the series, Nimoy said of Roddenberry, "Gene was antisemitic, clearly," qualifying that Roddenberry was anti-religious, seeing Jews as a religious group, adding "but I saw examples not only of [Roddenberry] practicing antisemitism, but of him being callous about other peoples' differences as well.” As with Christianity, Roddenberry similarly dismissed that there were any deliberately Jewish principles or allusions included in Star Trek, telling a journalist, "You Jews have a lamentable habit of identifying those characteristics in a society that you deem positive and then taking credit for inventing them.”
Would this be enough to attack Roddenberry albeit in a very distant way? Shatner (94) as Captain Kirk is the last surviving member of the original cast whose Jewish grandparents all came from Ukraine and Lithuania. Could Charlie Kirk be considered a captain of sorts?
Speaking of Disney,
Tron: Aries is about to be released and, instead of humans being digitized and manifesting in the computer world, the digital world is coming into the physical one. The obvious next step in the storyline or is the idea of 'our saviour' being introduced?
Tron: Ares follows a highly sophisticated program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind's first encounter with A.I. beings.
Just musing.