The first is characterised by a kind of awestruck wonder over the beautiful symmetry of it all: Shatner starred in Star Trek, Star Trek inspired a generation of engineers, the engineers built a rocket, the rocket flew Shatner into space.
Upon leaving the capsule on its return to Earth, Shatner tries to grasp at the profundity of what he saw up there; wide-eyed and slack-jawed, he struggles to articulate the fragility of life on Earth.
The show is part monument to Bezos’s ego, because of course it is, but it is also an incredible document of a man at the end of his life witnessing the great beyond.
In a quiet moment with Bezos, for example, Shatner leans in and asks if he is scared of death.
Sure, it’s probably a story he has told countless times before, and over the years it is likely to have been sanded and smoothed for maximum impact, but it lends his space trip a lovely poetry.
As the rocket reaches its highest point, and everyone is allowed to unclip themselves, most of the passengers start giggling at the sensation of weightlessness.
Now, part of me thinks that, if Jeff Bezos got his way, then everything that ever airs on Amazon Prime would be a variation of Shatner in Space.