There's a level on which TOS Sam Kirk appearing solely as a corpse played by William Shatner in a fake mustache is really funny.
There's a different level on which I'm wildly over-invested in the handful of implications we have about Sam, Aurelan, their three sons, and of course how they relate to my ultimate TOS blorbo, Sam's much younger brother Jim Kirk.
Like, the main advantage to only allowing a brief glimpse at Sam for the obvious "William Shatner in a mustache" reason is that it forces the hints at (Jim) Kirk's relationship to his family to be mediated through Aurelan and Peter instead, so we get less of a sense of Jim and Sam + Sam's family, and more of Sam and Aurelan and their children as Jim's family. Basically the only thing apart from Sam's profession we knew about them before this episode was that not just Sam, but his wife and all three sons had come to celebrate (32-year-old) Kirk receiving command of the Enterprise.
It's never suggested to be the flagship in TOS nor does the idea make much sense for their mission in TOS, but it is one of only twelve ships of its kind, and its mission is a huge deal. So receiving the captaincy so young was definitely a major achievement, just not as monumental as it's treated later on. The implication of Sam and Aurelan showing up with all of their children to see Kirk honored this way not only speaks to the magnitude of his success but to their affection and support for him.
Later in "Operation: Annihilate!" we'll find out that Kirk has Aurelan's private number for emergencies and they're on clearly affectionate terms.
KIRK: Aurelan? Aurelan, it's Jim.
AURELAN: Jim? Sam, he's—
KIRK: He's dead. But your son's still alive. You've got to help us.
AURELAN: You are here. It is you, Jim!
TOS doesn't give the slightest implication about any other family member having any meaningful presence or significance in his life at all. We're given no reason in the show to think he has children or other family of his own (it's wildly unlikely for TOS Kirk tbh, for various reasons). We're given no reason to think their parents are in the picture or have been in a long time, certainly none to think either parent was at the ceremony—TOS Kirk is never associated with conventional parent-child nuclear family at all.
It was a friend of their family who helped Kirk apply to the Academy, not their parents. The people mentioned in TOS as guides or inspirations to him, or as people he looks up to, are all unrelated mentors in Starfleet like obvious father-figure Captain Garrovick or public figures like T'Pau. The only "traditional" family mentioned as there for him and whom he ever acknowledges is his older brother, sister-in-law, and nephews—all of whom he's clearly very fond of and has a close relationship with—not parents or children.
We don't know the ages or birth order of Sam and Aurelan's children, but for all three to be of appropriate ages for a significant Starfleet event, Sam is likely to be significantly older than Jim, with the extremely brief glimpse of Shatner!Sam + mustache obscuring how youthful he really looked (the writers had envisioned a 10-year age difference, though this is never mentioned onscreen; it does make the backstory from "The Conscience of the King" work more easily, though, since Sam's survival no longer needs to be explained—he would have already been an adult and off on his own life, if young, and frankly he and Aurelan seem to have done better by a troubled 13-year-old younger brother who had just survived starvation and genocide than Sarek and Amanda ever managed with Spock for... existing).
But the other thing about Sam as Bill Shatner With Mustache is the obvious implication that, while I don't think we're meant to think the brothers are diegetically identical, they do resemble each other very closely apart from age. Jim looks far more like Sam than Sam's one surviving child, Peter, ever will. And Sam is going to be 43 forever—to Jim, to Peter. But Jim lives. Every year his reflection looks a little more like Sam's.
ngl I think quite a bit about this in terms of Viola in Twelfth Night, a character who is already deeply fitting for comparison to James "What is gender, really?" Kirk:
I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers, too—and yet I know not.
I my brother know
Yet living in my glass. Even such and so
In favor was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, color, ornament,
For him I imitate.
Bonus feature:
She [Viola] pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
But there's more!
There is a cut scene from the end of "Operation: Annihilate!" where Kirk takes Peter (in a tiny Starfleet uniform!) to the bridge, and puts him in the captain's chair to ask which offered home he wants to live in: one is with Sam's research partner and his (the partner's) wife on Deneva (Peter's home, despite the horrors, which Sam had called the best place in the galaxy) and the other with his grandmother on Earth (I don't think it was stated whether this was Aurelan's or Sam's mother, though I'm inclined to think Aurelan's for various reasons, including the descriptions of Peter as the last survivor of Sam's family; Kirk describing her as "your grandmother" with no indication that he's talking about his own mother; and Kirk somberly responding "No one ever is" to Peter sadly saying that living with Sam's friends won't be the same as his own parents). Peter chooses to stay on Deneva.
Unsurprisingly, I adore the idea of Kirk not only asking Peter what he wants rather than unilaterally making the decision for him, btw, but sitting him in the captain's chair of the Enterprise—!!!—and lowering himself to nearly Peter's eye level to ask him what he wants. Uncle Jim understands symbolism, okay.
There's also this bit after Peter is beamed back down to Deneva where Scotty says that Peter seems a bright lad who might well end up in Starfleet, and Kirk grimly responds that he hopes not. He explains that he doesn't want Peter to ever have to weigh decisions like destroying a planet to stop the massacre of billions and will follow a different, happier path.
He's fine, they're fine, the remnants of this impossibly suffering family are totally fine.
Anyway I also wonder what it's like for Peter Kirk to have an increasingly famous uncle who looks just like his dead father.
