Kirk's Dad being in Starfleet is a long standing notion. In 1988, the novel Final Frontier has him as Captain April's first officer (and suggesting the name Enterprise).
I barely remember reading this decades ago...it was a bad idea then, and still is a bad idea today.
Having watched the complete reel last night, I won't dissect it except to say 2 things:
This seems a common mistake by fanfilmmakers when making their projects, but in real drama an audience needs time to bond with a new character so that we can root for them if they succeed, or agonize over them when bad things happen to them.
Dropping an unknown character into an established series and making Kirk go crazy and to expect that the viewers will want this character to emerge unscathed just because it is said that he's Kirk's father just plain isn't enough. Television/films aren't like novels, and that useless flashback at what I assume is the Kirk family Iowa farm did nothing to make Mignona anything more than a cypher at that point.
If Trek producers had jettisoned all of the first 20-30 minutes of the Lights of Zetar episode and started right when Mira Romaine became alien-possessed, would we have sympathized at all just because she would be described as Scotty's girlfriend?
You need to show us WHY we should care about this character.
The other point I have is about that White hole event...all pretty special effects (really nice-looking)...yet, I couldn't have cared less about it as a source of drama and danger.
The vampire cloud monster was nowhere near as polished, yet it chewed the scenery as a villain as if it was Jack Nicholson compared to this episode's antagonist.
