Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Written by Harve Bennett and Jack B. Sowards and Nicholas Meyer (uncredited)
Directed by Nicholas Meyer
Release date: June 4, 1982
Stardate: 8130.3
Captain’s log. Lieutenant Saavik gives a captain’s log, saying the Enterprise is on a training mission to the Gamma Hydra sector near the Neutral Zone between Federation and Klingon space. They receive a distress call from the Kobayashi Maru, which is dead in space after hitting a gravitic mine. They’re in the Neutral Zone, and if the Enterprise moves to rescue them, they’ll be in violation of treaty.
Saavik orders Commander Sulu to go in anyhow. As soon as they are in the Zone, three Klingon attack cruisers show up and surround them. They’re jamming all communications, and the signal from the Maru has gone dead. Sulu tries to evade them, but the Klingons fire on them. Sulu, Commander Uhura, Dr. McCoy, and Captain Spock are all killed, and the ship is damaged beyond repair. Saavik orders all hands to abandon ship.
At this point, Admiral Kirk orders the simulation to end and the viewscreen slides open to reveal that the test is over. Spock orders trainees to report to the briefing room, while Saavik complains (after getting permission to speak freely) that there was no way to win and that made it an unfair test. Kirk replies that the whole point is to see how an officer handles a no-win scenario. Saavik abashedly says that she hadn’t thought of that.
Kirk meets with Spock to discuss the scenario, with Spock mentioning that Kirk took it three times, with his solution the third time being “unique.” (This will probably be important later.) Kirk also thanks him for the birthday present: a codex book of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
Spock heads to the Enterprise to get it ready for Kirk’s inspection. Kirk goes home, where he’s visited by McCoy declaring, “Beware Romulans bearing gifts” and giving Kirk his birthday present: a bottle of Romulan Ale and also a pair of glasses. (He has to explain what glasses are, as most people just get an injection of Retinax when their eyesight deteriorates, but Kirk is allergic.) McCoy is also fed up with Kirk being maudlin on his birthday, and says that he needs to be in command of a starship again, not riding a desk.
In the Ceti Alpha system, the U.S.S. Reliant is on a mission to find a completely lifeless planet to be used as a test bed for Project: Genesis. Captain Clark Terrell goes into orbit around the sixth planet, which is inhospitable to any kind of life, and doesn’t seem to have any, despite an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. However, there is an energy reading on the dynoscanner. Dr. Carol Marcus, the head of Genesis, is adamant that there be no life on the planet they use. Terrell and his first officer Commander Chekov beam down to see if it really is a life reading, and if it might be something they can transplant.
Marcus’s son, Dr. David Marcus, expresses concern over Starfleet’s involvement with Genesis, given that it could be perverted into a weapon. He mentions the “overgrown boy scout” she used to hang out with, and Marcus assures David that Jim Kirk is no boy scout. Okay, then.
Terrell and Chekov beam down in EVA suits to a sandstorm from hell. They can’t hardly see, but the tricorder verifies life—and then they find what look like cargo carriers. Inside, they find evidence of habitation. It looks like some people crashed on the planet. Chekov sees that the carrier is from the S.S. Botany Bay. Chekov freaks out, but before he can convince a confused Terrell to leave right now this second, Khan and his followers show up and take Terrell and Chekov prisoner.
Chekov is also confused, as Khan was left on the verdant Ceti Alpha V, not Ceti Alpha VI, but it turns out that the sixth planet exploded, the shockwave changing the fifth’s planet orbit, transforming it into this hellhole. Many of his followers—including his wife, Marla McGivers—died, killed by the Ceti eels. The eels’ infant offspring wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex, making their victims very suggestible. Since Terrell and Chekov won’t reveal why they came to this planet—since they obviously didn’t expect Khan—he implants eels into each of them and asks why they’re there, and where Kirk is these days. (Hilariously, the existence of the Ceti eels means that the planet isn’t a viable test bed for Genesis in any case…)
Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura approach the Enterprise on a shuttle for his inspection, which will kick off a three-week training cruise, with Kirk supervising, and the other three helping out—dialogue gives the impression that it’s Sulu and Uhura’s first time on the Enterprise in a while.
Kirk greets the trainee crew at the airlock, then inspects engineering. He teases Midshipman Peter Preston, who is also Scotty’s nephew, and is eager to get into space.
After engineering, Kirk cuts the inspection short and heads to the bridge. Spock, after giving what passes for a mischievous look at Kirk, asks if Saavik has ever taken a ship out of dock, and when she says no, gives her the conn. Kirk looks suitably terrified, and Saavik looks suitably nonplussed, but she does it. We get a glory shot of the Enterprise leaving spacedock that’s mercifully only one minute and ten seconds long (and has a funny scene right before it), and then Spock tells Sulu to indulge himself with regard to their course.
Reliant calls Regula I to speak to Marcus. Under Khan’s control, Chekov tells Marcus that Kirk has given Reliant orders to seize Genesis and start testing on Ceti Alpha VI. Both Drs. Marcus are furious, and they immediately call Kirk. However, Khan has Reliant jam all transmissions out of Regula I, so her attempt fails. It’s enough to get Kirk’s attention, though. So while Marcus orders her people to pack up their gear and hide, Kirk informs Starfleet that Genesis is compromised. He is given temporary command of the Enterprise and sent to Regula I to assess the situation, despite Enterprise being full of cadets, because there is no other ship in the sector. That keeps happening…
Kirk is willing to simply be ferried to Regula I, with Spock still in command of the ship, but Spock insists that Kirk take command, as that is his best destiny and the place for him to be. Kirk then goes to the bridge, lets the cadets know that it’s no longer just a little training cruise, and has Sulu plot a course for Regula I, warp five.
On Reliant, Khan’s second, Joachim, urges him to take the ship and go. They’re free, they can go where they will, so why pursue Kirk? Khan, however, is obsessed with revenge on Kirk for trapping him on Ceti Alpha V and won’t stop until he has that revenge.
Uhura is unable to raise Marcus—the jamming has stopped, but there’s no answer. Kirk reads Spock and McCoy in one what Project: Genesis is, exactly. Marcus’s presentation to the Federation quotes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, saying that Genesis is “life from lifelessness.” It’s basically insta-terraforming: turning a lifeless moon or planetoid into a life-filled planet.
McCoy is appalled—if this is introduced to a planet with life, it will totally destroy it in favor of a “new matrix,” as Spock puts it. McCoy believes this can be used as universal armageddon. Spock and McCoy argue for quite a bit before Saavik interrupts them: Reliant is on approach. She isn’t answering any hails, so Kirk calls for yellow alert. Then Uhura gets a message that their Chambers coil is overloading their comm systems—though it takes Spock about half a second to prove that to be a lie.
Khan orders shields raised and phasers to fire on the Enterprise. Engineering is hit before shields can be raised. Main power is offline. Reliant fires again, knocking main power completely out. Khan then contacts them, calling for surrender.
When Khan appears on the screen, Kirk recognizes him, to Khan’s delight. Khan only hasn’t finished them off because he wants Kirk to know who defeated him. Kirk offers to give himself up if the crew is spared. Khan agrees but only if he also provides all data regarding Genesis. Kirk feigns ignorance of Genesis, and asks for time to call it up on the computer. Khan gives him sixty seconds. Kirk has Saavik call up Reliant’s prefix codes, enabling them to remotely take command of Reliant’s systems.
Kirk asks how he knows Khan will keep his word, and Khan smiles and says, “I’ve given you no word to keep, Admiral,” which remains to this day one of my favorite villain lines.
Spock sends the prefix codes, Reliant’s shields go down, Sulu fires phasers, and Reliant is badly damaged. Khan wants to stay and fight, but they’re in just as bad shape as Enterprise. Joachim convinces him that Kirk isn’t going anywhere any time soon, either, and they have to effect repairs.
Kirk assesses the damage—and the casualties, among them Preston, to Scotty’s heartbreak. Sickbay is overflowing.
Auxiliary power is restored, and the Enterprise heads for Regula I—but still no one is answering. Kirk beams over with Saavik and McCoy and they investigate the station, since sensors are still inoperable. They find the bodies of several of the Genesis team—and also Terrell and Chekov, still alive. According to Terrell and Chekov, the data banks were all erased, the materials all removed. Marcus is not one of the bodies. The transporter is still active, and shows that the last beam-down was to a cavern on the planet the station is orbiting.
Kirk calls for a status report. Spock says that if they follow regulations like Saavik is always quoting, hours will seem like days. Then he says that it will take six days to do full repairs, and they can’t restore auxiliary control for another two days. Kirk says if they haven’t heard from the landing party in one hour, to head out of jamming range and alert Starfleet.
On the Reliant, Khan overhears all of this and is happy.
The landing party beams down to the cavern, where they find equipment, including the Genesis torpedo. They’re then ambushed by David and one of the other scientists. There’s a fight before Marcus intervenes.
But then Terrell and Chekov pull their phasers. When the scientist and David try to jump Terrell, he fires in self-defense, killing the scientist. But when Khan orders Terrell to kill Kirk, he resists, finally turning the phaser on himself. Chekov then screams, and the eel leaves his ear because—er, well, I guess because he’s a regular, so he can’t die? I guess?
Khan beams Genesis to Reliant and then strands the rest of them on an inhospitable world, just like Kirk did fifteen years earlier. Kirk takes that opportunity to scream Khan’s name into his communicator for no compellingly good reason, except maybe to create a meme.
Saavik tries to raise the Enterprise but McCoy reminds her that the ship is long gone or destroyed by now. Marcus sends David off with McCoy and Saavik to show them Stage 2 of Genesis, which is an entire ecosphere underground. Marcus and Kirk talk and it becomes clear that David is Kirk’s son, and Marcus hasn’t told him that Kirk is his old man. Speaking of old men, that’s what Kirk feels like: old and worn out. Marcus leads him to Stage 2, which is lots of plants and rivers and fruits and animals and stuff.
Joachim reports to Khan that impulse power is restored. But when he moves the ship to the station, there is no sign of the Enterprise.
Kirk reveals to Saavik that as a cadet he reprogrammed the Kobayashi Maru simulation so that it was possible to rescue the ship. He got a commendation for original thinking. Saavik accuses him of never facing the test, which ignores the fact that he took the test twice before, which was how he knew to reprogram it. However, Kirk’s only reply is to say that he doesn’t like to lose. Then, noting that two hours have passed since he called Spock, he contacts the Enterprise and orders everyone to be beamed up. As was obvious to anyone except the other characters in the movie, based on how unsubtly Spock spoke, their conversation flipped hours and days so that minimal repairs were done in two hours, not two days, and that they should leave if Kirk didn’t contact them in one day, not one hour. Cha cha cha.
The Enterprise only has partial main power. Kirk orders them into the Mutara Nebula, which will disrupt their systems, but they’ll also disrupt the Reliant’s systems in the same way—the odds will be even, as Spock explains to Saavik.
Khan doesn’t pursue them into the nebula—right up until Kirk contacts them and taunts him with his being still alive and back on the ship. Furious, and against Joachim’s recommendation, Khan follows the Enterprise in. They trade weapons fire, but the nebula makes weapons locks impossible. However, both ships get shots in, with Reliant’s torpedoes damaging the engine room to the point that there’s significant radiation leakage, while Enterprise’s phasers all but destroy Reliant’s bridge, killing most of Khan’s crew.
Chekov shows up at one point and takes over the tactical station, firing photon torpedoes which trash Reliant and kill the rest of Khan’s crew. With his dying breath, and quoting Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Khan detonates Genesis.
David informs Kirk that they have less than four minutes before the torpedo detonates. Scotty can’t be raised, and Spock goes down to engineering. He goes into a chamber that is filled with radiation and repairs the warp drive by hand in time for the Enterprise not to be caught in the Genesis wave. (Before going in, Spock does a quickie mind-meld with McCoy and says, “Remember.” This will probably be important at some point.)
Sulu warps away and they watch from a safe distance as Genesis transforms the Reliant and the nebula into a yellow sun and a planet.
McCoy calls Kirk down to engineering urgently. Spock has been hit with a lethal dose of radiation—McCoy, Scotty, and another engineer have to physically restrain Kirk from trying to open the door, which would flood the compartment and kill everyone else in engineering. Kirk and Spock have a tearful (well, tearful for Kirk) goodbye through the protective wall, and Spock expires.
Later, Kirk leads a funeral in the torpedo bay, with his coffin shot out the tube toward the Genesis planet. Kirk says that of all the souls he’s met in his travels, Spock’s was the most human. Nice way to insult your best friend, Jim…
Scotty plays “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes as the torpedo is fired.
In his quarters, Kirk tries to read A Tale of Two Cities, but his glasses are cracked. David visits him and says he’s okay with being his son, even though it’s basically Kirk’s fault that all his friends are dead. He also says that Kirk has never faced death like this before, and Kirk agrees, having apparently completely forgotten his brother and sister-in-law, his best friend from the Academy, half the crew of the Farragut, all the redshirts on the Enterprise, his pregnant wife, and the great love of his life in 1930s New York. But, y’know, aside from that…
Kirk, having just buried his best friend, declares to McCoy that he feels young. Okay, then.
We look in on the Genesis planet, which is already pretty darn verdant. And there’s Spock’s coffin, completely intact. We then get Leonard Nimoy intoning the famous “Space, the final frontier” voiceover, and then the credits.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? It’s never made clear what the chamber is that Spock entered, why it was flooded with radiation, or what it had to do with restoring main power. But, y’know, he did it and stuff.
Fascinating. Spock is now captain of the Enterprise, but consistent with how his lack-of-ambition has been portrayed, he’s only accepted the captaincy in order to be a teacher (just like his mom!). Once there’s an actual mission, he all but bullies Kirk into taking the center seat. (Kirk’s reluctance may be due to how the last captain of the Enterprise responded to Kirk usurping his command…)
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy does his usual job of being the curmudgeon, goosing Kirk when he’s being depressed on his birthday, arguing with Spock, and so on.
Ahead warp one, aye. In one of the earlier drafts of the script, Sulu was the captain of the Reliant with Chekov as his first officer. This was changed to Sulu being on the brink of accepting a command, the Excelsior, right after the training cruise. A scene of Kirk and Sulu discussing that was in the script and might have been filmed, but hasn’t been in any cut of the movie. It was included in the novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre, and Sulu eventually was in the Excelsior’s center seat in The Undiscovered Country.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura, um, opens hailing frequencies and stuff. That’s about it.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty has to keep the Enterprise together with spit and bailing wire and with a staff of mostly cadets, one of whom is his nephew who dies. All things considered, he holds it together pretty well, though it’s never explained why he took the near-death Preston all the way up to the bridge instead of right to sickbay.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov is now first officer of the Reliant. Nice to see the kid doing well for himself.
Khan recognizes Chekov, which confused and annoyed many fans because Walter Koenig wasn’t added to the cast until after Khan’s first appearance. I already addressed this in the Trivial Matters for “Space Seed,” so go read that there…
Go put on a red shirt. The Marcuses barely seem to even notice that their fellow scientists are killed—one of them is killed right in front of them, and he’s never even mentioned again. Similarly, Terrell is utterly forgotten the moment he phasers himself, which is odd behavior particularly from Chekov, whom you’d think would have some feelings for his captain being dead.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kirk and Marcus had a relationship twenty-plus years earlier that resulted in a kid. Kirk knew about David, but kept it to himself at Marcus’s request.
Channel open.
“I’m delighted—any chance to go aboard the Enterprise.”
“Well, I for one am glad to have you at the helm for three weeks—I don’t think these kids can steer.”
–Sulu and Kirk bantering.
Welcome aboard. The big “guest” is, of course, Ricardo Montalban, reprising his role as Khan Noonien Singh, last seen in “Space Seed.”
Kirstie Alley debuts the role of Saavik, intended to represent the “next generation” (cough) of Starfleet officers to possibly serve on the Enterprise, and theoretically replace Spock, what with him dying and all. The role will be played in the next two films by Robin Curtis, and her less impressive performance combined with Nimoy’s return resulted in the character of Saavik being written out and forgotten onscreen.
Bibi Besch plays Carol Marcus, the latest in a series of blonde women from Kirk’s past (among them Janet Wallace from “The Deadly Years,” who was used in earlier drafts of the script before the new character of Marcus was created). Some have theorized that she was the blonde lab tech Gary Mitchell threw at Kirk when they were in the Academy, referenced in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” The character will next be seen in the alternate timeline of the Bad Robot films, played by Alice Eve, in Star Trek Into Darkness.
Merritt Butrick plays David (and he looks like he could be the offspring of Shatner and Besch), Paul Winfield plays Terrell, and Judson Scott (uncredited) plays Joachim. All three would return to play different roles on TNG, Scott and Butrick both in “Symbiosis,” Winfield in “Darmok.”
James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig return as well, with John Winston also reprising his role as Kyle, serving on the Reliant. This movie is the first time Doohan, Koenig, Takei, and Nichols got their own solo credits, instead of having to share the screen with others (the four of them and Majel Barrett shared a single screen credit in The Motion Picture).
Trivial matters: This movie is, obviously, a sequel to “Space Seed,” picking up on Khan and his merry band of tyrants fifteen years later.
The film was originally released as without the Roman numeral after Star Trek, though later editions added it. The film went through several titles, including War of the Generations, The Omega System, The Genesis Project, and The Undiscovered Country, that last being Nicholas Meyer’s title when he came onto the project. It was changed by Paramount to The Vengeance of Khan against Meyer’s wishes, and then changed to The Wrath of Khan when it was revealed that the third Star Wars film was to be called Revenge of the Jedi. Lucasfilm wound up changing the title of their movie to Return of the Jedi, and Meyer would later use his preferred title on the sixth film. Cha cha cha.
Paramount blamed Gene Roddenberry for the bloated budget of The Motion Picture, and he was “promoted” to executive consultant, which meant he would be consulted on future Trek films but nobody would be under any obligation to listen to him. Because of this, Roddenberry went around conventions in 1982 bad-mouthing this movie, saying it wasn’t “real Star Trek” and that Meyer and Bennett didn’t know anything about Trek, and they were ruining his vision. (Nothing changes…) He stopped doing that once it became clear that the movie was popular among both Trek fans and the general public.
This movie had a much smaller budget than The Motion Picture, a trend that would continue until Bad Robot took over production of Trek movies in 2009. All the movies from Wrath of Khan to Nemesis had unusually small budgets for science fiction movies. Part of this was accomplished by using the sets already built for The Motion Picture. However, the Starfleet uniforms were redesigned, with these versions of the uniform remaining through to the Generations prelude and, per “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Family,” “Tapestry,” and other places, would remain standard issue until the mid-24th century.
Originally, Leonard Nimoy was not going to reprise his role as Spock, but he was willing to come back if the character was killed off. (I Am Not Spock, indeed…) In earlier drafts of the script he was killed off at the one-third mark, but it kept moving later in the film with each draft until it became the climax.
An early draft of the script included Marla McGivers, but Madlyn Rhue was wheelchair-bound thanks to multiple sclerosis (which eventually killed her) and unable to play the role, and Meyer didn’t wish to re-cast. EDITED IN 2022 TO ADD: Belatedly, this has been established not to be the case, as seen in this blog post from FactTrek. Thanks to them, and to David in the comments. While McGivers was indeed in early drafts of the script, and Rhue did suffer from MS, she was still relatively able-bodied when The Wrath of Khan was being filmed; the character was dropped from later drafts purely for story reasons.
None of the scenes with Preston were in the theatrical release, but they were in the version that aired on ABC, as well as the director’s cut.
Simon & Schuster acquired the license to do Trek prose fiction in 1979 with the novelization of The Motion Picture. Their first original novel was Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Entropy Effect, and on the strength of that novel (which your humble rewatcher still considers one of the ten best Trek novels ever written), McIntyre was hired to novelize this film, as well as the next two. In particular, McIntyre did considerable work providing backstory for Saavik, fleshing out the members of the Project: Genesis team, and expanding the character of Preston (including a friendship between Saavik and Preston).
Saavik‘s backstory from the novelization—which made use of description in the script of her as being half-Vulcan and half-Romulan—was expanded upon in numerous works of tie-in fiction, particularly Carolyn Clowes’s The Pandora Principle, as well as the Star Trek: The Untold Voyages comic book miniseries by Glenn Greenberg & Michael Collins, issues #7-8 of DC’s first monthly Star Trek comic by Mike W. Barr & Tom Sutton, and the novel Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonanno.
Saavik continued as a recurring character in DC’s monthly Trek comic, which covered the time between this movie and the next, as well as between The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home.
Khan‘s life on Ceti Alpha V (or VI or whatever) was chronicled in both the novel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh by Greg Cox and the comic book miniseries Khan: Ruling in Hell by Scott & David Tipton & Fabio Mantovani.
Nobody had the comics license at the time the movie came out, so no comic book adaptation was done, making it the only one of the pre-Bad Robot TOS movies not to be adapted into comic book form—at least until 2009, when IDW went ahead and did a comics adaptation of the movie by Andy Schmidt & Chee Yang Ong.
Terrell is a supporting character in the Vanguard novel series by David Mack, Dayton Ward, & Kevin Dilmore, where he serves as the first officer and then captain of the U.S.S. Sagittarius. He’s seen as captain of the Reliant in the novella The Darkness Drops Again by Christopher L. Bennett (part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries, which your humble rewatcher was the editor of, and I gotta say that the chapter in which Terrell appears is one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever been in any way involved with the creation of) and in the comic book Alien Spotlight: The Gorn by Scott & David Tipton & David Messina. Terrell and McCoy were established as old friends in the script, but that didn’t make it to the final product, though it was included in the novelization.
The aftereffects of the detonation of the Genesis torpedo will be explored in The Search for Spock. The Genesis effect is revisited in the 24th century (with a 130-year-old Marcus) in the Genesis Wave trilogy and the followup Genesis Force, all by John Vornholt.
A version of Kirk’s cheating on the Kobayashi Maru will be seen in the 2009 Star Trek. That’s the only other time the scenario is seen onscreen, although it comes up a lot in the tie-in fiction. Julia Ecklar’s novel The Kobayashi Maru has Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov telling each other the story of how they handled the scenario. Kirk’s taking the test is also dramatized in issue #73 of DC’s second monthly Trek comic by Howard Weinstein & Rachel Ketchum and the short story “A Test of Character” by Kevin Lauderdale in Strange New Worlds VII. Other characters are seen to take the test, including Nog in both “The Bottom Line” by Drew Morby in Strange New Worlds III and “Best Tools Available” by Shawn Michael Scott in Strange New Worlds VI, Kirk’s nephew Peter in Sarek by A.C. Crispin, Mackenzie Calhoun in Stone and Anvil by Peter David, etc. The real-world events that led to the scenario becoming an Academy exercise was dramatized in the Enterprise novel Kobayashi Maru by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin.
The Kobayashi Maru scenario has the ship going to the Gamma Hydra sector, the same area of space the Enterprise visited in “The Deadly Years.” The Maru itself was setting out from Altair VI, a world mentioned in “Amok Time.”
This is the first mention and sighting (and drinking) of Romulan Ale. It will be referenced and/or seen and/or drunk again in The Undiscovered Country, “The Defector,” Nemesis, “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” and “Melora.”
The glasses McCoy gives Kirk will later be sold by Kirk to a pawn shop in 1986 San Francisco in The Voyage Home, thus causing a recursive time loop. Or just silly writing.
Jack B. Sowards would later write the TNG episode “Where Silence Has Lease.”
To boldly go. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This is easily the most iconic and most popular of the thirteen Star Trek movies. It isn’t even close, really. Because of this movie, everyone knows that the Kobayashi Maru refers to a no-win scenario; because of this movie, everyone knows about Kirk shouting Khan’s name at the top of his lungs; because of this movie, everyone knows the sayings about how the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and that revenge is a dish best served cold.
The movie was so popular that three other Trek movies would use it for inspiration, once to good effect—First Contact aped the structure of doing a big-screen sequel to a popular episode of the TV show it spun off of with lots of Moby-Dick callbacks—twice not so much—both Nemesis and Into Darkness were virtual remakes that didn’t work at all.
And for the most part, The Wrath of Khan absolutely earns its kudos. The film is visually vibrant, briskly paced, decently scripted, well acted. In Ricardo Montalban’s Khan, we get a superlative antagonist, one whose desire for vengeance is palpable and truly understandable. Yes, he’s more mustache-twirling than he was in “Space Seed,” but he’s also just spent fifteen years in a hellhole that killed his wife. Khan was a genetically engineered übermensch on Earth—it is very unlikely that he ever really had to truly struggle with anything until Ceti Alpha VI went boom. Those struggles he and his people endured would have changed and hardened him.
The themes of aging, of past indiscretions coming back to haunt you (whether it’s the genetic superman you stranded on a planet or the son whose life you were asked to stay out of), of learning how dangerous space can be (the trial by fire for the cadets in general and Saavik in particular, not to mention how quickly Khan’s exile after “Space Seed” went to shit), are strong ones.
In addition, the film just looks better, and a lot of it is a simple costume choice: going from grays and beiges to red. The original series did a great job of showing how dressing everyone in primary colors can be pleasing to the eye, and putting everyone in red (or white) makes everything pop more. The Motion Picture was drab; The Wrath of Khan is bright. That makes a tremendous difference.
Many words have been written on both the greatness and the flaws of the film—and the latter are legion. Again playing the “only ship in the sector” card when the Enterprise can’t have left Earth’s solar system (they never go to warp until they get sent to Regula). The Mutara Nebula that is somehow inside a star system. The Reliant being three days away from Regula yet somehow able to jam their communications. The inability of the Reliant crew to count the number of planets in the Ceti Alpha system (seriously, how could they mistake the fifth planet from the sun for the sixth? I could see the other way around, but not this…). How Khan’s followers went from a multiethnic group of people his own age to a collection of blond-haired blue-eyed young people.
But the big flaw I want to address is the ending. Or, rather, endings. Because the only movie I can recall with so many separate denouements is A.I. (about which the less said the better). First we have Kirk watching Spock die, then we have Spock’s funeral, then we have David and Kirk’s talk in Kirk’s quarters, then we have the “I feel young” scene, then we have the Genesis Planet, and for goodness sake, can we end the frikkin’ movie already?
Plus I didn’t cover all the themes in the movie four paragraphs ago, as there’s one that totally falls flat, and it raises the unanswerable question about whether or not it’s better to come to working on Star Trek as a fan.
Nicholas Meyer has always been up-front about how he was not a fan of Trek when he was brought on for Wrath of Khan, though he’s now a major player in the franchise, what with his involvement in this film, The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Country, and the upcoming Discovery. There are those who have cited this as an example of why he shouldn’t have been tapped, starting with Gene Roddenberry his own self.
And it can be a problem. Stuart Baird and John Logan were brought in as “fresh blood” on Nemesis, and it was a total disaster, one that killed the Trek movie franchise for seven years before a whole ‘nother production company was brought in. JJ Abrams’s lack of fandom for Trek has been used as a club against the Bad Robot films by many, though Robert Orci’s fandom for Trek is long-established. Ronald D. Moore grew up watching Trek and became the franchise’s strongest scripter. Gene Roddenberry created the show, but is also responsible for some of the biggest failures (“The Omega Glory,” “Turnabout Intruder,” The Motion Picture, the first season of TNG). Star Trek Beyond was more acclaimed by critics and fans than the other Bad Robot films, which many credited to Simon Pegg’s affection for Trek. Both sides have ample evidence on their side.
Meyer occupies an interesting middle ground because, on the one hand, there are many aspects of Trek he gets. Kirk’s need to be in the center seat, his being on the Enterprise as his first best destiny (the words Spock actually uses), his friendship and duty partnership with Spock, and also the theme of growing older are all ones that work nicely. They all tie back to several sources on the original series, from Edith Keeler’s observation about Spock’s place by Kirk’s side to Kirk’s fear of aging in “The Deadly Years” to his bullying his way back into command just one movie ago. Plus this film absolutely nails Spock and McCoy’s roles as foils for each other and as the angel and devil on Kirk’s shoulder, particularly in the scene where Spock and McCoy are read in on Genesis.
On the other hand, there are other aspects that crash and burn. Starfleet is way too militaristic in Meyer’s world. He took a lot of cues from the Navy, which is fine—and Roddenberry’s whole “Starfleet is not a military organization” was self-retconning on his part as he got older and started to believe his own bullshit—but the divide between science and the military that David and the other Genesis scientists decry just doesn’t track, given that the Enterprise is also a vessel of exploration, that Spock was the science officer before he was captain. Admittedly, a lot of this was David’s paranoia and Khan’s manipulating of Terrell and Chekov, but still…
More fundamental, though, is that the theme of Kirk never facing death until he lost Spock just rings wrong on every possible level. I mean, we start with “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” where Kirk has to kill his best friend from the Academy. We move on to “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” where Kirk is deeply affected by the security guards who die, and while that consideration whittles down over time, to the point where he stops even noticing his crew dying by the late second season, Kirk has been seen to feel the loss of crew at least occasionally. Then we have “Operation: Annihilate,” where he listens to his sister-in-law die and finds the body of his older brother. Then we have “Obsession,” where Kirk’s guilt over his role (whether real or imagined) in the death of half the Farragut crew is so palpable that he devolves into the titular obsession to stop the creature responsible. Then we have “The Paradise Syndrome,” where he falls in love with Miramanee, marries her, and has to watch her die after finding out she’s pregnant with their kid.
And, the biggie, Edith Keeler, whom he stopped McCoy from saving. Yeah, that’s someone who’s never faced death. Sure. Hell, “The City on the Edge of Forever” was a classic no-win scenario: either let the great love of your life be killed or destroy history. And Kirk already faced it. For that matter, he took the Kobayashi Maru test twice before he cheated, so he faced it there, as well.
Which is too bad, because, as I said, the other themes work just fine. The cracked glasses at the end aren’t a particularly subtle metaphor, but that doesn’t make the metaphor an unsuccessful one. Growing old sucks, but it only happens if you let it. (At least for a while.) On top of that, we get a wonderful new character in Saavik, who would’ve been a fascinating (ahem) addition to the cast if Nimoy hadn’t decided to come back and Kirstie Alley had. But we’ll talk about that more next week…
Warp factor rating: 6
Next week: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the author guests at Balticon 51 this weekend, along with authors Steven Brust, S.M. Stirling, and (by Skype) Eric Flint, artist Donato Giancola, filker Amy McNally, fan Geri Sullivan, and many more. Keith will be at the eSpec Books table selling and signing books and also will be doing programming. His full schedule is here.
One minor thing that’s always bugged me — the Ceti Alpha V/VI mix-up. I assume that the planets are being numbered from the innermost outward (i.e. Mercury would be Sol I and Earth would be Sol III), so having planet VI blow up shouldn’t change the status of V as being the 5th planet outward from Ceti Alpha, unless VI blowing up really did a number on multiple planetary orbits or something.
But I’m willing to forgive that because it really is a great film, all other things considered.
According to Nicky Meyer, Bennett had to scramble to secure a director and script in order to meet ILM’s timeline and complete the visuals to finish a movie by the release date. The four screenplays Gene had commissioned were rejected and Meyer gleaned the four or five decent story clips he could from those scripts and strung them together. No wonder Gene was on the outside looking in. And its no doubt why Meyer didn’t get a screenplay credit- he really didn’t write much. The last 20 minutes is obviously pulled from “Balance of Terror”… it’s a WWII submarine movie.
“Saavik accuses him of never facing the test,”
I never liked this line. Kirk had been on two five year missions on the Enterprise, and literally every week had to win or die. Saavik, as a Starfleet cadet on the command track, would have studied Kirk’s (and other Captain’s) missions in depth. Her line is just silly.
I always assumed that the comment about the time travel loop with the glasses was a joke. So for a few centuries the glasses simply exist in two places
“Kirk says that of all the souls he’s met in his travels, Spock’s was the most human. Nice way to insult your best friend, Jim…”
Insult? Thats a compliment. I don’t think you get Spock at all.
I saw this one in the theaters. It wouldn’t have been a major moment at the time, true, but I don’t remember seeing the “Remember” line at the end in the original. I’ve always wondered if it was interpolated into the VHS and subsequent versions after the plans for Nimoy’s return in “Search for Spock” started to gel. Anybody know the story?
Vonda McIntyre’s novelization was extraordinarily well done, far above the usual standards of such works.
S
@1: There’s no reason to assume that Reliant or any other Federation vessel would approach a new star system from an angle that allows them to view all of the planets in the system simultaneously – if the system has been surveyed, then presumably the ship’s computer has accurate orbital positioning information on each planet. If CA V was supposed to be on the far side of Ceti Alpha when Reliant arrived, and the planet on which they landed was tolerably close to the predicted position of CA VI based on the system survey, there’s no reason for Reliant’s crew to suspect anything was up until it was too late. (This also assumes that V and VI were about the same size; a large difference in the size of the observed planet vs. survey records would probably tip someone off.)
Frankly, as long as a movie can stand on its own I don’t care that much about canon. Yes, blasphemy among Trekkies! So be it. As for the planetary mixup, I like to think it was a Neptune/Pluto orbital switch-a-roo situation, and the navigator aboard Reliant simply confused which planet had exploded. Yes, yes, a simplistic explanation that would have me burned at the stake with the NASA crowd, but that’s how I roll.
Worth it for Shatner and Montalban chewing every last bit of scenery. Space opera gotta opera!
The whole Ceti Alpha thing could have been fixed just by having the planet suffer some kind of planetary catastrophe like a supervolcano or an asteroid hit. Nuclear winter and all that would pretty much take care of things.
ragnarredbeard: I get him fine, thanks, I was being facetious and calling back to the (several) times on TOS when Kirk referred to Spock as acting human and Spock saying he sees no reason to be insulted…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Kirk takes that opportunity to scream Khan’s name into his communicator for no compellingly good reason, except maybe to create a meme.”
He screams the name because he’s ACTING. He wants Khan to think he’s won, not that the Enterprise will be just fine in a couple of hours.
One of my favorite things about this movie is the way Kirk and Spock outthink “the superior intellect” by exploiting Khan’s obvious character flaws.
(Heroes defeating villains by exploiting the villain’s flaws is one of my favorite tropes in fiction, and it’s used all too rarely anymore.)
Alex K: Oh, I know, but its really really bad acting….. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I agree that the several “cheating death” and “never facing death” lines don’t quite match up with the reality of the entire body of TOS. But on the other hand it is true in the sense that Kirk and the characters he holds most dear (Spock, McCoy and the Enterprise) really should have been dead many times over in the course of their adventures, yet managed to survive by pluck and good luck. This is the first time he faces death in that innermost circle. And in the next movie, Kirk chooses to “kill” another of those characters (and everything that goes with it, career, status, etc.) to save Spock.
And don’t forget that Kirk survived a holocaust when he was a teenager… He must have seen plenty of death at an early age.
My reinterpretation for the “never faced death” conversation between David and Kirk is the arrogance of youth. Here comes David Marcus who has probably led a sheltered life and feels that he can correctly judge a man he has only just met. This happens all the time. Kirk agrees with him because at that moment, Spock’s death overshadows everything else, he’s too miserable to argue, and he’s glad about the company.
I remember being excited about Saavik when the film was new. Since watching “Amok Time”, I had wished for a young Vulcan female who wasn’t a villain. It was also great that the film had not only one, but two female guest characters, and the other one was a middle-aged scientist. The Genesis cave was beautiful. And I cried when Spock died.
Since then, I’ve become less fond of the film. Khan was a much more interesting character in “Space Seed”. It was a magnanimous gesture to give him a planet to tame, and the film ruins it. In retrospect, it seems that it would have been a better idea to kill him right away, right? That’s so un-startrekky. It also led to speculations that Kirk negligently left the incident out of his log entries, and I’ve even seen the theory proposed that he knew that Ceti Alpha Six would explode and deliberately set Khan up.
When I tried to rewatch the film less than two years ago, I noticed that I couldn’t even watch it, because it has really bad dialogue. Yes, it has memorable quotes, but that’s because people don’t talk like this. I suffered through the first scenes, but when I came to Ceti Alpha Five and Khan’s villainspeak, I stopped the DVD and watched TSFS instead. Much better.
I don’t agree that Khan’s desire for vengeance is understandable. Khan suffocated Kirk, twice, tried to kill him, twice, and tried to destroy the Enterprise. In response, Kirk gave him a planet. The planet suffered a natural disaster. Being angry with Kirk after all this strikes me as rather childish.
I like the colour of the uniforms too. On the other hand, I dislike their style. I wish they had never changed the TOS uniforms.
Another thing where I disagree is the aging theme. Was Kirk really afraid of aging in “The Deadly Years”? I thought the problem was that he was clinging to his command even though he was mentally no longer capable of commanding the Enterprise. That isn’t the same thing.
Actually, the older I get, the less convincing I find the aging theme. Many of my friends and neighbours are about fifty now, and as a rule, they are totally unconcerned about aging. It doesn’t ring true. Wasn’t Meyer in his thirties when he made the film? He probably thought that fifty was old, and that giving a pop culture icon a midlife crisis was deep and daring. Which brings me back to the idea of the arrogance of youth :)
“Kirk takes that opportunity to scream Khan’s name into his communicator for no compellingly good reason, except maybe to create a meme.”
I’m always amazed when I hear people say they don’t understand why Kirk screams Khan’s name. From the moment they started talking, Kirk’s done everything he can to convince Khan to “come down here” because Kirk believes the odds of stopping Khan will improve if he’s within arm’s reach. The screams seems like that last ditch effort. Sure, he’s pissed, but it always struck me as a calculated move on Kirk’s part just like the rest of his conversation with Khan.
Bobby
I can explain why Kirk thinks he hasn’t faced true death until Spock’s here. We saw in Requiem for Methuselah that Spock decided that Kirk was too emotionally distraught by a robot’s “death” so he mind melded and erased her. Obviously Spock has been giving Kirk regular “Sad-Away” mind melds throughout their careers… :)
Okay, I got nuthin…
On the Ceti Alpha mixup I always just figured that the early charting missions (under Jonathon “Duchess” Archer, as we later find out) were just a mess and charts were occasionally wrong. They went in looking for a desert type world in X orbit which was called Ceti Alpha VI, Reliant shows up, marks they are a planet short but there is a desert type plane in the roughly correct orbit, just goes with the name but logs it for correction in records when their mission is done. Okay, I never figured anything of the sort when I first watched the movie, because the movie was so good it just didn’t really ping me. But it is my fandom retcon theory.
I saw this movie for my 10th birthday. It wasn’t the first movie I saw in theaters (that would be Star Wars in 1977), but it was the first movie that I requested to see by my own choice. My parents weren’t sci-fi fans, and although my mother dutifully took me to see it, she never forgave me for the scene of the “giant slug,” as she put it, emerging from Chekov’s ear — decades later, she still brought it up whenever Star Trek was mentioned.
Since I was too young to be a TOS fan when it first aired, and I hadn’t seen much of it in syndication, I had no idea the movie was a sequel to a televised episode. But I had no problem following the plot or understanding Khan’s need for revenge, so that’s probably a mark of good writing.
I also had my first “hey, it’s that guy” moment, when I recognized Judson Scott from his starring role in The Phoenix. I suspect I may have just startled several readers who forgot The Phoenix ever existed. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
Of all the things that bugged me, the one that bugged me most was Kirk being stupid in his approach to the Reliant, before he knows Khan has commandeered it. This is a big flaw to me, easily corrected by having Khan force Chekov to communicate with and reassure the Enterprise – thus allaying suspicion…
#14
Khan’s grudge isn’t just because the planet suffered a natural disaster, it’s the fact no one from Starfleet ever checked on them in those 15 years. He lays that responsibility on Kirk, which is fair. He really should have seen to it someone made a followup on their progress, or lack thereof.
Brian: YOU SHOULD BE SORRY! Geez, I haven’t thought about The Phoenix in, er, a long time. With very good reason, I might add…….. *chortle*
Also in general, I let being snarky interfere with analysis, which is never good. I really do understand why Kirk yelled Khan’s name to fool his enemy into thinking Kirk was defeated, but the way he did it was soooo over the top, even by the inflated standards of William Shatner’s acting style, as to be impossible to take seriously. I thought it was goofy when I saw it in the theatre at age 13, and my opinion of it has not improved……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@19/SidneyFalco: Well, this is exactly what I’ve been talking about – the film retrospectively casts a shadow on a great episode ending. Kirk gave a planet to a guy who tried to kill him and destroy the Enterprise. He made a log entry about the incident. There is no evidence in “Space Seed” that he was in any way negligent. Yet The Wrath of Khan makes it look as if he somehow was. But it isn’t Kirk’s job to arrange for others to check on Khan. It’s his job to do the tasks assigned to him and the Enterprise and write reports.
However, both ships get shots in, with Reliant’s torpedoes damaging the engine room to the point that there’s significant radiation leakage, while Enterprise’s phasers all but destroy Reliant’s bridge, killing most of Khan’s crew.
Krad: One slight nitpick. What caused the radiation leak at the Engine Room was a stream of phaser fire from the Reliant, which hit the side of the Enterprise’s star drive section.
Along with the Ceti Eel scenes, the scenes with crewmen burning alive in these explosions are downright horrifying to me.
#21
Yep, like a good little bureaucrat, following orders and writing reports. And Khan is the angry old man at the government office, blowing up at the person behind the computer. It’s irrational and yet completely understandable.
@19/krad: There really was an awful lot of short-lived genre TV in the early 80s, wasn’t there? And I’m pretty sure I watched approximately all of it.
A couple of years ago I watched the entire original series, the animated series, and the six films straight through. The Motion Picture is ambitious and boring (and interesting, sort of), but this and the two that follow are nigh-unwatchable, which is disappointing. I just don’t see the redeeming qualities that fans of the films seem to think are there. I genuinely enjoy the rewatches, and often find myself revising my opinion, but not in this case. Nor, I suspect in the next two cases. I’m grateful for the longevity given to the series through these films, but on their own merits I just don’t care for them.
@23/SidneyFalco: True, people like to blame others for their misfortune a lot, even if those others are not at all at fault. So in this regard I guess it is understandable.
Still, I have problems imagining the Khan from “Space Seed” react like this. He was a super-intelligent, super-ambitious, ruthless ex-dictator. He used to rule a quarter of the Earth. He flew into space with his people when things went bad. He intended to “win a universe”. Wouldn’t he embrace the opportunity to seize power again instead of embarking on a pointless revenge trip?
Also, part of my original argument was that Khan treated Kirk more badly than Kirk ever treated Khan, even including the destruction of the neighbour planet. I think he sees life as a struggle for power. I don’t think it fits his mindset to expect others to treat him well or look after him.
Brian: Me, too. *sigh* Me, too….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, nerd
JanaJensen: The Khan from “Space Seed” hadn’t watched the woman he loves die horribly.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
#26
Perhaps, but I’ve never spent over a decade in a hellhole with little sunlight watching my friends and loved ones die horribly to creepy crawly aliens. I’m not sure what that would do to a person’s psyche, alleged “superiority” notwithstanding.
If you’re interested, give Greg Cox’s Reign in Hell novel a read. Does a really good job explaining how Khan turned into a crazy Captain Ahab.
@28/krad, 29/SidneyFalco: I can’t say that it’s impossible, only that I don’t find it likely. But then, I generally find that a crazy villain bent on revenge is about the lamest plot device ever, and that may cloud my judgment.
@6: “I saw this one in the theaters. It wouldn’t have been a major moment at the time, true, but I don’t remember seeing the “Remember” line at the end in the original. I’ve always wondered if it was interpolated into the VHS and subsequent versions after the plans for Nimoy’s return in “Search for Spock” started to gel. Anybody know the story?”
The “Remember” line was always there. On set when they were about to shoot Spock’s death scene, it was thought that there might be a way to leave a story thread open for future films – exactly what that thread would be wasn’t certain, but they wanted one. So Nimoy did the mind-meld on Kelley. The shot used was an insert shot that made it look like it was somebody else’s hand, but in the “flight-recorder” footage from the next movie (which uses a different take), it’s clear that it was Nimoy and that it was shot at the same time as the rest of the scene.
Well, he had seen old-friends-of-the-week die, but not people he had been seen to care about before that episode, or people he was seen to care about afterwards.
ad: His best friend from the Academy. His older brother and sister-in-law. And two women he feel deeply in love with, one of whom was pregnant with their child when she died. The only way they aren’t important is if Kirk is a total sociopath or emotionally stunted.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@32 Even if the demands of the medium require the protagonist to brush off the plot-related death of the week, other characters should at least remember that they happened.
@31, thanks!
I think we Khan all agree that this was the most exciting of the original Star Trek films, with The Voyage Home being the most fun.
#36
I Khan’t argue with that!
Alan & Sidney: I suppose you just Khan’t resist the puns, Khan you?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
No, I Khan’t. In fact, I’m Reliant on puns. I’m a Regula user of them.
The Ceti Eel was a plot device to get the obligatory Chekhov scream.
Personally, one of my biggest nits was the use of Klingons in the Kobyashi Maru simulation, particularly as I assume that the scenario would be changed on a regular basis. Given the events in “Balance of Terror”, “The Deadly Years” and “The Enterprise Incident”, having the opponent be Romulan would make far more sense (use of mines, location and the D7 class ships).
@33 Yes, but it is a little like saying Leia lost all her family and friends in A New Hope, so why do we see Luke being comforted by her, instead of vice versa? Obviously, because the audience has seen Luke see someone he cared about get killed. And because the audience cared about the person Luke lost, but didn’t know or care about the people Leia lost.
Likewise, other Star Trek episodes and films have told the audience that Kirk really cared deeply about this person he had never mentioned before, just before that person got killed. But in this story, the audience has actually seen Kirk care about this person. The audience has cared about this person itself. So people can be expected to care more about him.
Short version: killing a regular has an impact that killing a guest star can never have. Death can work as the theme of this story because it killed a regular character. That is what is different about this death.
@krad “Their first original novel was Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Entropy Effect, and on the strength of that novel (which your humble rewatcher still considers one of the ten best Trek novels ever written),”
Out of curiosity, what are the other nine? Apologies if this has been asked and answered in the past!
There are a lot of subtle (and unsubtle) ways that Moby Dick is referenced in the movie, beyond Khan’s dying words. Much of his over-the-top villain-speak is quoting Melville. Dude only had a few books with him, including Moby Dick and Paradise Lost; no wonder he became obsessed with futile revenge. He should have had A Tale of Two Cities, and then he might have nobly sacrificed himself to save others (oh, I just got that reference this second, holy crap).
Maybe that’s not enough to explain Khan’s foolishness, but Ahab is also a great, charismatic, intelligent leader who throws away his potential and his crew’s lives with a mad obsession.
My favorite reference is during the slow chase through the nebula, when Spock remarks that Khan exhibits “two-dimensional thinking.” Ahab, chasing the whale, throws away his sextant because he will not navigate by the stars. He wants no favors from heaven, since he blames God for evil’s existence. He uses the less accurate, two-dimensional method of log-and-line, relying only on his earthly self. Khan also thinks of his ship as on a plane, allowing the Enterprise to sneak underneath like the whale. Melville writes a lot of chapters about the mysteries of the deep, and the terror of an enemy that can move unseen beneath you. This sequence in the movie echoes that theme.
@43 Joachim is also a very nice updating of Ahab’s first mate Starbuck, one of my favorite characters from Melville’s book.
S
ad: Oh, I’m completely familiar with what you’re talking about.
I also despise it with every fiber of my being, and will decry it until my dying breath. It’s a revolting, appalling tendency, one that is emblematic of lazy writing, and contributes to the notion of death as something unimportant and trivial, something it should never be.
You say, “killing a regular has an impact that killing a guest star can never have,” and I say bullshit. Killing a guest star can have a bigger impact if it’s written well. In fact, I can cite two examples within the Star Trek universe, to wit, the deaths of Edith Keeler and Tasha Yar, the former a guest star whose death had a major impact and was a centerpiece of what many consider the best episode of Trek ever produced, the latter a regular whose death had significantly less of an impact, to the point where the character is a barely remembered footnote in the TNG pantheon.
There’s no such thing as a faceless soldier or an innocent bystander. Everyone who dies matters to someone, and the tendency in fiction to only give importance to people whose names are in the credits is despicable and appalling and I will never consider it anything other than wrong.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
KRAD: “The film was originally released as without the Roman numeral after Star Trek, though later editions added it.”
Oh, thank God I’m not the only person who remembers this!
KRAD: “… Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Entropy Effect, and on the strength of that novel (which your humble rewatcher still considers one of the ten best Trek novels ever written)…”
I read it again, after more than 20 years, at the hospital, on the night my daughter was born. It was better than I remembered, but it doesn’t make my list of the best Trek novels ever written. With all of her Star Trek novels, McIntyre seemed to want to remake Trek in her own image, rather than write it as it already existed. I’m sure you and I have had this conversation before. :-)
KRAD: “Saavik‘s backstory from the novelization—which made use of description in the script of her as being half-Vulcan and half-Romulan—was expanded upon in numerous works of tie-in fiction…”
First, thanks for the mention! :-)
Secondly, I’m sure I’ve told you that when I was working on UNTOLD VOYAGES, Paramount encouraged me NOT to acknowledge the Vulcan/Romulan background for Saavik, and just write her as a full Vulcan. Their position was that since it was never mentioned onscreen, it wasn’t canonical. I had to practically BEG them to let me stick with what had already been established by McIntyre, Barr, and Clowes. I didn’t want to be the one to deviate from this backstory, as I figured that if I did, fandom would reject MY work, not the stuff that had come before me.
KRAD: “First we have Kirk watching Spock die, then we have Spock’s funeral, then we have David and Kirk’s talk in Kirk’s quarters, then we have the “I feel young” scene, then we have the Genesis Planet, and for goodness sake, can we end the frikkin’ movie already?”
Blasphemy. :-)
KRAD: “Meyer occupies an interesting middle ground because, on the one hand, there are many aspects of Trek he gets.”
Starting with his immediate recognition that it was Horatio Hornblower in outer space, which, of course, was how Roddenberry initially saw it too.
“this film absolutely nails Spock and McCoy’s roles as foils for each other and as the angel and devil on Kirk’s shoulder, particularly in the scene where Spock and McCoy are read in on Genesis.”
Scenes like that one convinced Nimoy that maybe it was a mistake to agree to kill off Spock. He is said to have particularly loved the line, “Really, Dr. McCoy, you must learn to govern your passions–they will be your undoing.” He figured if Spock could be this well written, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to stick around after all.
Just a “6”? Puh-LEEEZE.
Buckets of love to ya, buddy! :-D
P.S. It was Star Trek: The Motion Picture that really sparked my interest in all things Star Trek. But it was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that made me a die-hard, passionate fan. Seeing it was literally a life-changing experience for me. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I got to tell Nicholas Meyer that when I got to meet him a few years back. :-)
DH and I have been thinking about how badly the second Star Trek reboot movie (ST:ID) compared to Space Seed and WoK. Aside from other problems that many have hashed over, our issue is replacing Khan, at least somewhat plausibly played before by Ricardo Montalban, with Benedict Cumberbatch, a good actor but no Khan. DH posits that a number of issues (impetuousness, illogic, simply being miscast as someone from the Indian subcontinent and others) could have been explained away by Cumberbatch not actually being Khan, but instead Khan’s second in command, Joachim, who passed himself off as Khan to protect his commander and friend. It’s our band-aid for a few of the movie’s inconsistencies.
It will come as no surprise, given my username, that I feel that the greatest contribution of this movie was the character Saavik, as played by Kirstie Alley and fleshed out by Vonda McIntyre. The “Spock arc” that we were talking about last week in reference to the first movie, from failure to attain Kolinahr to the appreciation of the role of the emotions, is only finally resolved in my headcanon through his relationship with the young Saavik, as delineated in Carolyn Clowes’ The Pandora Principle. Spock’s failure to attain the enlightenment of pure reason is revisioned and redeemed through the experience of parenting/mentoring Saavik. He attains enlightenment of a different sort, in a form that suits his unique heritage and personal history. In turn, his parenting of Saavik is what makes it possible for her to use her unique personal history to save the world. One of the things I love about Clowes’ book is its depiction of deep mutuality in a relationship of parent and child. There are many stories of one person adopting an older child who is found in devastating circumstances (Aliens, Dreamsnake, Tehanu, just to stay in-genre). But Saavik saves Spock’s life at their first meeting, and she is the catalyst for his attaining his own form of enlightenment and shedding the lingering shame of Kolinahr failure and not being a real Vulcan. She gives him as much as he gives her.
This particular story of Spock and Saavik may not fit into everyone’s headcanon. I know others have taken the Spock/Saavik relationship in very different directions. I find Clowes’ narrative very satisfying, though. It honors the central importance of Spock’s friendship with Kirk and his chosen family of Starfleet, while at the same time using the relationship with Saavik to explain how he is finally able to relinquish the struggle to be “Vulcan enough”. I realize that accepting this narrative means rejecting some later pieces of possible canon, where Spock goes back to try to attain Kolinahr again!
I’m wistful about what might have been, if Nimoy had not continued in the movies and Alley had. It would have been fun to see Alley’s Saavik developing in a key leadership role on the Enterprise or other vessels.
@46 Glenn Greenberg–Very interesting to hear how you had to fight to keep Saavik’s Romulan/Vulcan backstory! I’m so glad you did. The “Worlds Collide” issue of the UNTOLD VOYAGES series is my favorite retelling of Saavik’s backstory outside of Clowes’ book, and thus my favorite Star Trek comic book ever!
@50 Saavik
Thanks so much! That really makes my day. :-)
Well, the whole “The Enterprise is the only ship that can help” trope may seem absurd, but if you think of the Enterprise as something like an aircraft carrier in our current Navy then consider if anything happened within a few hundred miles of the United States coast, the only carriers available would either be in drydock undergoing refit (and having to sail without all the systems functioning, much like the Enterprise in TMP) or a carrier engaged in training activities (for instance re-certfiying the crew for flight operations). We have no flagships on station just off the coast (that’s why we have the Air National Guard).
Since the Ceti Alpha system must be fairly close to Earth (the Botany Bay couldn’t have made it very far pre-warp), there probably aren’t any starships around, at least not on active duty. You put your flagships out in hotspots, projecting power. Starfleet probably has something like a Coast Guard, but Coast Guard ships are small, not really equipped to deal with a threat like a Russian aircraft carrier or large enough to rescue the crew of a carrier-size craft. So the Enterprise has to fill in.
@45/krad: Thank you!!!
@46/Glenn Greenberg: When The Entropy Effect was new, I considered it the best Star Trek novel ever. Sulu und Scotty were out of character, but Kirk, Spock and McCoy were perfect. The story was interesting. I had read the Phoenix books, Vulcan!, Trek to Madworld, The Galactic Whirlpool and one or two other Bantam novels before, and The Entropy Effect was much better than any of them.
@49/Saavik: From all the genre examples you give, Spock is the only male. That also makes it special.
An odd thing is that the conversation in Vulcan between Spock and Saavik seems to imply that Saavik hasn’t met Kirk before. If Spock raised Saavik, and Kirk is Spock’s best friend, wouldn’t they know each other?
I wish they had given Kirk a child at some point. He seems to be fond of children. There are two TOS episodes that have a bunch of children in them, and in both of them he carries a little girl around.
Completely unrelated, I think I just learned something. It has always baffled me how different some of my fellow Star Trek fans see the show and what it’s all about. For me, the main Star Trek characteristics are compassion and the desire to help, the friendship between the main characters, and people from all over the world working together. But I imagine that if someone saw the films first and regards TWOK (and not, say, “The Devil in the Dark”) as the quintessential Star Trek story, the only ingredient that’s left is the friendship between the main characters. (Is it a coincidence that Chekov has a bigger role than either Sulu or Uhura?) Perhaps this explains the notion that TOS Star Trek is about space battles, and Kirk is in the habit of killing his enemies, which I keep coming across.
30. JanaJansen – But then, I generally find that a crazy villain bent on revenge is about the lamest plot device ever, and that may cloud my judgment.
Which is the main reason I’m not a fan of the reboot movies. The same “crazy guy seeks revenge” in all three of them. Every Single One. “Hey, let’s reboot Star Trek because it’s gotten stale” “OK, let’s make them all about a crazed Romulan/Khan/Starfleeter wanting revenge.” “Sounds great! Let’s add lots of explosions and CGI too!”
Bleah
33. krad – I’m going with B.
My take on the “Kirk has never faced death thing” is that although “faced” is the wrong word, there is a sense that Kirk has never really accepted the reality of death. He has seen friends and loved ones die, but we have never seen him mourn or grieve for more than a few minutes and none of these people were ever mentioned again (of course this was because it was episodic television in the 1960s, but it’s fun to try and find an in universe reason for it). His response to the Kobayashi Maru test is hardly “facing death” because he went back and retook it twice, cheating on the third time so he didn’t have to die. That’s hardly “facing death,” it’s actively avoiding it.
With Spock, he finally faces a death he can’t avoid or shrug off. I’m not sure why this death more than the others would have this effect, but perhaps Kirk feels more responsible this time? Or maybe it’s just the point he has reached in his life? It’s not a perfect explanation, but it works well enough for me.
@56/Richard: That’s a nasty interpretation. As krad wrote in comment #33, it implies that Kirk is emotionally stunted. I’ll add this view of Kirk’s character to my list of damage this film does to the TV show.
What about this alternative interpretation: Kirk is mature enough that a loved one’s death doesn’t shake his entire life. We don’t see him grieve because he isn’t devastated by any of the deaths he had to accept. He does grieve, but it doesn’t show on the outside.
There’s no reason to assume that Spock’s death is any different. David just hasn’t seen him after Sam’s death, or Edith Keeler’s death, and jumps to an erroneous conclusion.
“Nasty” seems an odd way to put it. As is “emotionally stunted.” Kirk has emotional hangups, like everyone. He lived through a genocide as a child, that’s going to have an impact. In many ways it’s his particular emotional issues that make him such an effective Captain. A Captain with emotional issues that make them a good Captain is hardly an idea unique to Kirk, or even Star Trek.
@19 and 21,
I think the Federation is at fault for not checking in on Khan in the 15 years he was on Ceti Alpha. If you watch TOS, how many times did the Enterprise show up at a colony world and it was the first time a ship had been there in several years? In “This Side of Paradise” the colony had been out of contact for several years and no one seemed the least bit concerned about that timing.
I think the Federation treated the colonies like little islands in the Pacific. Drop a few people off and some supplies and maybe we’ll stop by in two years to see how you’re doing. In the meantime, there’s a plague or a planet-wide catastrophe and the Federation is only there to pick up the pieces, not to actually prevent or mitigate the damage.
@58/Richard: Sorry for the harsh words, but it bothers me to see “emotional issues” ascribed to a character I happen to like just because of dubious evidence from one self-important film. And it isn’t just about Kirk. I generally resent the idea that personal disasters automatically result in emotional issues. It isn’t true. Bad things happen to people all the time. Imagine being a mother in a preindustrial society, with half of your children dying before they are one year old. Imagine living through a war. Yes, this leaves some people emotionally scarred, but other people just pull through. A lot of people are resilient, or the human race would have ceased to exist a long time ago.
As for the genocide, you can use it to explain why he’s so passionate about helping others. But that wouldn’t imply that he “has never really accepted the reality of death”, quite the contrary. IMO his actions throughout much of TOS show that he cares about human life, so he obviously knows what death is.
@59/ragnarredbeard: I used to think that the distances were so great that this was the best they could manage.
I never thought about Kirk having previously experienced loss on this scale. Maybe what was aimed for here was sympathy with how fans would feel over Spock’s dying. They’d never dealt with a major Trek character’s death before.
I don’t know if there’s supposed to be much correlation between the Star Trek universe and the real one, but there is an actual star called Alpha Ceti. (Typically stars are identified by greek letter first and constellation name second.) It’s around 250 light years from Earth, which is not far by cosmic standards.
It’s also believed to be a red giant star, which kind of rules out any habitable planets around it.
I would have thought that Starfleet, upon approaching the Ceti Alpha, would have noticed that 1) There was a different number of planets orbiting the sun, and 2) the one they landed on was following the orbit of the planet Khan had been stranded on. Chekov should not have been surprised to find Khan.
Also, given the Botany Bay crew’s “superior intellect,” if I was Starfleet, I would have approached that system with a great deal of care, as who knows what the crew could have cobbled together in their copious spare time had they not been hampered by ecological catastrophe.
@60 JanaJansen
The point I was trying to make in 58 was that I wasn’t intending my comments about Kirk’s character as a criticism. We all a product of our own emotional baggage, Kirk no less than anyone else. Part of what makes Kirk a great Captain is his unwillingness to accept defeat or death as inevitable and his finding ways out of unwinnable situations. It’s a theme that’s returned to in Star Trek III.
Hi, I’m finally here… I didn’t feel up to commenting yesterday, due to other aggravations elsewhere in cyberspace.
Keith, thanks so much for your comment on the Terrell scene in The Darkness Drops Again. I needed to hear something positive this morning. And it was one of the scenes I’m proudest of writing.
As for TWOK, I’ve never really understood its popularity. Sure, it handles the characters better than TMP, but it’s a very dumbed-down, garishly melodramatic movie. Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be a naturalistic adult drama; it often fell short of that, especially in season 3, but he wanted it to be believable, for the characters to act like regular and relatable people, for it to be a story about folks doing a job that happened to be in space rather than larger-than-life cosmic superheroes. But TWOK throws all that out the window and goes for relentless corniness and cartoonish exaggeration, and I find it embarrassing. “KHAAAANN!!!” is one of the most cringe-inducing moments in Trek history. Scotty bringing Preston’s bloodied body to the bridge is inane. Khan is supposedly a brilliant superhuman, but he’s dumbed down to the point that he can’t even crack the galaxy’s most obvious code. The story is full of gigantic logic holes and absurdities. And the violence and gore are distastefully overdone.
And I don’t think it looks better than TMP. I think it looks far worse. The way the sets are lit and photographed makes them look cheaper, more like TV than movie sets. The red lighting in the combat scenes is particularly ugly. The new costumes are garish, ugly, overcomplicated, and ridiculously retro, like Horatio Hornblower cosplay. I could buy them as dress uniforms, but they make no sense as everyday duty wear. If they’d ditched the jackets and just gone with the turtlenecks underneath, like the pilot uniforms, that would’ve made more sense.
And speaking as someone who does not find TMP’s pacing tedious, I find TWOK’s pacing to be glacial in the action scenes. The ships lumber along like hippos in mud. There are instances where Kirk and Khan just sit there staring mutely for 10-15 seconds before reacting to an urgent, life-threatening event. I just want to yell “Get on with it!” at the screen, something I never feel the need to do in TMP.
The board doesn’t seem to want to post my really long comment with replies to other comments, so I’ll try posting them separately.
@7/Scott_MI and others: As for the Ceti Alpha V/VI mixup, there’s no possible way it could happen. Planetary orbits are defined by six different parameters, including semimajor axis, eccentricity, inclination, and where their periastron (closest approach to the star) occurs in their orbit. It’s not just a matter of counting outward from the star. There’s no way one planet could be “blown” onto an orbit exactly matching all six parameters of the other, let alone match its physical size, atmosphere, composition, and other features exactly. Not to mention that any explosion powerful enough to destroy a planet would be bright enough to outshine the star and would’ve been detected by the Federation’s FTL sensors 15 years before the movie — or at least would’ve been observed by the Reliant once it came within 15 light-years of the system. There is simply no way to justify this premise.
@22/Eduardo: Yes, obviously the damage to the ship is supposed to have caused the radiation, but there’s no reason the radiation would come out there. The radiation room was built off to the side of the engine room set in a place that has no connection to the actual engine core, the big glowing cylindrical tube in the middle of the set. If you look at the cutaway plans of the refit Enterprise, there’s just no connection between that reactor room and anything that could plausibly be involved in making the ship go.
@Jana: I totally agree with you about how the movie wastes Khan. He was a compelling character as a cunning, brilliant, debonair, multifaceted conqueror seeking to rebuild his empire. He’s far less interesting as a scenery-chewing madman whose only focus is killing one guy he’s mad at. For all its problems, I feel Star Trek Into Darkness handles Khan much better than TWOK does, because it brings back the sane and multilayered Khan of “Space Seed.”
@41/ad: “Yes, but it is a little like saying Leia lost all her family and friends in A New Hope, so why do we see Luke being comforted by her, instead of vice versa?”
Because Leia is a total badass and a hardened resistance fighter who knows how to compartmentalize her pain, while Luke is a naive farm boy who’s never had to face that kind of loss before. And because Leia is compassionate and giving even when she’s in grief. She never actually says anything that contradicts the existence of her loss, the way Kirk did.
@46/Glenn Greenberg: “With all of her Star Trek novels, McIntyre seemed to want to remake Trek in her own image, rather than write it as it already existed.”
So did a lot of Trek novelists back then, like Diane Duane, John M. Ford, and Bantam writers like Joe Haldeman and David Gerrold. That was part of the fun of early Trek literature. The canonical universe was much less clearly defined, so there was more room for novelists to filter it through their own imaginations and styles and offer interestingly individualized variations on a theme. It was the authors like McIntyre and Duane, the ones who put their own stamp on the universe the most strongly, whose books were the most interesting to read, because it was interesting to explore the alternate ways the universe could be interpreted. It made ST feel more democratic, something we were allowed to personalize and make our own, rather than the more top-down thing it’s become since.
Heck, it all started with James Blish. He actually approached his Trek novelizations as if they took place in his Cities in Flight universe, tossing in references to events and ideas from his books like the Cold Peace and the Vegan Tyranny. There was much more freedom back then for authors to fit Star Trek into their own styles and visions, rather than fitting their own styles and visions into a consistent portrayal of Star Trek. And I never saw that as a bad thing.
@64/Richard: I’m sorry! I hear the idea that fictional characters have to be somehow broken or problematic to be interesting fairly often, and I thought you were saying something similar.
As for Kirk, I agree that he doesn’t give up easily, but that doesn’t mean that he denies death. It seems to me that he accepts death as inevitable until there’s evidence to the contrary (as in Star Trek III).
Last fall I wrote a ‘blog entry about Star Trek, including a fairly long discussion of Wrath of Khan. You can read it here: http://www.jamescambias.com/blog/2016/09/that-show-i-watched.html
My hypothesis is that Meyer adapted the story more or less verbatim from that of the first Hornblower novel, Beat to Quarters. The Melville and Dickens references are just camouflage.
66/ @@@@@ Christopher: I was just about to post more or less the same opinion about the 80’s Star Trek novels. It was a kind of golden age. There were already many standard Star Trek novels with the Enterprise crew doing typical Star Trek things, so I was amazed when books like The Final Reflection and Dwellers in the Crucible came out. These were not typical Star Trek adventures– the focus was on other characters and other aspects of the universe with the main characters making brief cameos. It really made the greater ST universe seem big and wondrous, like there were all sorts of other things going on that we’d not seen up to that point, because of the focus on one ship and crew.
By the way, the best theory I’ve heard for the nonsensical appearance of a sun for the Genesis Planet to orbit is that the Mutara Nebula was actually a stellar nursery and that the star was already there. That actually makes a lot of sense. The color scheme ILM used for it is based on the emission colors of H II (pronounced “H-two,” excited molecular hydrogen) regions that are often stellar nurseries. And the nebula was unrealistically dense — real nebulae would be little denser than vacuum, but if it were a particularly dense clump with a forming star in the middle, that might explain its density and the massive static discharges.
Still, then you get the coincidence that the Reliant just happened to be at the right distance from said star for the planet to be in a habitable orbit — or to have the right velocity to be in orbit to begin with. Not to mention that the Genesis device was not programmed to create a planet from scratch out of nebular matter, but to terraform an existing planet’s surface and turn abiotic matter into a habitable biosphere. So we’re supposed to accept that it’s magically able to do something completely unlike what it was programmed to do.
What would’ve made a lot more sense, and achieved the same result plotwise, would’ve been to have Mutara be a warm Jovian planet rather than a nebula. The outer atmosphere of a Jovian would have a density comparable to the “nebula” as shown in the movie, and would’ve had the kind of massive lightning storms and electrical interference the “nebula” was shown to have. And the rocky core of a Jovian planet can be roughly Earthlike in size. The Genesis wave could’ve torn away most of the planet’s hydrogen atmosphere and terraformed the surface of the leftover core, and the planet could’ve been in a habitable orbit to begin with. And having the ships dive into the atmosphere of a gas giant would’ve fit the “submarine warfare” metaphor even better than the “nebula” did.
@67 JanaJansen
My only intention was to try and find a reading of the “Kirk has never faced death” concept with the way he was presented in the series. I don’t think it’s necessary to make the character work or that he wouldn’t have worked without it. But, it is present in Wrath of Khan, a film I happen to like, and if I can find a way to reconcile it with the series, I will.
@71/Richard: I just think it’s an inconsistency, like the way Khan’s people somehow have movie-era Starfleet belt buckles and a TMP-style sickbay monitor in their dwellings despite being stranded in the TV era, or like Chekov being retconned into “Space Seed,” or like Khan’s originally multiethnic band being retconned into a bunch of Nazi recruitment-poster types who are somehow in their 20s despite being stranded as adults 15 years before. TWOK was made in an era when continuity wasn’t as heavily obsessed over by fans as it is today, and when the resources for checking such details weren’t as pervasive, so continuity was treated rather more loosely, more as a matter of broad strokes than precise details. That was certainly true of Harve Bennett’s work on TV series like The Six Million Dollar Man. Bennett and Meyer may have drawn on “Space Seed” for inspiration, but they didn’t hesitate to tweak continuity details, because they cared more about telling the story they wanted to tell than about matching every continuity detail exactly.
I have a vivid memory of seeing this in a theater. As the Reliant approaches the Enterprise, and Kirk is advised to raise the shields but doesn’t, a kid a few rows in front of me couldn’t stand the suspense, and yelled out “Kirk, you idiot, raise the shields, they’re gonna blast you.
Obviously, one of McCoy’s signature lines was “He’s dead, Jim.” I remember reading an interview in which DeForest Kelly revealed that an early draft gave McCoy that line about Spock. Kelly remembered telling them, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Kelly suggested changing it to “It’s too late.” (Eventually, of course, the line “he’s dead already” was given to Scotty.)
Cambias: Thanks for sharing that! I don’t agree that Trek was always an anthology show — in fact, it went back and forth a lot between that and a show about three dudes who beam down to planets and have adventures, with a few sops toward an ensemble show early in the first season and once or twice afterward. But your overall point stands, in particular that Trek was never an “action-adventure” show. Like Kirk’s reputation as a maverick, that’s entirely an artifact of the movies, which turned Trek into action-adventure, starting with this one.
(Also the Picard actor’s last name is Stewart, not Steward, and TNG did not have a CGI Enterprise — it was all model work on that show. Trek didn’t really use full CGI models for the ships until latter-era DS9.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Christopher: Vonda McIntyre actually used the fact that the Genesis device was never intended to go off in a nebula as one of the reasons why it fell to pieces, since she (rightly) viewed the “protomatter” thing as total horseshit. We’ll get to that next week….. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@53 JanaJansen –Why hasn’t Kirk met Saavik, if Spock “parented” her? In The Pandora Principle Spock takes a year off to educate/rear the child Saavik after she and the others are rescued from Hellguard. (The reasons for this special arrangement are explained in the book.) They spend this year on a planet with a not-very-smart and laidback sentient race, so they won’t have to deal with too much interference or curiosity. After this intensive year, Saavik goes off to a foster family on Vulcan (not Spock’s family), until she is old enough to attend Starfleet Academy. But she sends him questions every day, to which he responds with “teaching tapes” (ah, the Suck Fairy of Technological Progress!). So they are in daily contact (which he keeps to himself, both for his privacy and for hers). There is no flashback to or explicit description of the foster family, and it is clear that Spock remains her emotional parent.
@56, 64 Richard –I agree with you on Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru: retaking it until he can cheat and win shows that while he has experienced failure/death, he hasn’t learned to accept it as a possibility in a situation where he has control. He refuses to accept the no-win outcome and keeps going back for a redo until he can finagle his way out of it. I guess I can see the Academy folks rewarding him for this, although they should also have kept in mind that he might have trouble whenever he truly, deeply lost. But if the point of the KM is to test whether you still function in the face of a no-win situation, then I guess Kirk rightly “passes” the test, by virtue of facing it over and over until he can kick it in the teeth. On the other hand, if the point of the KM is in part to see how you come to terms with the reality of no-win situations, then Kirk fails and they shouldn’t have commended him. But in that case, how you did on the KM would be measured in part not during the test but after it, assessing your ability to grieve healthily. Oh well, I’ve always remained unconvinced that such a test, with its inevitable outcome and its true concern, could possibly be kept secret from students before they take it. Some student, either a disgruntled “failure” or one who thought it was a bad thing to put people through, would spread the news.
I also agree with you @64 that Kirk’s “unwillingness to accept defeat or death as inevitable and his finding ways out of unwinnable situations” is part of what makes him a great captain. Presumably the Academy officials recognized this, and perhaps found it more important than the ostensible point of the test. I agree that if the word in the script had been “accepted” rather than “faced” death, it would have helped some.
At the same time, I agree with KRAD that since he cheated the test Kirk has certainly had to come to terms with death, including the deaths of people he cared about deeply. We didn’t see evidence of the reality of longterm healthy grief, because (1) episodic TV show and (2) American grief avoidance in general, which makes us way underestimate the extent and length of normal, healthy grief.
@68 Cambias: Yes, it’s Beat to Quarters! I’ve actually never heard until Glenn Greenberg said it here @46 that Roddenberry initially saw Trek as Horatio Hornblower in outer space. (This may reveal that I am only a dilettante Trek fan.) I’ve always only heard the “Wagon Train to the stars” phrase (and then heard that refuted or nuanced). Anyway, any discussion of TWOK would be incomplete without some reference to Beat to Quarters, so, thanks.
Now, of course, if we want Horatio Hornblower in outer space, we have Honor Harrington!
@66/Christopher: Yep. I also liked that Khan turned out to be a victim in Into Darkness, and Admiral Marcus was the actual bad guy.
By the way, I love how you addressed the stupid Kirk midlife crisis in The Darkness Drops Again. It makes me grin every time.
@71/Richard: My explanation is that David doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and Kirk goes along with it because he’s sad, and lonely, and blames himself anyway.
@53 JanaJansen p.s.–True, I can’t at the moment think of any in-genre example of a man adopting an older orphaned child in devastating circumstances. I can think of examples in other genres, though, such as Magorian’s YA book Goodnight Mister Tom (or, by its USA title Good Night, Mr. Tom).
Saavik: Roddenberry pitched Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars” to NBC because Westerns were the big thing in TV in the mid-1960s, and if he pitched it as “Horatio Hornblower in space,” the NBC execs likely would have said, “Who?” He himself always thought of it as Hornblower, but that information came out of private memos and biographies and things. The official pitch was always the Wagon Train one, so that has gotten considerably more press. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Is the stuff about Preston being Scotty’s nephew in the extended cut? The version I’m familiar with (from BBC showings and the home video release) has him briefly introduce himself to Kirk during the tour of engineering and then the only other time we see him is when Scotty brings him up to the bridge injured and he dies in Sickbay.
Redshirt syndrome is in full effect with the throwaway death of the third scientist (the credits call him Jedda): So throwaway it took me several viewings for it to sink in that someone just died, because no-one acts as though he has. I think the synopsis does him a disservice by claiming he rushes Terrall: I should probably watch it again to make sure but my memory is that David lunges at Terrall for no real reason except David’s a dick, Terrall fires as Kirk shoves David out of the way, and the blast kills the poor guy standing behind him minding his own business.
Don’t know if Faces of Fire is just one in a long line of David tie-in appearances but it tries to explain why David’s a dick to Kirk for most of the movie for no real reason. Of course, it does it by having him be a dick to Kirk at the end of the book for no real reason… At least that fan myth about Kirk not knowing about David until the events of this film has been shot down.
I’m not quite sure how Kirk is to blame for the Regula I massacre. The only thing he could have done differently up to that point is deal with Khan properly in the first place, and that seems to be a long way back on a chain of circumstances that he couldn’t have foreseen at that point. Blame the Reliant crew for not being able to count to six before you blame Kirk.
I’ve never really thought that about the four endings or felt fatigued during them. (The next film, on the other hand…) Maybe it’s because all those scenes are so iconic it’d be hard to imagine the film without them.
Quoth Bob Ahrens: “The four screenplays Gene had commissioned were rejected and Meyer gleaned the four or five decent story clips he could from those scripts and strung them together.”
Not quite. Roddenberry didn’t commission any scripts, he took a stab at a treatment that was rejected and then he was kicked upstairs. Meyer cobbled together several script notions that were commissioned by Harve Bennett after he took over.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@81/krad: “Roddenberry pitched Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars” to NBC because Westerns were the big thing in TV in the mid-1960s”
Everyone points that out, but it’s only part of the story, and I think it’s missing the real point of the analogy. There were like a million Westerns on the air at the time, so he could’ve picked any one to make the same point — Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, whatever. Just saying “I want to do a Western” would be too vague, when there were so many of those — he needed to indicate what kind of Western he was aiming to emulate. He chose Wagon Train as his specific example because it was a long-running, critically acclaimed adult drama that used a pseudo-anthology format in which each episode revolved around a featured guest star’s story. By using that comparison, he was saying he wanted Star Trek to be a smart, classy, character-driven adult drama, the kind that would hopefully get the same kind of awards and critical esteem that Wagon Train received and have a similarly lengthy run, rather than a cheesy, kid-oriented adventure series like Lost in Space.
@82/cap-mjb: Yes, in the theatrical cut, Preston was just a random cadet that Scotty got inexplicably choked up over. The bit about him being Scotty’s nephew was in the novelization, but it didn’t show up onscreen until the extended TV cut, I think it was. (And that contradicted Scotty’s “official biography” in The Making of Star Trek, which said he was an only child.)
I think the “fan myth” about Kirk not knowing David was his son originated in the McIntyre novelization, though I’m not sure.
@73: I have my own theater memory of this one. When the Ceti eels first appeared, an audience member shouted “Oh, yuck!”
The novelization was the first “Trek” book I owned. I also had the James Horner soundtrack on cassette (am I ever showing my generation! I’m two years younger than KRAD).
Don S: The soundtrack for this film was the first soundtrack I ever bought. I, too, had it on cassette…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There have been many explanations of how Khan and Chekov knew each other. (My favorite one is the one suggested by Walter Koenig himself). I no longer have an issue with that as an inconsistency (although I did when I first watched TWOK). I also accept Greg Cox’s explanations for (1) how Chekov apparently “forgot” where Enterprise left Khan, (2) How Chekov apparently got Ceti Alpha V and VI mixed up.
My issue is that this was a missed opportunity. I think Khan’s takeover of Reliant would have been far more credible and dramatic if both Terrell and Chekov had been strangers to Khan. I was looking forward to seeing how this would have played out and ended up being disappointed by the way it actually played out.
Christopher and cap-mjb: I think the fan myth about Kirk not knowing about David comes from the movie itself, though it’s something that’s only in the ABC version and director’s cut: as they’re climbing a ladder, Kirk says that that boy down there is his son, and Spock says, “Fascinating.” Nimoy put a lot of tone into that word, mostly along the lines of, “Dude, focus, we’ve got bigger problems….” *laughs*
But I think that may be the source of it. I mean elsewhere, Kirk says, “That’s David?” so he knows who David is, and his conversation with Carol is all about how he “stayed away.” So yeah, he knew.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I do want to make one note to address “Why didn’t Starfleet follow up on Ceti Alpha V?” – it’s a neat bit of evidence for the “nobody believes Kirk” fan theory.
If you’re not familiar with it, the basic gist is that for most of Starfleet, space is pretty routine stuff. Diplomacy, carrying cargo, spending 18 months charting gaseous anamolies, that sort of thing. And when non-Enterprise ships run into crazy stuff, they all tend to die. So when Kirk files log entries like, “I met and defeated the Greek god Apollo” or “I overthrew a planet of space Nazis” or “I found the Hitler of the Eugenics Wars and let him and his buddies have a planet for themselves” the brass back home just thinks he’s having fun with his boring exploration assignment and laughs them off.
(Which is why, by the way, when crazy stuff happens in TNG, everyone is so totally thrown off by crazy adventures. Running into space gods and meeting Mark Twain is not routine Starfleet stuff!)
So why didn’t Starfleet follow up on Khan? They just thought it was another one of Kirk’s space yarns.
@53/JanaJansen
My picks for the best Star Trek novels ever written:
http://glenngreenbergsgrumblings.blogspot.com/2016/09/where-no-books-have-gone-before-part-1.html
http://glenngreenbergsgrumblings.blogspot.com/2016/09/where-no-books-have-gone-before-part-2.html
http://glenngreenbergsgrumblings.blogspot.com/2016/09/where-no-books-have-gone-before-part-3.html
Chris L. what do you think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
@70
“The color scheme ILM used for it is based on the emission colors of H II (pronounced “H-two,” excited molecular hydrogen) regions that are often stellar nurseries.”
H II is actually ionized atomic hydrogen, as opposed to H2, which is molecular hydrogen. On behalf of astrophysicists, let me apologize for the confusing nomenclature. Sometime during one’s PhD you’re taught to pronounce them completely differently.
Correct that the density of the nebula is crazily, but that’s sort of of a piece with the usual problems of scale in space combat. I like the idea of fighting in an atmosphere instead…
@65 “I find TWOK’s pacing to be glacial in the action scenes. The ships lumber along like hippos in mud.”
I quite like the pacing of the ship combat – gives much more of a feel of big ships facing each other than the hyper-kinetic maneuvering like jets characteristic of later fights. Though of course there’s the aforementioned problem of scale – speeds and distances relative to ship sizes are crazily small – that’s acceptable for visual necessity.
Chris Scholl: I think you posted in the wrong comments section.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Sorry
@66/ChristopherLBennett
“So did a lot of Trek novelists back then, like Diane Duane, John M. Ford, and Bantam writers like Joe Haldeman and David Gerrold.”
Clearly you’ve never read my rants about authors who did that–particularly Diane Duane. I read a number of her Star Trek novels, and I can’t say I enjoyed any of them. As for David Gerrold, I will say that THE GALACTIC WHIRLPOOL is one of my favorite Trek novels, and I didn’t think he made any attempts to “remake” the Star Trek universe in his own image in that novel. On the contrary, I thought he captured the characters perfectly and made the story fit very well with everything that had come before.
“That was part of the fun of early Trek literature.”
Let’s not forget that a lot of early Trek literature was considered crap, even back then. I didn’t (and don’t) like Star Trek novels in which the characters, the ship, the technology, and other key elements of the established universe don’t track with the way they’re depicted on the show. But if you find that fun, more power to you.
“It was the authors like McIntyre and Duane, the ones who put their own stamp on the universe the most strongly, whose books were the most interesting to read, because it was interesting to explore the alternate ways the universe could be interpreted.”
Again, if you like that kind of thing, good for you. I much preferred the work of A.C. Crispin and Howard Weinstein, who wrote novels that made you feel like you were experiencing a new live-action adventure with the characters you knew and loved.
@72/ChristopherLBennett
“Bennett and Meyer may have drawn on “Space Seed” for inspiration, but they didn’t hesitate to tweak continuity details, because they cared more about telling the story they wanted to tell than about matching every continuity detail exactly.”
And yet, considering that neither Bennett nor Meyer had anything to do with “Space Seed,” their fidelity to that episode is impressively strong.
Someone who has never seen “Space Seed” or TWOK before can watch TWOK first, then watch “Space Seed” to learn the full backstory, and feel that the experience, as a whole, is fairly seamless.
@70 entirely agreed. It bugs me how much Spock dropped the ball by pushing Kirk into the captain’s chair, which leads to Kirk’s inexpliciable screw-up of not raising the shields when the Reliant is approaching and it’s not possible to make contact. A million things could be going wrong– maybe the ship was taken over, maybe there’s an M-5 scenario, maybe an evil entity has hijacked the main computer, maybe the crew of the ship is under the influence of some space anomaly making them irrationally aggressive, etc. Kirk has lived through all of those scenarios and it should be immediately obvious that if something is fishy he should raise shields. Saavik even outright reminds him of regulation (which should really just be common sense). Yet he doesn’t give the order to raise shields until they actual detect the Reliant powering up phasers. This moment of sheer incompetence drives the rest of the plot and, by extension, the implicit triology of 2/3/4.
And what reason is there not to raise the shields? The absolute worst case scenario is that the Reliant’s radio is just glitching and shields were raised for no reason. The only justification I can think of is maybe Kirk thought the Reliant crew was in distress and there would be a need to beam them over in a hurry, which would not be possible if shields were up. But that is an awfully thin justification for such a massive risk.
So “waste of material” or not, maybe Spock should have been in charge. I am fairly confident he would have raised the shields.
@97: I assume that Kirk’s failure to raise shields is meant as a way to underscore the “Kirk’s gotten old and rusty” subplot, but it does seem so basic that even an “ancient” 50 yr old desk jockey should know better.
@88/KRAD
I think the confusion stems primarily from the fact that in the movie, Kirk’s line “Why didn’t you tell him?” could easily be misheard as “Why didn’t you tell me?” In fact, I believe the original DVD release of TWOK has “tell me” in the subtitles. It boils down to Shatner’s delivery of the line–he murmurs that last word.
The website http://www.chakoteya.net/, which features transcripts of all of the Star Trek movies, made the same error. They finally changed it, after I emailed them and pointed out that they were mistaken.
For the first few years after the movie’s release, I too was under the impression that Kirk didn’t know about David’s existence until TWOK. But eventually, when taking into account that, upon seeing Carol again, Kirk immediately says, “Is that David?”, I came to the realization that the line HAD to be “Why didn’t you tell him?”
Pressing my ear to the speaker in my TV once the film was out on VHS really drove it home. :-)
98: I think that’s right, including that it’s too basic to be satisfying as a “mistake.” TMP actually did this properly– not knowing that one of the primary weapons systems is tied into the warp drive is exactly the sort of thing that “Admiral Kirk” would be unaware of, leading to an understandable mistake. “Other starship won’t make contact and is closing in to firing range, so I should raise shields” is so intuitive and easy that failing to do so is just not satisfying/credible as a Kirk mistake, at least not if we’re supposed to take him seriously for the rest of the franchise. The average 21st century person who has spent ten minutes in Star Trek: Online or Eve Online wouldn’t fall for that old gag.
And it drains some of the drama out of Kirk’s later actions– all he’s doing is sort of fixing problems that, but for his incompetence, would not exist in the first place (or would exist in a vastly easier form to deal with).
@65
“Khan is supposedly a brilliant superhuman, but he’s dumbed down to the point that he can’t even crack the galaxy’s most obvious code. “
I know a guy who is a software engineer who writes code in his sleep. Genius-level dude. But he can’t tell you what he had for lunch yesterday. Sometimes genius in one area doesn’t cross over. That code may be obvious to you and us, but I guarantee that some really smart people can’t figure out how to use a can opener.
@92/Bruce: Aah! I knew I should’ve double-checked whether it was excited or ionized. Been too long since college astronomy class — I’m getting rusty.
In my TNG novel The Buried Age, I proposed that the abnormally small and dense nebulae we see in Star Trek are actually “micronebulae” — small clumps of extra-dense nebular matter existing in isolation, lingering after the rest of a nebula has dissipated. Given that we now theorize there are rogue planets of various sizes that form independently in space rather than being ejected from planetary systems, it stands to reason that there would be smaller nebular equivalents of stellar nurseries for such smaller rogue objects to form from. They would be too small and dim to be easily detected by present-day telescopes, much like brown dwarfs or rogue Jovians, so it’s plausible that they could be out there and we simply haven’t discovered them yet. If this is ever proven to be actually true, I hope somebody notices that I suggested it beforehand.
@95/Glenn: “As for David Gerrold, I will say that THE GALACTIC WHIRLPOOL is one of my favorite Trek novels, and I didn’t think he made any attempts to “remake” the Star Trek universe in his own image in that novel.”
Oh, he made plenty of efforts to expand on the universe, to flesh it out in idiosyncratic ways that owed more to his own writing style and sense of humor (and his own desire to write a Heinlein pastiche) than to anything from Trek canon. Bug-spots on the Moon, portable airlocks, Emperor MacMurray, Polo’s Bolos, the whole generations-long history of early space settlement and the building of artificial habitats, etc. This is what I’m saying — not that these authors changed the stuff we knew from onscreen, but that they filled out the world beyond what we’d seen onscreen in their own very distinctive ways. Since pre-TNG canon said so little about the larger context, early writers were able to imagine it however they wanted, and what they came up with reflected their own writing styles, giving the books a greater variety.
“Let’s not forget that a lot of early Trek literature was considered crap, even back then.”
A lot of them were, yes — mostly the ones that were ordinary, forgettable adventures. The ones I’m talking about are — mostly — the ones that stood out from the pack due to their imagination and distinctive style. McIntyre’s, Duane’s, and Ford’s books were and still are among the most critically acclaimed. Although there certainly were some whose idiosyncratic takes on the universe were less admired, like Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath, Sonni Cooper (Black Fire), Della Van Hise (Killing Time), etc. But at least there was a willingness to experiment, to take chances on exploring new possibilities rather than trying to conform to a single, homogenized house style like the books tended to do in the ’90s.
@101/ragnar: That’s just it, though. You don’t have to be a genius to hear someone say “Hours will seem like days” and then heavily stress the word “days” every time he says it in order to figure out that he actually means “hours.” Not only is it implausible that Spock had to improvise a code instead of using some pre-existing Starfleet protocol for conveying coded information on an open channel, but Nimoy was directed too broadly, to the point that he was practically winking at the camera when he said “By the book.”
@102/ Christopher
“not that these authors changed the stuff we knew from onscreen”
I have to disagree with you on this. Those authors DID change the stuff we knew from onscreen.
I have no problem with EXPANDING the universe that we know, adding to it, which is why I liked THE GALACTIC WHIRLPOOL so much. Same way I didn’t mind Mike Barr establishing in the DC series that the refitted Enterprise could reach Warp 12 and that it had something called “tracking phasers.” As far as we knew as the time, it made sense that the refitted ship could do stuff that the original version couldn’t. And when later continuity rendered this stuff apocryphal, I just rolled with it. Expanding is one thing. Contradicting is another. And authors like Vonda McIntyre and Diane Duane contradicted what we knew from onscreen, sometimes willfully so, because they wanted to write Star Trek their way.
For example:
When did we EVER see Sulu call Kirk “Jim”?
When did we EVER see ANY characters, particularly members of the Enterprise crew, utter the phrase, “Oh gods”?
When did we EVER see crew members of the Enterprise carrying on conversations with the turbo-lift?
Why, after STAR TREK III established that McCoy’s middle name began with an “H,” did Duane continue to assert in her stories that his middle name was “Edward”?
That’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head. Been a long time since I read those early novels.
I liked the old cracky-er Trek novels, I loved never quite knowing what you got.
Khan doesn’t crack Kirk and Spock’s hours could seem like days code because Khan isn’t really listening. He’s anticipating triggering his trap, he’s so close, he can almost taste it, and Kirk and Spock jibber-jabbing about repair schedules, he doesn’t care about that. Khan’s desire for revenge is his fatal flaw, just Kirk’s complacency is his. Both men have got rusty in their respective lives. Khan has wasted his brilliance by dreaming of revenge and the way he seizes the opportunity to take it has made him blind to all common sense. Kirk grew stale behind a desk, made a huge mistake; but watching the scene it isn’t as bad as is made out, he does have his people take counter measures and work the solution, he just fails to go the full measure as he would have. The scenes on Reliant and Enterprise are concurrent so Kirk is literally only a beat behind Khan.
The time line is Reliant appears. Gives silence. Kirk orders yellow alert “defense screens”, Reliant offers a stall and Kirk has Spock check the stall before raising shields. That is the error. He wants a report from Spock on the stall before raising shields, Khan raises shields and Kirk orders the same but then Reliant is firing before Kirk’s can come up. It is not that big a boner as is made out. Watch the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaVIIoRKBlk
Don’t forget though, there are at least two Five Year Voyage Enterprise Veterans on Reliant. So Kirk’s blindness to danger is built on how he is not only an admiral who spends every day amongst friends and at worst office-politics enemies so doesn’t see space traps like he should, but also it is a ship containing at least two friends if not more. That is where the complacency comes from. He’s not used to people attacking, especially when there are friends (supposedly) on the ship in question. The stall that Khan offers, the chambers coil, is obviously something that could be a legit issue or Kirk wouldn’t have had Spock check it out in the first place.
105, I just rewatched the scene and I just don’t agree that it’s a minor error. The Reliant is approaching at roughly the 0:55 second mark with radio silence. That is the time when shields should have been raised. Saavik and Spock have their belief colloquy about regulations that concludes at 1:10. Kirk orders yellow alert/raises defense screens at 2:08. Even Khan’s crewman is incredulous that at 2:30 they “still haven’t raised their shields.” Spock announces phaser lock at 2:41. Kirk FINALLY gives the order to raise shields is at 2:43.
That’s two minutes of screentime. Now, granted, the screentime is split between the Reliant and the Enterprise roughly evenly, but that still means that Kirk had NEARLY A FULL MINUTE to take the incredibly obvious step of raising his shields after being explicitly reminded by a competent subordinate that he should do so. That is an unacceptable level of delay, because raising the shields is such a trivial act– it doesn’t harm the other ship to do so, or impair the ship’s functioning, or anything like that.
The idea that “but they said their coils were overloading” or “there were two friends aboard the ship” does not, in my mind, wash as an excuse. Events didn’t unfold so quickly that there was not time to react. There were several easily foreseeable reasons (listed above) why a seemingly friendly ship could suddenly attack, ranging from “evil AI” to “space thingie making the crew Not Themselves” to “ship taken over,” all of which are situations that Kirk has actually dealt with in his past. They really should have had the Reliant dart out of the nebula and fire before anybody could react or something like that– i.e., something where Kirk could make a mistake, but an understandable one.
To the extent it just highlights Kirk’s complacency-driven incompetency, it really warps what the film is trying to do. Ultimately, Spock died because he pushed a now-incompetent Kirk into a captaincy that he was completely unprepared to handle. By sharp contrast, the academy recruits that Kirk/Spock were worried about did their job just fine. That actually would be a fine plot if that was the movie was trying to do, but the script sure does seem unaware of just how much flows from Kirk’s mistake. Weirdly, it’s sort of the inverse of the Kobayashi Maru; all Kirk had to do to “win” was raise the damn shields, but he picked the one option that turned an easily winnable situation into an incredibly difficult one.
krad: In how many prior episodes did he show any feelings about any of these people, and in which subsequent episodes was he shown grieving for them? Few and fewer, of course. That is a consequence of an episodic series in which Status Quo is God. So characters marry women they barely know, and forget about them by the next episode; are tortured mercilessly, and forget about it by the next episode; see close relatives die, and forget it by the next episode.
Such a series can only show lasting feelings about regular characters – all other feelings disappear with the end-of-episode reset. Kirk might not be “emotionally stunted”, but the series has to show him as such because it cannot show any of those deaths having any lasting impact on him. It could not even show him caring about those people before the episode in which they were introduced and killed.
But Wrath of Khan kills one of the most important regular characters, for whom the series lead feels a deep affection. That gives you the ability to hit the audiences feelings a lot harder. That gives you the ability to hit Kirk a lot harder – however unrealistic it is that he be seen to be hurt more by the death of his friend than his brother.
(Someone may wish to write a reply telling me that all human lives are equally valuable. But that person will not care as much about strangers as they do about people they know. Hundreds of thousands of people they knew nothing about died today without bothering them – but they would have cared greatly about the death of someone they knew. You cannot mourn for all those strangers, or life would be unendurable. The only people who can truly care as much about strangers as about their brother, are the people who don’t care about their brother. So don’t condemn the audience for not caring more about the deaths of strangers than you do.)
I like Wrath of Khan well enough. It’s enjoyable, and it honestly explores Kirk’s vulnerable human side rather than stick to the leader archetype. Events in this film affect him directly. Horner scores a decent soundtrack (not as good as Goldsmith’s efforts, though). Spock’s death has real emotional impact. Death seems like a constant presence in this particular film. As I’ve mentioned, I’m continuously horrified by the scenes of carnage with crewmen being blown to bits and permanently scarred by the Defiant’s vicious attack. Scenes like these remind me of T2’s nuclear blast and that’s not my most pleasant memory.
As a Star Trek film, however, it falls rather short. When I first saw these films decades ago, I actually did my way backwards, starting with Undiscovered Country, and finishing with TMP. After seeing Search for Spock and notiicng how much Kirk was invested in getting Spock back, I can’t help but feel let down by how simplistic and hollow STII feels as its predecessor.
First and foremost, the film looks cheap. And I blame Gayne Rescher’s cinematography and lighting choices (I could blame Nick Meyer, but STVI’s Hiro Narita photography looks miles better, so the blame truly lies with the DP). At this point, we had TMP, two Star Wars films, Indiana Jones, Close Encounters and Blade Runner, and they all look superior.
It’s been mentioned before that the film was a product of several different screenplays stitched together and it shows. There are scenes that lack the proper follow-through. Writing in a hurry can be beneficial, given the right circunstances. This wasn’t the case. As much as one can blame Meyer, Harve Bennett was also a part of this. On the plus side, I commend him for doing what he did given the tight budget.
I can understand David saying Kirk never faced death, since he doesn’t really know his father, but Kirk saying is what it is: the product of people who didn’t pay enough attention to the episodes. I can understand a filmmaker wanting to make his/her own choices in a feature, but you have to acknowledge what’s been established. Even if it were meant to be a soft reboot of TMP, it’s still a direct sequel to Space Seed.
@65/Christopher: Agreed with the melodrama comment, especially the film being dumbed down. I’ve read several attempts by people who try and justify Scotty bringing Preston to the bridge.
It’s interesting that in retrospect, Kirk’s Khan scream is as out of place as Spock’s scream in Into Darkness.
Wrath of Khan looks cheaper because it was cheaper, with a budget of just $11 million. Compare that to TMP’s $46 milllion, Blade Runner’s $23 million, Raiders of the Lost Ark’s $18 million, etc.
I think it looks pretty good for that money. But then I tend to see it as a glorified TV movie than anything else.
@104/Glenn: I’ve never understood the mentality that continuity is the only thing that matters in judging fiction. A lot of fictional franchises have numerous massively incompatible versions of the same basic characters and setting — Batman, for example, or Sherlock Holmes. Toho alone has given us eight different Godzilla universes. In franchises like these, whether a story is good in its own right is more important than whether it fits with other stories, and sometimes the ways in which the stories don’t fit each other, the ways in which they bring fresh and distinctive takes to the idea, are what make them worthwhile. Back in the ’80s, before we had a bunch of different Trek series all pretending to share a single continuity even though they had dozens of inconsistencies of detail and style, there was less pressure to standardize the novels and comics. There was freedom to explore variations on a theme, to use the original episodes as a starting point for imagination rather than a set of restrictive limits upon it. And for me, that variety was fun. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, y’know.
@105/random22: Okay, that’s a fair explanation for why Khan didn’t crack the code, but it still doesn’t explain why they needed an improvised code instead of having some standardized open-comms protocol.
@107/ad: What you’re saying about the thinking behind the “never faced death” bit is pretty much the very thing I object to, and I think it’s part of what Keith is objecting to. You’re saying the earlier canonical losses he faced are being ignored because they aren’t as important as the audience. But that’s exactly the problem. It’s unbelievable because it sacrifices in-story logic in order to impose an external, artificial standard. That undermines suspension of disbelief by calling attention to the artifice of the fiction. And that’s bad writing. Characters’ motivations should be believable within the context of the world the characters supposedly inhabit. If they do something contradictory to that in-universe logic because it fits the audience’s experience of them as fictional characters, then it’s basically admitting that they’re just fictional characters who have no existence beyond the stories. It’s fakey and contrived and that is the whole problem.
@109/SidneyFalco: I don’t think the reduced budget explains all of the cheaper look, because it uses the exact same sets built for TMP yet makes them look cheaper and less impressive. I agree with Eduardo that the cinematography is the problem there. Or maybe the experience of the director was a factor too. TMP was Robert Wise’s 38th feature film (39th if you count his co-directing on The Magnificent Ambersons); TWOK was Nicholas Meyer’s second.
#110
And people with less experience typically come at a cheaper price.
Christopher L. In my opinion “KHAAAN” from Star Trek 2, “WHYYYY” in Steel Magnolias and “NOOOO” in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith were the most cringe-inducing moments in cinema history.
@65 CLB: “As for TWOK, I’ve never really understood its popularity. Sure, it handles the characters better than TMP, but it’s a very dumbed-down, garishly melodramatic movie.”
I think you answered your own query. :) Dumbed-down sells popcorn, and garishly melodramatic appeals to the lowest common denominator. And those descriptions would fit countless Hollywood blockbusters, from Armageddon to Top Gun (to mention two of my least favorite flicks of all time). That said, I think you’re being a little hard on TWOK. It’s tone was the natural reflex to the somber, plodding, glacial plotline of TMP. I recognize TMP as a superior film to TWOK, but as an inferior movie, if you know what I mean.
I completely understand all the criticisms – the characterizations of some of the series regulars didn’t seem to fit, the acting was over the top, there are enormous plot-holes and glaring inconsistencies… and yet…. pass the jujubes. It was the one thing TMP was not: fun.
I admit that I haven’t watched the whole movie all the way through in several years, because it does wear thin on multiple viewings, but if I’ve got it DVR’d there are still moments that I have to find and watch because they still make me smile or feel for the characters, and none of them have to do with action or special effects – it’s all about the delivery of certain lines by these wonderful characters:
“He’ll die.” “He’s dead already.”
“He tasks me, and I shall have him!”
“It is very cold… in spaaaaaccccce.”
Kirk: “I would not presume to debate you.” Spock: “That is wise.”
“Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik. The odds will be even.”
“Do you need a tranquilizer?”
And of course, McCoy’s “Are you out of your Vulcan mind?”
My favorite “gotcha” moment in all of Star Trek, when Kirk’s lounging around eating that apple or whatever it is, and says “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario” as he flips open the communicator and says: “Kirk to Spock. It’s two hours. Are you about ready?” I remember hi-fives and fist-pumps among all of us geeks in the theater. :)
So…this may not be great filmmaking or high drama – but it’s skillfully done entertainment for entertainment’s sake and exactly what most of us wanted after TMP.
The movie pays tribute to two great and celebrated novels in “Tale of Two Cities” and “Moby Dick”. That’s got to earn it some brownie points for at least attempting to raise the bar. No? ;)
The only character in this one that didn’t work for me was Carol Marcus, who looked and sounded like she was dropped in from a 1970s soap opera. I cringe when I hear: “Let me show you something that will make you feel young as when the world was new.”, or “Can I cook, or can’t I?” Blecch.
So yes, I really like this movie. It was the most fun I ever had watching Trek in the theater, and has provided by far the greatest collection of fodder for quotations among friends. Speaking of which– a friend I worked with for years now works across the state in Fort Lauderdale. We talk maybe 3 or 4 times a year, and every time he calls me, he doesn’t say hello. He says: “Khaaaaaaaaaan!” LOL. So even watching that scene makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. :)
@110/Christopher
“I’ve never understood the mentality that continuity is the only thing that matters in judging fiction.”
I never said it was. And by suggesting that I did, you’re sidestepping my point.
The topic at hand was whether those authors changed the stuff that we knew from onscreen. I cited examples of them doing just that. Having Sulu address Kirk as “Jim,” for example, denotes a significant change in their relationship, one that was incompatible with everything we ever saw onscreen, both in the TV series and in the movies. That’s an instance of the author portraying key characters, and their relationship, in a manner inconsistent and out-of-character with the source material.
And I’m sorry, but when McCoy’s middle name is established ON FILM in 1984 as beginning with the letter “H,” you shouldn’t keep calling him Leonard Edward McCoy for years afterwards. That’s not just about continuity, it’s about consistency, which IS important. If you write a Superman story in which you say that he came from the planet BabaBooey, well, that’s just wrong. If you write a Superman story in which you say that his Kryptonian name is Dave-El, that’s just wrong. If in your Superman story you say that he lives in Wurtsboro, New York, works as a TV repairman, and is living with Cockeye Jenny the Town Whore, well, that’s just wrong. If you make a Godzilla movie in which he starts out as a human who gets fused with a radioactive gila monster ala Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY and grows to the size of a skyscraper but retains his human intelligence and sings “The Monster Mash” and dances the Batusi in the middle of Tokyo, I think a lot of people would say, “That’s just wrong.” (Though, I must admit, I’d pay to see that.)
Okay, I got a bit extreme with those examples, but do you see my point? As I assume you know, the novels established a whole string of contradictory fates for the female Romulan Commander from “The Enterprise Incident.” But I didn’t care. I didn’t demand or expect all of the novels to fall in line with each other, though it was certainly nice if and when they did.
But I DID expect the novels to be consistent with the TV series and movies, and to strive to capture as best as possible the characters, the relationships, and the overall universe that we saw on screen. Crispin was able to do that. Weinstein too. Gerrold. Michael Jan Friedman. Peter David, to a large extent. They were all able to tell their stories without the need to “fix” Star Trek as they saw fit.
@84 CLB–Thanks for that explanation of the significance of the comparison to Wagon Train in particular.
@99 Glenn Greenberg–I think you must be right. Especially if the original DVD release had “Why didn’t you tell me?” in the subtitles! So it’s all down to Shatner’s mumbling the line….
@77/Saavik: Thanks for the information! I can imagine that Spock would keep the different parts of his life apart like that. After all, he didn’t tell his friends and collegues that he was engaged, or that Sarek and Amanda were his parents, either.
@84/Christopher: Yes, Kirk doesn’t know that David is his son in the novelization. When Carol Marcus tells David that Kirk is his father, Kirk wonders if she only made that up to prevent David from killing him. Later he asks her: “Why didn’t you tell me?” They even have an entire conversation about the subject, with Marcus telling him that he could have asked, because he knew that she had a son of the right age.
It never occurred to me that McIntyre invented Saavik’s backstory, but it fits. She obviously has a thing for having characters grow up on dystopian planets: Sulu in The Entropy Effect, Janice Rand in Enterprise – The First Adventure, Saavik here.
@90/Glenn Greenberg: Thank you for the links! Although we apparently have different tastes. I found Sanctuary boring, and I love Diane Duane’s books, especially the ones that aren’t about Romulans. It’s true that her characters are sometimes a bit off (McCoy is a great chess player?), but most of the time, I find them very recognisable, and they have wonderful dialogue.
One more note: the “Star Trek: 25th Anniversary” adventure game (which is one of several works to claim to be a retelling of the 4th year of the 5-year mission) features a Khan prequel in its third episode. Kirk encounters Carol Marcus being held hostage on Ark 7, a biomedical research station where she and her crew are secretly working on Genesis. There’s a lot of little winks back to this film as the episode goes out of its way to sort of wink at the idea that she has a kid somewhere but Kirk is blissfully ignorant. (This is also the episode that provides that Vulcans aren’t affected by laughing gas, so there’s that.)
The game is worth checking out, available for sale on GOG and other retro-gaming sites, although it hasn’t held up all that well in the space combat sections. It is largely voiced by the original cast which is nice.
Concerning the question whether Kirk knew about David – aren’t novelizations written on the basis of the script? Because in this case, I argue that Kirk did indeed say “Why didn’t you tell me?” and did NOT know that David was his son.
@99/Glenn Greenberg: “But eventually, when taking into account that, upon seeing Carol again, Kirk immediately says, “Is that David?”, I came to the realization that the line HAD to be “Why didn’t you tell him?” ” – No, it doesn’t have to be that. Kirk saying “Is that David?” simply means that he knows Carol has a son, and he hasn’t seen him for many years, so he doesn’t recognise him. I have said the same sentence to friends whose kids I hadn’t seen for years. It’s like saying “Gee, you’ve grown”.
Does anybody own a TWOK script? What does it say there?
It would be a better story if she hadn’t told Kirk. Telling her ex “Oh, by the way, you’ve got a son, but I don’t want you to ever see him” makes her look really unsympathetic.
@119/JanaJansen
The scene was reshot and reedited somewhat late in the production process. It departed from the script in some significant ways. My understanding is that in the original script, Kirk DOES find out that David is his son. The scene in the novelization more or less is the scene as written in the original script. But after some back-and-forth between the studio and Nicholas Meyer, changes were made.
The line is definitely “Why didn’t you tell him?” I’ve listened to it enough times at top volume to determine that. Besides, the scene doesn’t really work if the line is “Why didn’t you tell me?” As I mentioned, Kirk had already asked Carol, “Is that David?” So he knew about the kid.
Let me put it this way–during the time when I thought the line was “Why didn’t you tell me?”, the scene never felt right to me. It seemed to be contradictory, inconsistent with itself. Once I realized that the line was “Why didn’t you tell him?”, it all fell into place and worked perfectly.
@119/JanaJansen: Novelizations are written based on a script, but not necessarily the final draft. Novelizations are started so early in the process that often the script will undergo fairly significant revisions when it’s too late to rewrite the novelization to match, so you can’t necessarily use anything in a novelization to support what’s in the actual movie or TV show. That’s why novelizations so often depart hard from the erstwhile source material, and sometimes in what seems like really strange ways. (The BTTF novelization included a scene that was cut from the screenplay after they swapped from Stoltz to Fox, for an example of how early in the process they get kicked off.)
@120/Glenn Greenberg: But it does work if Kirk says “me”, as I pointed out in my previous comment. Of course he would know that Carol Marcus has a son. He doesn’t recognise him because David has grown.
For me, the scene worked much better before I learned that Kirk allegedly says “him”, because the “him” reading makes Carol Marcus look bad.
Just checked again–the line is most definitely “Why didn’t you tell him?”
And I was mistaken in one of my earlier posts–the original DVD does have it correct.
@122/JanaJansen
Whatever works for you. I never thought it made Carol look bad, just very protective–and as it turned out, she was kind of right to be that way!
@115/Glenn: “The topic at hand was whether those authors changed the stuff that we knew from onscreen.”
Yes, and I don’t accept that standard, because it’s fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with telling a story in a different way. I don’t care whether every book I read for pleasure fits into continuity on the superficial level of factual detail. We’re not studying for a test, so we don’t need our reference texts to have the “right” answers. We just need to have fun. And while, yes, sometimes continuity errors can just be annoying, there are other times where a story’s idiosyncratic and alternative take on the universe is interestingly offbeat and fun, an entertaining glimpse into an alternative way of approaching an imaginary premise. If an author like Diane Duane or Vonda McIntyre or Joe Haldeman offers me a version of the Trek universe that’s clearly different in the broad strokes from the way I perceive the canonical universe, then I don’t expect it to be consistent with the canonical universe, and I can enjoy it as an alternative take even if there are direct inconsistencies. It’s the alternative approach, the not-quite-right, alternate-reality feel of those books, that makes them interesting.
Star Trek fans have actually become kind of handicapped in the imagination compared to fans of other franchises, because all the different productions have pretended to be in a single shared universe. Most Marvel fans don’t scream bloody murder when the MCU movies and TV shows rejigger the stories to tell them differently than the comics did; most DC fans don’t complain about the Arrowverse, Gotham, and the DCEU movies being mutually incompatible realities that also change a ton from the comics. Some always do, of course, but most understand that the different stories are putting the concepts and tropes together in different ways and not trying to be mutually consistent. Star Trek today is not like that; even though every different TV and movie has retconned a ton of stuff, we still pretend it’s all one whole and elevate continuity above all else.
But in the ’70s and ’80s, when these books first came out, it was different. We just had TOS, TAS, and a few movies, and in some ways it was debatable whether the movies were entirely in continuity with the shows. And the various comics and novels that came out at the time were routinely inconsistent with each other and frequently inconsistent with the show. We hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of expecting a uniform continuity. It was much more wild and wooly. Fittingly, much like the contrast between Kirk’s world and Picard’s, it was more of an uncharted, unregulated frontier, in contrast to the more fully explored, tamed, structured universe we have today. And I’m glad it was like that. It’s part of what makes that era of Trek Lit distinctive and memorable.
@117/Jana: “It never occurred to me that McIntyre invented Saavik’s backstory, but it fits.”
The idea that Saavik was half-Romulan, and therefore more emotional, came from the movie script. The filmmakers wisely dropped it because they realized it didn’t make sense. Not only is Vulcan logic learned rather than innate — they’re actually deeply emotional by natural inclination — but Vulcans and Romulans are the same species. So that idea was nonsensical on two levels. McIntyre kept the half-Romulan backstory, presumably because it wasn’t cut out of the film until after she’d done the novelization, but she evidently recognized the same holes in the premise. I don’t know for sure, but I figure she knew that just being half-Romulan wouldn’t make Saavik more emotional, so she invented a backstory in which Saavik had a hellish childhood and never learned Vulcan control until her teens, as a more logical way of justifying her more volatile personality.
@119/Jana: “aren’t novelizations written on the basis of the script?”
First off, as Idran said, they’re generally not based on the final draft of the script, so there are often discrepancies. Second, at the time TWOK came out, studios were far less restrictive about novelizations than they are today. These days, they expect novelizations to be as close as possible to the final movies, I guess so fans don’t get confused when something in the book turns out not to be in the movie. But prior to a decade or two ago, novelizers were much freer to make big changes, and McIntyre took plenty of advantage of that in her novelizations. In addition to all the things she added, she also changed a number of things to make more sense, like changing the weird “Ceti Alpha” usage to the astronomically correct “Alpha Ceti.”
Couple of other things on the Kirk/David issue that may not have been mentioned. Jana, you’re right that Kirk might have said “Is that David” knowing that Carol had a son, but not knowing it was his son. But in context it doesn’t look that way. Note that when Kirk rears back to punch David and says “Where’s Dr. Marcus?” and David says “I’m Dr. Marcus”, the look on Kirk’s face seems a lot more shocked than one would expect if he was just meeting an old flame’s son who wasn’t his own.
Further, consider the conversation in the Genesis cave:
KIRK: I did what you wanted. …I stayed away. …Why didn’t you tell him?
CAROL: How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be? You had your world and I had mine. And I wanted him in mine, not chasing through the universe with his father. .
Why would Kirk think he needed to “stay away” unless he knew he had a son? And then look at Carol’s response. If you change Kirk’s last line from “him” to “me”, I would suggest Carol sounds like a really bad person for unilaterally deciding not to tell a man that he had a son, just because she wanted her son “in her world” instead of his. Kirk’s not a monster. He’s just a man with a risky job.
So I would tend to disagree with the thought that it makes Carol seem worse if she had not told him. On the contrary, if I found out I had an adult son I was never told about, I would be much more upset with his mother than if I had been told about him but asked to stay away. At least in the latter situation, I would have the knowledge that I’m a father, and I would have a say in whether I was a part of his life. It sounds to me like Carol honestly believed that having a father like Jim Kirk in her son’s life would be more detrimental than beneficial, and so they both agreed, like adults, that he would, as he put it, “stay away”. The alternative would be for her to have withheld information that every parent is entitled to know. JMHO.
Another thing that bothers me in this film is the way the Genesis concept is introduced.
The film is really about Khan’s 15 year old desire for revenge against Kirk for being marooned in a remote planet and losing McGivers in the process. Therefore, why does he bother in stealing the Genesis torpedo from Kirk, Carol and David’s hands? He doesn’t need it while he has the Reliant’s weaponry. It only becomes relevant once the ship is torn to pieces and he has no other weapon he can use.
The film never establishes that Khan has any other goal beyond revenge. Getting Genesis seems like an incidental side prize for him, which makes the whole countdown scene frivolous. The only reason for him to spare Kirk at that point is to see him shiver in the face of death. There’s no reason for him to demand Kirk hand the plans over (did he believe the Enterprise really had the plans, for that matter?).
I feel this reduces the entire Genesis arc and concept to a simple and blatant plot device, with no other nuances. Again, I feel this is a byproduct of the film being a hodgepodge of several story and screenplay ideas thrown together.
It’s not until the next film that Genesis gains a more thematic metaphysical relevance beyond plot means, proto-matter included.
@125/fullyfunctional: Oh, you’re right! I had forgotten that later conversation. Also, good arguments why this doesn’t make Carol a bad person.
@126/Eduardo: When I watched the film at the age of fifteen, I loved the symbolism of a green, living world springing from all the violence and terror and death that had come before. I don’t know if I would still like it today. It’s probably rather heavy-handed.
They still haven’t gone to Boldelygo.
Given what we know (which isn’t much) I find the “Kirk didn’t know” scenario hard to accept. He knows Carol has a son, he knows (at the least) the approximate time of David’s birth, and that the two of them were romantically involved. Who else would be David’s father be?
Even if she didn’t explicitly say, “David is your son,” obviously Jim would be able do the math. If he doesn’t “know,” with 100% certainty, he must’ve had a 99.9% suspicion. I guess Carol might have lied or misled Jim, but that would be a pretty crappy thing to do, and not in line with who the character appears to be.
For what it’s worth, most tie-ins have Kirk learning about David when he’s young. Michael Jan Friedman’s novel Faces of Fire has Kirk finding out about David when the boy is about 9-10, I think, when he encounters Carol and her son on a colony world. (By a rather large coincidence, Kruge is there too, though I don’t think he and Kirk meet.) Howard Weinstein’s “Star-Crossed” storyline in DC Comics’ second TOS volume had Kirk find out while David was a toddler. I’m pretty sure the TWOK novelization is the only version that has Kirk learn about David for the first time on Regula I.
@129/cosmotiger: “He knows Carol has a son, he knows (at the least) the approximate time of David’s birth, and that the two of them were romantically involved. Who else would be David’s father be?” – Actually, Carol tells him the same thing in the novelization. “Why didn’t you ask? You’ve known for a long time that I have a son. You know his age, or you could have found out without any trouble. And I don’t believe they take you into the Starfleet Academy unless you can count.”
@124/ChristopherLBennett
As I’ve said before, more power to you, CLB. I guess you feel you got your money’s worth when you bought a lot of those early Trek novels. There were plenty of times when I felt ripped off.
First and foremost, when I’m reading a Star Trek novel, I want to feel like I’m immersed in the Star Trek universe as I know it from the TV series and the films. I want the book to capture, as best as it can, the experience of watching a new live-action Star Trek adventure—but since it’s a novel, it can and should delve much deeper, and deliver concepts and events that aren’t limited by a TV or movie production budget.
I feel the novel should adhere to the continuity and to the “rules” set forth in the filmed episodes and movies. I expect the characters to be written in a manner consistent with how they’re portrayed on screen. When I read the characters’ dialogue, I want to hear in my head the voices of the actors who play them.
To be honest, I never read a Duane novel that I enjoyed, and I read a number of them.
I liked ENTROPY EFFECT well enough, upon reading it again within the last 14 years, but I have always felt that ENTERPRISE: THE FIRST ADVENTURE sucked big time–it was a wasted opportunity. And while I thought McIntyre’s novelization of ST II was okay, I really didn’t like her takes on movies III and IV. Her versions of most of the characters came off as crabby, bitchy, petty, and downright unlikable. And she seemed to contradict things in the screenplays just for the sake of being contrary. Her recasting of the relationship between Kruge and Valkris is an example of that.
Can’t remember reading Haldeman’s stuff, and I skipped the books by John M. Ford.
As noted above, the books written by Crispin, Weinstein, Friedman, David, and J.M. Dillard were much more to my liking. And you can throw in Shirley Maiewski too, whose short story “Mind Sifter”, from the 1976 anthology collection STAR TREK: THE NEW VOYAGES, remains an all-time favorite of mine.
CLB: “In addition to all the things she added, she also changed a number of things to make more sense, like changing the weird ‘Ceti Alpha” usage to the astronomically correct “Alpha Ceti.'”
The name Ceti Alpha was established in “Space Seed,” so not only was McIntyre contradicting Meyer and Bennett, she was also contradicting Genes Roddenberry and Coon. That’s just not something that’s going to work for me, “astronomically correct” or not.
@125/ fullyfunctional
I’m with you, 100%!
Jana, nice to see that you’ve come around. Guess I just assumed that you remembered the rest of Kirk and Carol’s conversation as well as I do! :-)
Wow, I seem to have started a stink here so I’ll try and unravel it without writing an essay. I never once while watching the movie thought that Kirk didn’t know David was his son. Then I read that was the received wisdom, thought “Really?”, watched the movie, heard “I did what you wanted, I stay away” and thought “No way did he not know.” I think at one point I did hear it as “Why didn’t you tell me?” and tried to make sense of that. (I think I reasoned that “Is that David?” was Kirk discovering for the first time what Carol’s son looked like and how old he was and having Sudden Dad Syndrome.) But…at no point in the movie does Carol tell Kirk that David is his son. There’s no opening for it to have happened off screen, and even if Kirk worked it out by himself, you’d think he’d check he was right before starting on “I did want you wanted, I stayed away.” Things clearly go differently than in the novelisation. (Incidentally, I think there’s a short story somewhere, probably in one of the Strange New Worlds collections, that has a flashback of Kirk being present at David’s birth?)
I’m kind of on the fence with the “parallel continuity” thing. I am open to reading a story set in a slightly different version of the universe I’m open to, even though I find portrayals of Federation society and Vulcan and Klingon culture in early novels bizarre in the extreme. (In fact, I really wish the Abramsverse had had the guts to draw a line and say “We’re a completely unrelated Star Trek continuity” instead of wimping out with the alternate timeline nonsense.) But I do think there’s something slightly cynical in just writing a novel featuring characters called Kirk, Spock and McCoy without paying respect to what’s been established about them. And I think every fandom has those who have that problem, some even more than Star Trek: A lot of Marvel or DC comics fans will write off a whole series or movie because “But Clark and Lex didn’t know each other when they were young!” or “But Rogue and Bobby never went out in the comics, she belongs with Gambit!” To misquote a comment about Doctor Who fiction: “You play with the toys in the sandbox. It might be fun for you to bring in your own toys but it spoils it for the other kids.” I think canon was an issue long before TNG came along. TAS was a continuation of TOS, as were the movies, hence the same characters and themes reappearing. Even back in TOS, anyone who wanted to disregard what had been established and write “their” Star Trek got nudged back into line (Harlan Ellison being the most high profile example). Indeed the whole debate about whether Kirk has faced death or not is dependent on the assumption that this isn’t Nicholas Meyer’s private Star Trek, it’s the same James T Kirk who lost Gary Mitchell, Edith Keeler, Miramanee, Captain Garrovick and Sammy Kirk Jr.
On the subject of which…I don’t have a problem with it. Yes, it’s factually inaccurate but so what? There’s a big difference between “That’s not true” and “That’s not what Kirk would have said.” He’s grieving and depressed. He’s not going to say “Oh, well, actually my last best friend died tragically in the line of duty as well so I know the drill.” He’s going to make a sweeping grandiose statement, like we all would. It’s just we don’t have people who know our history watching it on film for 35 years going “Wrong!”
(That said, I did once co-write a Star Wars/Home and Away pastiche where I took the mickey out of people caring more about some random old guy Luke knew for a day or so than Leia’s home planet.)
I feel I should re-read McIntyre’s ST II and III novelizations now. I remember liking the fact that she expanded the stories significantly. And then re-read some of the novels where Kirk, Spock and McCoy only appear in cameos. I’ve been meaning to re-read The Final Reflection for some time now.
I never had a problem with the “Kirk facing death” theme because I saw it as being about Kirk facing his *own* mortality in a way he had never done before. He had seen others he loved die, yes, but nothing before seemed to shake his sense of his own invincibility. Even in “The Deadly Years,” he seemed unwilling to accept the reality of this unnatural superannuation. And how many *fights to the death* had he been in, cockily sure that he would win (or at least not really lose–see “Amok Time”).
In this, it is the confluence of physical infirmity (the glasses), meeting his adult son, facing an old enemy, and having his best friend die that makes him face his own mortality in a way he had always refused to before.
When this movie came out in theatres, I was a gay man in my 20s in graduate school whose father had just had a quintuple heart bypass resulting from hereditary heart disease, and a classmate had just died from AIDS weeks before so that death seemed to be stalking my dating choices. Death wasn’t new to me–older relatives, a high school classmate in a car accident–but it was personal in a way it hadn’t been before. My own mortality was real in a way it hadn’t been before (I suddenly understood “The Death of Ivan Illych” in a way that was visceral rather than intellectual). So the whole aspect of the story resonated for me. I had come to that visceral awareness earlier than most because my robust father’s sudden frailty after his operation made me hear the time bomb ticking in my chest and AIDS stalking my people and dating prospects (and HIV not yet identified or named) and Kirk had come to it rather later than most.
But the idea that a confluence of events could trigger a moment when death stops being an abstract thing that happens to others and becomes something personal where you feel your own impending death in your bones as a real not abstract thing–that struck me as real. And it struck me as completely right that while Kirk had dealt with death before, he had never dealt with it *in that way* before this moment.
@132/Glenn: “First and foremost, when I’m reading a Star Trek novel, I want to feel like I’m immersed in the Star Trek universe as I know it from the TV series and the films. I want the book to capture, as best as it can, the experience of watching a new live-action Star Trek adventure—but since it’s a novel, it can and should delve much deeper, and deliver concepts and events that aren’t limited by a TV or movie production budget.”
Sure, I like books like that. But I also like books that are unusual or idiosyncratic takes in interesting ways. No reason it has to be a zero-sum competition between the two; it’s more enjoyable to have both. I wouldn’t like it if all tie-ins felt off, but there are enough that “fit” that it makes the more eccentric ones feel like fresh variations. Like if you usually have mayonnaise on your turkey sandwich but sometimes want to vary it up by using mustard or salad dressing or even apple butter.
Roddenberry wanted ST to be scientifically plausible, although it often fell short. He wasn’t as obsessively fixated on exact details as fandom tends to be; like most creators, he saw his work as merely the best approximation he could manage what with all the various compromises and mistakes, and he was always willing to revise and improve things later on. He never saw Star Trek as some immutable holy gospel. I’m not sure how the “Ceti Alpha” thing ended up in “Space Seed,” but I don’t see Roddenberry objecting to a correction for the sake of good science. Heck, he was just about the only 1960s or 1970s SFTV producer who had any concern at all with scientific credibility. That was part of what made ST stand out from the pack of sci-fi schlock.
And come on, what about all the ways that TWOK contradicted “Space Seed” and the rest of TOS? Chekov’s presence, the change in the age and ethnicity of Khan’s followers, the total crap about Kirk never facing death, etc.?
@133/cap-mjb: “But I do think there’s something slightly cynical in just writing a novel featuring characters called Kirk, Spock and McCoy without paying respect to what’s been established about them.”
It’s not that absolute. Varying some aspects of a character is not the same thing as writing a completely different character. There are many traits that define a character, so you can vary a few while maintaining others and still have a recognizable version of the character. For instance, Adam West’s Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman are extremely different, but they have enough fundamental points of commonality that it’s understandable why they’re both called Batman (although I’d argue that Bale’s is significantly further removed from the comic-book source than West’s).
Besides, I’m not talking about the characterizations. Different readers can disagree on whether characters are portrayed well, but that’s not what I’m focusing on. I’m talking about the fact that, in the early days when we only had a few dozen episodes, the Star Trek universe beyond the Enterprise was much more vaguely defined than it is now, so novelists had a lot more flexibility in how they imagined that larger universe, the context in which the Enterprise and its crew existed. It’s the difference in their portrayals of the overall world that I’m talking about, not their portrayals of individual characters. So little was known at the time about that larger world that none of these alternate takes could really be considered “wrong.” That’s what was so fascinating about that era in contrast to the more fully developed universe we have now. There was so very much we didn’t know about the Federation and the Klingons and whatever, and so different writers’ imaginations could fill in the gaps in so many different ways. Like how The Final Reflection and Pawns and Symbols came out only 18 months apart but offered two completely separate and incompatible explorations of what Klingon civilization and culture were like. And neither of them was “wrong,” because at the time, canon had established virtually nothing about Klingon culture, so anything was possible. It was fascinating to be able to see different possible answers to the same question and have them all be equally valid. It gave the writers more freedom and it gave the readers more variety.
So I’m not even talking about contradicting canon. I’m talking about the absence of canon. I’m talking about how Trek canon at the time was at most a hundred-odd adventures of a single starship crew, with zero visits to any of the major civilizations’ homeworlds aside from one arena on Vulcan and a couple of movie-era glimpses of Earth. So the rest was this vast unknown, an empty canvas for the writers’ imaginations. Staying consistent with canon was the easy part, because there was only a fraction as much canon as we have today. Once you used up what little was known for sure about the Vulcans or the Klingons or the Romulans or even the history of the Federation, there was still far more that was totally unknown and that writers could fill in however they wanted.
@132/Glenn Greenberg: Sorry for being obstinate! I’ve watched the film twice when it was new, but I read the novelization first, and sometimes it shows.
@135/Chimaxx: I feel a bit guilty to contradict you after you posted such a personal and thoughtful comment, but I don’t think that Kirk ever had a sense of invincibility. I think he expected to die when Gary Mitchell let the boulder drop on him, or when Khan stuck him in the decompression chamber, or when he faced his execution in “Bread and Circuses”, and also in “Amok Time”. He expected to lose in “Amok Time”. He kept fighting without intending to kill Spock because both alternatives – killing Spock and allowing Spock to kill him – were against his nature, not because he expected any kind of lucky escape.
He didn’t always “trick death” or save himself, he was fairly often saved by others. That’s another reason why this film’s take on him just doesn’t ring true.
@129 Cosmotiger (love the name): IMO telling a man to keep the hell away from his son and LYING to said son about his paternity is a pretty crappy thing to do. Especially since Carol makes it quite clear that her reason is to limit David’s life choices to ones she controls.
Enjoyed that perspective Jana. I think maybe all of us have been making a little too much of this, although it does make for good conversation. Maybe Kirk just values the lives of his friends more than his own. As he says in the movie, hes tricked death, cheated it and talked his way-out of it, but never had to face it like this. And I think that Is a Testament to the friendship of Kirk and Spock at this stage in their lives. In Amok Time they had only known each-other for a year or two. At this point they are old friends, even brothers in a way, and Kirk is forced to watch his best friend literally die slowly in front of him. That’s got to be hard to take no matter how often you face death yourself or suffered personal tragedies. It was definitely a plot device meant to dramatize the story in a melodramatic way, but for most fans, it worked, Even if after dissecting the movie later, one realizes it doesn’t exactly ring true.
@136/Christopher
“Chekov’s presence”
Oooh, you actually went there, huh? That’s not a contradiction AT ALL. As I’m sure you are well aware, NOWHERE in ANY filmed Star Trek does it state that Chekov had just joined the crew at the start of the second season. To insist that he had is fannish thinking of the highest order. Just because we hadn’t seen Chekov before Season Two doesn’t mean he wasn’t on board for at least some of the Season One episodes, which means he very well COULD have encountered Khan during the events of “Space Seed.” And TWOK said he did, so he did. I tackled this issue head-on in STAR TREK: UNTOLD VOYAGES #4.
“the total crap about Kirk never facing death”
Mind you, Kirk never says that he’s NEVER faced death. He says to David, “Not like this.” The other situations he’d been through–Gary, Edith, Miramanee, Sam, Aurelan–were not instances in which Kirk enjoyed what appeared to be a clean, decisive victory, thinking that everything was going to fine and dandy, only to discover afterward that such a victory came at a terrible price. I had a much bigger problem with Kirk apparently forgetting about Sam when he told Spock, in THE FINAL FRONTIER, “I lost a brother once. I was lucky, I got him back.”
@140/Glenn: “I had a much bigger problem with Kirk apparently forgetting about Sam when he told Spock, in THE FINAL FRONTIER, “I lost a brother once. I was lucky, I got him back.”” – I think they did that on purpose, both out-of-universe and in-universe. That is, Kirk did it on purpose. He wanted Spock to think that he was talking about Sam and then surprise him with the message: “You are my brother. You are not alone.”
Concerning the novels… when I read Star Trek novels in the 80’s, me, and my friends, and reviewers whose stuff I read, didn’t care much about technical details, but we did care about characterisation. It’s still the most important aspect of a Star Trek novel for me. The thing is, I do recognise the characters in Diane Duane’s books. I even read her books especially for the character scenes. Some details aren’t quite right (McCoy as a great chess player, Spock calling McCoy “Leonard”,…), but on the whole, I see the characters I like and hear their voices when I read her books. Similarly, her Enterprise has more alien crewmembers than the one we see on screen, but this has always felt right to me – kind of like the Enterprise as it should have been, if they had been able to afford it.
By the way, that’s another thing that bothers me about TWOK: Apart from Spock and Saavik, everybody is human. TMP had several alien crewmembers, TAS had Arex and M’Ress, and even TOS season two and three had the Vulcan crew of the Intrepid and Andorians and Tellarites as ambassadors, inmates or dead bodies on Memory Alpha. The last time Starfleet and the Federation have looked so human-centric was in TOS season 1.
@139/fullyfunctional: “In Amok Time they had only known each-other for a year or two.”
Per the creators’ intention at the time, more like 3-4 years. By modern chronological assumptions, closer to 2 years.
@140/Glenn: I’m not talking about “contradictions.” I’m not talking about whether it can be reconciled in-universe, because this is fiction and I get so damn tired of fans analyzing it only on the level of in-story continuity and consistency, as if the totally fabricated, nonexistent conceit of a world within the story is somehow more “real” than the actual, living, breathing writers and artists who created it as a work of entertainment. In-story continuity is not the only or most important level for analyzing a work of fiction. It’s really the most superficial level, and the least revealing one, because it says nothing about the creative process, the intentions of the people who conceived and made the story, and the way they perceived and approached the concept when they made the story. In short, I don’t want to talk about whether the details are consistent or inconsistent; I want to talk about why.
So my point here about Chekov is absolutely not about reconciling in-story continuity. That’s a trivial concern. It’s a question that’s been addressed many times over the decades, I offered an explanation for it in Ex Machina a dozen years ago (well, I cribbed Allan Asherman’s explanation from DC’s Who’s Who in Star Trek), and I’m deeply bored with it by now. I’m talking about it in terms of how it reflects the creative standards of Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer — two real live people who actually existed, unlike Pavel Chekov or Khan Noonien Singh — with regard to the maintenance of continuity in a work of fiction. The point is that they were willing to retcon the previous story to fit their needs. Whether other people can make up rationales for that retcon after the fact is irrelevant to the question of those people’s decision to make the retcon at the time. The point is simply that Bennett and Meyer were willing to be selective and transformative in their use of prior continuity in a fictional franchise. Bennett made that clear enough in The Six Million Dollar Man, which contains a number of continuity changes from the pilot movies and various inconsistencies within itself over the years.
@141/Jana: I see Diane Duane’s versions of the characters as somewhat idealized versions of themselves. The Wounded Sky in particular — the first Duane novel and still my favorite, though it gets unfairly overlooked because it’s not part of the Rihannsu sequence — reads like Star Trek as epic mythology. The characters are way too perfect, there’s no real conflict among them, but it’s just such a grand and cosmic vision with so many rich ideas that that’s okay. They may not quite be the characters as we know them, but they’re the characters as we want to imagine them.
And you’re right — I feel most of the movies portrayed Starfleet as far too human-centric, compared to the diversity we saw in TMP. That was presumably due in part to the low budget, but it’s a habit that later productions got into, including plenty of DS9 and VGR episodes where all the Starfleet-crew extras in the background were human, even if there were plenty of aliens in civilian crowd scenes.
Weird… I posted a comment and it didn’t show up. Sometimes they stay hidden until another comment is posted, so I’ll see if this reveals it. In any case, Tor.com folks, your comment system is screwing up again.
EDIT: Ah, there it is.
@138/Roxana: I like Carol Marcus, so I’ll admit I’m biased. I tend to see her motivation as trying to protect David, rather than trying to control him. But you have a point, that ends up being the same thing when a parent takes it too far.
I once read- in one of Shatner’s books? about Meyer’s tales of making this movie. I remember he wanted characters to smoke, because what else would they do with their hands? Blech.
How do you live on a planet that is totally lifeless? Did the Ceti eels teach the Space Seeded how to eat sand?
I recently saw an episode of Cheyenne where Madlyn Rhue portrayed a rancher’s daughter who could not walk, but didn’t let that stop her from being badass. I did not know of her later MS at that time.
Cambias @68- Khan as El Supremo? Ship to ship action in the nebula/ storm? You may have something there….
CBL @70- Protomatter, duh :)
@142/Christopher: I love The Wounded Sky. Probably my most re-read Star Trek novel.
Interesting idea about her characters being idealized versions of the ones in the TV show. It would explain why her books feel so right to some people and so wrong to others.
@141/JanaJansen
“… Kirk did it on purpose. He wanted Spock to think that he was talking about Sam and then surprise him with the message: “You are my brother. You are not alone.””
Yeah, that’s how I interpreted it at first, too, when I saw the movie on opening night. But upon subsequent viewings, I came to the conclusion that nah, they didn’t put that much thought into it. :-)
@142/CLB
Hey man, I just took your earlier post at face value. Clearly you’re putting WAAAAAY more thought into this than I am.
“The point is that they were willing to retcon the previous story to fit their needs.”
But don’t you see my point? With regard to Chekov, in particular, there was no retcon, because there was nothing TO retcon, since there had been nothing established about when he first joined the Enterprise crew. Khan remembering him in TWOK never bothered me. Now, had Chekov mentioned in his first TV appearance that he had just come aboard, I’d feel differently. (In the same vein, just because we never saw Kevin Riley again after “The Conscience of the King,” does that mean he transferred off the ship right after that episode? Or Yeoman Tonia Barrows right after “Shore Leave”?)
@147/Glenn: “Retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity.” People these days seem to have gotten the impression that that means contradicting past continuity, but it doesn’t. It literally means retroactively establishing something new about an earlier story, something that wasn’t revealed at the time. That new revelation can recontextualize an event, can change its meaning, but it’s presented as if it were part of the original story all along. For instance, “Redemption” retcons “Yesterday’s Enterprise” by revealing that the Enterprise-C ‘s crew weren’t actually killed as we thought they were, but taken prisoner. It’s information that’s presented as being in continuity with the original story, but is only established retroactively. It doesn’t contradict the original information — hence the “continuity” part — but it changes how we interpret it. So yes, Khan knowing Chekov is a retcon,in the original, broader sense of the word. It’s new information about the original story that was only established after the fact.
And again, it’s beside the point. I don’t care about continuity nitpicks. That’s not the level of analysis I’m pursuing here. It’s boring and shallow just to argue over whether fact A fits with fact B. Literary criticism is not just about such superficial bookkeeping. I’m talking about the creative process, the ways in which the filmmakers were willing to be flexible with the specifics of a creative work. You’re fixating on a single tree, while I’m talking about the forest.
@110, 124 CLB–You got me thinking.
It would be really interesting if someone were to write a book on the differing attitudes towards canon in various fandoms, historical and current, Western and non-Western. Maybe some professor of popular culture could get her students to write theses on “approaches to canon in the fandom of fictional world X” and then draw all the research together.
All sorts of fascinating questions here: What were the earliest instances of a large fan group interacting with the (rarely if ever entirely self-consistent) original stories and arguing about canon? (Sherlock Homes comes to mind.) The differing attitudes towards canon and reconciling contradictions have played out with regard to sacred literature/stories—how much of that is reflected in fans’ approach to frankly fictional worlds? How does the input of the original creator(s) or the organization that holds the copyright shape fans’ sense of canon? (Paramount is at the controlling end of the spectrum. Marvel and DC enact official rewrites of the master story all the time, and sometimes publish different “parallel universe” versions of the same character’s story simultaneously.) In some fictional worlds, there is one original creator (Conan Doyle, Rowling) while in others there were multiple people and takes involved from very early on. Even in TV shows, there’s a range from “one dominant creator” (Babylon 5) to “one person with the initial vision which is worked out by many” (Star Trek?) to “a changing bunch of people developing this together”. How does that affect fans’ approach to canon? How much is the Intent of the Creator used to adjudicate disagreements over canon? How is that Intent established? Or does the evidence of the stories themselves outweigh the creator’s input independent of those stories? I’ve been fascinated, for instance, by the ways the discussions about Hermione Granger’s ethnicity play out. How common is it for fans to judge the canonicity of later contributions to the fictional world on the basis of whether the creators of those contributions were longtime fans themselves?
Has any such broad study been written, as far as any of you know?
@149/Saavik: My understanding is that, yes, Sherlock Holmes fans and critics were the first people to use the religious term “canon” as a metaphor for differentiating an original work of fiction from derivative works and pastiches. The original bone of contention was probably the William Gillette stage play, which was written with Conan Doyle’s participation but diverged significantly from the prose canon in its portrayal of Holmes (he fell in love and got married, for one thing), and yet introduced a character (a pageboy named Billy) that Doyle would adopt into later stories, making him the antecedent of other adaptation-to-original characters like Jimmy Olsen, Harley Quinn, and Agent Coulson.
And that seminal example shows how it pays not to get too rigid about what is or isn’t canon. Fiction is not as rigidly defined as reality. Concepts can overlap and be borrowed. Different works can have some continuity in common and some not. There are countless ways of expanding on a fictional universe, countless ways of handling continuity within a single series, let alone among it and its adaptations. Canons themselves are much more mutable than reality; they pretend to represent consistent realities but are subject to revision along the way.
“(Paramount is at the controlling end of the spectrum. Marvel and DC enact official rewrites of the master story all the time, and sometimes publish different “parallel universe” versions of the same character’s story simultaneously.)”
If you really look closely, most new incarnations of Star Trek have been mild reinterpretations to some degree. They aren’t perfectly consistent, but we accept the conceit that they represent a single universe and gloss over all the ways they clash. Every single revival has been denounced by some fans as too different to count as “real Trek,” but has eventually come to be accepted and folded into the whole. I think Star Wars has been rather more tight at maintaining consistency. Its movies and TV series have a surprising amount of unity of design and interpretation of the universe; it feels more unified than the various Trek productions do. And its policy toward consistency among its tie-ins has tended to be a lot more controlling than CBS (formerly known as Paramount) is toward Trek. In SW these days, every tie-in is overseen in-house at Lucasfilm and treated as part of the canon; before that, they weren’t really, but they pretended they were and insisted that all tie-ins be consistent with each other. With Star Trek, while tie-ins have always been required to stay consistent with onscreen canon (albeit with errors or idiosyncrasies of interpretation occasionally getting through), they’ve never been formally required to be consistent with each other, and indeed there was a time in the ’90s when they were formally required not to be. The Trek tie-in novels these days have a long-running, overarching continuity, but that’s by editorial and authorial choice rather than studio mandate, and the novels are totally inconsistent with the IDW comics and the Star Trek Online MMORPG.
@148/CLB
I was an editor and writer for Marvel Comics throughout the 1990s, so I don’t really need an explanation of what a retcon is. That said, I think you and I have been talking about two separate things.
When I refer to how Meyer and Bennett handled Chekov in TWOK, I’m referring specifically to the part about Chekov having served aboard the Enterprise during the first season of TOS. Which doesn’t qualify as a retcon. There was no “con” to “ret,” since it was NEVER established when exactly Chekov joined the crew. And so the extrapolation that Khan and Chekov met off screen during “Space Seed” was something I could accept easily.
I will grant, however, that the act of establishing that Khan and Chekov had met during “Space Seed” WOULD qualify as a retcon.
“You’re fixating on a single tree, while I’m talking about the forest.”
Like I said before, you’re giving this way more thought than I am.
Look at all these comments! That really underscores the impact this movie has had. Without Wrath of Khan, the Star Trek franchise would have died. There would be no TNG, DS9 or Voyager. Maybe the reboots, given this day and age, but there would still only be one captain.
The Genesis Cave scene was also one of the coolest moments I ever experienced in a movie theatre. When Kirk says, “I don’t like to lose,” the entire crowd ERUPTED in cheers. That was 35 years ago, but I still laugh out loud whenever I remember that moment.
TV Tropes calls such scenes A Crowning Moment of Awesome. For my money, that scene is the definitive CMoA.
@152/trike: Well, the TMP rewatch has 164 comments. And I find it hard to tell what would have happened without this film. The alternative could have been a different film, a TV show, or nothing at all. Star Trek had fanzines and novels and conventions. Perhaps there would have been a few years without any new films, and then TNG would have been made anyway.
I think in a movie where I AM the one watching it it is perfectly fine that captian Kirk react more strongly to the death of Spock even than his dead brother. Why not? I did.
@154/roblewmac: Reacting more strongly is one thing. Saying “I’ve never faced death” is a lousy way of phrasing it, though. The line should’ve been written differently. Like, “I’ve faced death too many times, but it’s been a long time since it’s hit me this hard,” or words to that effect.
@152: What reignited interest in returning the franchise to television was Voyage Home’s box-office success, more than anything. By far the biggest winner.
@156/Eduardo: No, TNG was in the works before The Voyage Home came out. The commissioning of the show was announced in October 1986, a month before TVH’s release. The first-draft bible was dated November 26, the very same day TVH was released in the US. Maybe the advance buzz for TVH was strong enough to influence the decision, but they didn’t know at the time what the box office results would be.
I repeat: Kirk never says that he’s NEVER faced death. He says to David, “Not like THIS.” The other situations he’d been through–Gary, Edith, Miramanee, Sam and Aurelan–were not instances in which Kirk enjoyed what appeared to be a clean, decisive victory, thinking that everything was going to fine and dandy, only to discover afterward that such a victory came at a terrible price.
@158/Glenn: That’s splitting hairs to try to rationalize a problematical line. I’d still rather speak about the process: If the writers had phrased that line differently, we wouldn’t have to make legalistic, twisty excuses to pretend it fits. You can usually concoct a rationale for any dialogue or continuity problem if you try hard enough, but it’s still better if you don’t have to.
Besides, I’d say your description does apply to Miramanee. He’d gotten happily married and was going to be a father — he probably considered that a great victory. And then it was abruptly, brutally yanked away from him.
Kirk’s scene with his son was interesting. On one hand Kirk is too tired for more fighting, and his son is reaching out to him. Kirk could be churlish and tell him he’s wrong, or just tiredly agree, hoping to build a greater understanding later.
On the other hand you have the emotional consequences of being the survivor of a holocaust goes a long way to explain it as well. Obviously none of this is explored in the film, but he could have felt that he and his brother were living on borrowed time, so his brother’s too-early death was something he’d been mentally prepared for, even expecting. This attitude could extend to everyone he ever meets. He’s been conditioned from an early age to expect people to be taken from him. Life on the Enterprise kind of reinforces this. It also explains his easy willingness to face death himself. He’s never faced death as an adult (or near adult) because he’s always taken it for granted.
But then life on the Enterprise also teaches him a different lesson. That despite everything the universe throws at them, Spock, McCoy and the others survive when everyone else dies. They keep surviving for decades. He then subconsciously starts to expect them to survive. Until one of them doesn’t. Then he has to face and acknowledge death in a way that he hasn’t since he was a child
Oh, and I adored the way Peter Kirk broke the “unwinnable” scenario without cheating. Learning about other cultures is never a bad thing! :
@159/CLB
I respectfully disagree, on all counts.
I don’t feel I’m making any “legalistic, twisty excuses to pretend it fits.” If I did, I wouldn’t have posted my previous comment. The fact is, Kirk specifically states that he’s never faced death LIKE THIS. As in, paying a terrible price for victory. That’s what the line meant to me back in 1982, and what it’s meant to me ever since.
DAVID: Lt. Saavik was right. You never have faced death.
KIRK: No, not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. Tricked my way out of death, and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity.
He’s referring to all the times he managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat without paying a terrible personal price. A great example: “Balance of Terror.”
I hardly think he’d consider his defeat of Gary Mitchell to be a “victory.” Sam was dead by the time Kirk found him, and Aurelan was already doomed. There was no victory related to Edith’s death, just the fulfillment of Kirk’s responsibility to history and the universe.
“Besides, I’d say your description does apply to Miramanee. He’d gotten happily married and was going to be a father — he probably considered that a great victory. And then it was abruptly, brutally yanked away from him.”
That is a REAL stretch, in terms of what I’m talking about.
I dont know “I’ve never faced death does’nt work…not like THIS! Does kinda work for me. It’s not the best line maybe but I buy the death of Spock effecting Kirk enough so he says “I’VE faced death but not like this with the exception of the following enumerated list One of whom is his “true love” who was time paradox he knew for a week.
I am going to continue my love-fest for TWOK on a few points that my not have been made yet. I think the writers are to be commended for setting up interesting twists as the story unfolds. The Kirk “Its been two hours” gotcha moment is the most obvious, but the movie has been out so long I think many of us have forgotten how it affected us the first time.
The opening scene, for example. I remember being intrigued, perplexed, and ultimately amused, by watching Saavik struggling with what we did not know to be a simulation at the time, until the lights went up and Kirk comes sauntering in. That scene does double duty. It also introduces the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario into the plot, and they tease us in telling us Kirk’s performance was unique, and we all knew and looked forward to finding out how….
As for David being Kirk’s son. I think we tend to watch the first volatile meeting between them without remembering that the first time we saw it, we didn’t know that was father meeting son. Again, the movie teased us, because Kirk’s shocked reaction seemed strange at first, and then it began to dawn on us….
To add to favorite lines of dialogue:
Kirk: Scotty you old space dog. You’re well?
Scotty: I had me a wee bout, but Dr. McCoy pulled me through.
Kirk: A wee bout of what?
Scotty: Shore leave, Admiral.
I say again. I love this movie. Not as a life-changing film that causes me to contemplate my place in the universe. Just as pure entertainment.
@164/fullyfunctional: Speaking of how it affected audiences the first time, the opening simulation scene served a third duty beyond the ones you mention. Leaks existed before the Internet, so the rumor that Spock would die in the movie got out well in advance. So they put in an opening scene where Spock (and almost everyone else) seemingly died right at the start of the movie, then had it revealed as a fakeout, in the hopes that it would dispel the rumors and lull the audience’s concerns, so that when Spock actually did die at the end, it would come as a surprise.
The simulation, by the way, is another of the many things about TWOK that make no sense. First off, why are so many senior officers participating in a cadet simulation? I’ve rationalized it as part of their commemoration of Kirk’s birthday somehow — they’ve all gotten back together for the event and they decided to have some “fun” by sitting in on the Kobayashi Maru run that day — but it’s still weird from a procedural standpoint. And second, why are there live explosives going off in a simulator? That seems unwise.
@144, Cosmotiger; I get that Carol doesn’t want to compete with the glamour of a Starship Captain father but she’s still wrong. David might still have chosen her field even if he’d known and she wouldn’t have had to live a lie with her son and be gratuitously cruel to her ex.
@165 CLB: Re the simulation, I took it as giving the cadets time working with experienced crewmembers. I’d think it would add a layer of “this is the big time, this is serious!” More than if they’d just been commanding or working with their fellow cadets. At least that is how I rationalized it; no doubt KRAD’s “opening credits” issue played a part. – grin –
@157/Christopher: You’re right. I mixed up the dates.
But regardless, they could have tried the TV route right after Wrath of Khan’s success and they didn’t. They chose to do ST3 instead. I guess one of the reasons they didn’t jumpstart TNG until 1986 was to capitalize on the 20th anniversary. Another issue was obviously Gene Roddenberry, since supposedly Paramount had no legal grounds to keep him away from production as they did with the films, so there had to be protracted negotiations going on during that period.
Having Voyage Home be the financial success it was, however, probably gave Paramount a much needed confidence boost in going for a full 26 episode season, especially given how much each one cost back then.
@160/WillMayBeWise: I find your thought about Kirk feeling that he’s living on borrowed time intriguing. And I agree about the scene with his son (although I don’t think that this was the intended reading, see below).
@162/Glenn Greenberg: “The fact is, Kirk specifically states that he’s never faced death LIKE THIS. As in, paying a terrible price for victory. That’s what the line meant to me back in 1982, and what it’s meant to me ever since.”
But do you also think that this is the reading Meyer intended? Because I don’t. I always had the impression that he really means that Kirk has never faced death, only cheated it. I think he wanted Kirk to learn a lesson. To achieve this, he had to change the character: Turn him into a rule breaker. Cast doubt on his heroism. Make him smug – in the Genesis cave scene that seems to be so beloved (cf. comments #113 and #152), he really “pats himself on the back”. All this to set him up for a fall.
This confused me greatly when the film was new. Kirk was my favourite character, and I hardly recognised him in some of the scenes. But since the makers of Star Trek claimed that this was who he was, it had to be me who was at fault. (I was fifteen years old, and I had no idea that this was a different set of makers of Star Trek.)
@169/Jana: Exactly what I’ve been saying. Continuity was not an overriding concern for the filmmakers of that era. Look at most film adaptations of older things from that era and earlier, or even at most long-running single series, and you’ll find little concern for the kind of exact, note-perfect consistency that modern fandom demands. It was understood that these are works of make-believe, not documentaries of consistent realities, and so the makers of new works were free to change the details in ways that would serve the stories they want to tell.
Modern audiences take fiction far, far too literally. They don’t understand that sequels and revivals and things like that are interpretations of the original source and are subject to change. Look at something like the original Universal Monsters movies, where the continuity changed from sequel to sequel all the time. First Frankenstein did his experiments in a remote watchtower, then he did them in a storehouse on his estate grounds, then he did them directly in his family castle. And House of Frankenstein contradicts the geography of the earlier films’ events, so that things taking place in Vasaria in the previous two films now happened in the burg of Frankenstein where the first two films had occurred, and Visaria [sic] was somewhere else entirely. The Planet of the Apes series did much the same — since none of the first four films was made with sequels in mind, each successive film had to retcon details from the previous one to justify its existence. First Taylor just spent 2000 years in suspended animation, then it was retconned to a time warp in the second film. First we were told that the domestication and breeding of apes into intelligent servants was centuries in the future, then it was retconned to happen in a single generation somehow. And so on.
@169/JanaJansen
“do you also think that this is the reading Meyer intended?”
It doesn’t matter. I’m not a mind reader. Only Meyer knows what he intended with regard to his work, and I’ve found that in many cases, he’s been reluctant to divulge that. He’d rather the audience come up with their own answers, and interpret the work based on their own observations and feelings. (He’s been asked many times over the years why Khan wore only one glove. His answer has always been something along the lines of, “I don’t know. Why do YOU think he did?”)
When all is said and done, who CARES whether it’s “the reading Meyer intended”? All that matters is whether the moment works, and doesn’t directly contradict things we know to be “true.”
If Kirk had said in the scene, “I’ve never lost anyone close to me until now,” then I’d have a real problem. But he didn’t. Maybe Gene Roddenberry insisted that “No, not like this” be added to the script. Maybe Harve Bennett, given how he had just recently watched all 79 episodes, realized that Meyer was disregarding a lot of deaths in Kirk’s past, and he made the decision to add it, just as Spock’s “Remember” moment with McCoy was added in the midst of production. We don’t know. Again, it doesn’t matter.
You’re free, of course, to have your own reaction to the scene in question, and to challenge its veracity. But my reaction is just as valid. I don’t need a sworn statement from Nicholas Meyer backing me up to make it so.
Looking over all the criticisms of this movie—many of which are valid—that it’s cheesy, garish, over-the-top, hammy, with holes in logic, slow-moving ship battles, character and canonical inconsistencies, and less impressive televisual production values…
Sounds an awfully lot like an episode of Star Trek! Hehe.
“Kirk takes that opportunity to scream Khan’s name into his communicator for no compellingly good reason, except maybe to create a meme.” Not to be a stickler, but the film came out in 1982, decades before “memes” were invented and long before high speed internet that could stream videos was publicly available.
@173/zeeman2020: The word “meme” is significantly older than its modern use. It was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to refer to a concept, symbol, or behavior that propagates through a culture by replication from one mind to another, analogously to how genes propagate themselves through organic replication, and able to mutate, evolve, and influence a population in analogous ways. The terminology of an idea “going viral” is derived from this biological analogy as well.
So technically memes have existed for as long as human beings have been able to transmit ideas from one person to another — and perhaps even since before humans evolved, since many animals are capable of passing on knowledge and learned behaviors. Stories, songs, jokes, fashions, recipes, learned skills, religious beliefs — all of those things are memes. And, yes, the kind of things we call memes today, like jokes and catchphrases and movie quotes, were absolutely able to propagate before there was an Internet. Watch any old Warner Bros. or MGM cartoon from the ’40s or thereabouts and you’ll see the cartoon characters quoting popular song lyrics, radio stars’ catchphrases, famous movie quotes, literary references, etc. — even though most of the references are lost on modern audiences who only know them from the cartoons (like “Gee, ain’t I a stinker?” or “Mmmmm, could be!” or the entire personality of Foghorn Leghorn). People then got their pop culture from movie theaters the same way we get it from the Internet, and there were plenty of memes that propagated that way, even if the word for them hadn’t been coined yet.
@170/Christopher: I’m usually not overly concerned with continuity, but changing a character’s personality seems like an odd move to make for a Star Trek story, even in 1982. For many fans, the characters were the reason why they were fans in the first place, so you’d think they would be considered important. I’d say that other core elements include a Starfleet that mostly does space exploration, humanitarianism/peaceful conflict resolution, and a diverse crew. Oddly, Meyer changed them all.
I really like the next two films. They undid at least some of these changes.
@171/Glenn Greenberg: Please don’t get me wrong, I didn’t intend to criticise your reaction. I was asking a different question, and if it’s a question you aren’t interested in, that’s fine.
@175/JanaJansen
It’s all good. No offense taken. :-)
I really like this film, I know it’s a departure from TOS, that it has huge continuity/plot consistency issues regarding the show (and the movie itself), but what can I say… the TOS films were my first Trek, and the “trilogy” this one forms with The Search For Spock and The Voyage Home is very close to my heart.
The whole “explain what glasses are” is pretty dumb, Kirk is a learned man, even if people don’t use eyeglasses regularly, he would have seen them in old films or read about them in books… even seen them in backward planets. And people probably still use sunglasses, unles Retinax also shields your eyes from sunlight.
As for getting to the wrong Ceti Alpha planet… didn’t the Reliant scans show there was one less planet?
@9 – Ragnar: That still doesn’t fix it, Chekov wouldn’t allowed them to even consider Ceti Alpha V for Genesis.
@14 – Jana: Being 50 in the 1980s wasn’t the same as being 50 today.
@21 – Jana: In Kirk’s position, would you never ever wonder what happened to Khan? Would you never check up on what Starfleet has done in that matter?
@65 – Chris: Was it a “someone is wrong on the internet” situation? I feel your pain.
@77 – Saavik: I’m certain the KM is not a test where they tell you “You are going to sit for the Kobayashi Maru.”, they just tell you it’s a simulation you need to go through, and BAM! it’s your KM. In fact, it’s probably not even the same test always, not even using the same ship name or situation.
@101 – ragnar: But Khan is supposed to be an actual super genius, a superhuman, not a regular human genius who’s just a genius in one aspect or two.
@104 – Glenn: I’m mostly with you on this, but you can’t fault writers for having characters have conversations while riding the turbolifts…
@131 – Jana: “And I don’t believe they take you into the Starfleet Academy unless you can count.”
Yet the Reliant crew never notices the Ceti Alpha system is missing a planet. :)
@138 – Roxana: Agreed. I can understand keeping the truth from David while he’s a child, but after a certain point, even before adulthood, she should have told him.
@142 – Chris: I never really got that about DS9, they could have very easily put on a Starfleet uniform on any of those aliens, and almost never did.
@149 – Saavik: Barring the Bible, one of the earliest “canon/non canon” discussions I’ve heard of is from the 17th century, regarding the unautorized sequel to Don Quijote (by an unknown author under the pen name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda)). This book which “forced” Quijote’s original author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra to write his own sequel, mostly because “Avellaneda” was a fan of Lope de Vega, Cervantes’ rival, and used the book to insult Cervantes. Cervantes, in turn, used his “Part Two” of Quijote to insult back. :)
@174 – Chris: “The Selfish Gene”, what an interesting title given we’re talking about Star Trek. :)
@177/MaGnUs: “In Kirk’s position, would you never ever wonder what happened to Khan? Would you never check up on what Starfleet has done in that matter?”
Nope. Kirk is a busy man, and when he finds the time to check up on any of his previous encounters, I imagine that he is more interested in others. How are all the formerly computer-controlled societies faring whose computers he destroyed? Has the syndicate on Sigma Iota II done away with the gang warfare? Are there peace talks with the Gorn? Are the peace talks between Eminar and Vendikar successful? Is there still a war on Neural? Did the Providers on Triskelion keep their promise to educate the thralls? Have the Kelvans adopted friendly relations with the Federation? How has Eymorg culture changed now that they don’t have a Controller any more? And so on.
Khan was really dangerous to him and his ship for a few hours, but he isn’t very important in the great scheme of things.
@177/MaGnUs:
“@104 – Glenn: I’m mostly with you on this, but you can’t fault writers for having characters have conversations while riding the turbolifts…”
Ummmm, I can fault writers if characters are having conversations WITH the turbolifts, which is what I actually wrote.
@178 – Jana: I’d say he’d check on all of those AND Khan.
@179 – Glenn: My bad. :)
And it doesn’t have to be Kirk doing the check-ip. There’s an entire fleet out there. But Kirk apparently kept everything secret and it cause the deaths of many people.
@181/kkozoriz: That’s a perfect example of the attitude I talked about in comment #14.
There are many good things about this film. For instance, the characters of Carol and David Marcus. Civilians and scientists, they broaden the world of Star Trek in this era nicely. They are ethical and pacifistic, embodying the Roddenberry, Coon, Fontana, views of the original series. Brilliant and confident, Carol is Kirk’s equal. We get the impression she has never taken any crap from this guy. She’s the kind of partner that it’s believable for Kirk to have, which is pretty rare. David is a pacifist and anti-military, the very values that characters like Edith Keeler, Spock, Surak, later Picard, and, I would argue, Kirk himself, embody. But, unfortunately, here he is represented as basically naïve and wrong in his views, while Kirk comes off as a typical militarist, essentially an American establishment-type figure. With some exceptions, Eighties Kirk would remain more or less this type of authoritarian figure, essentially the opposite of the intention of his creators who saw him as a man of action, sure, but also as a man with the values of a far more socially advanced and progressive future, a man without bigotry or prejudice, a man from a utopian society, a man of peace.
David could have gone on to be a foil for Kirk, his conscience, representing the values Kirk supposedly believes in. But Harve Bennett saw David primarily as a villain, I believe, a crummy kid from the radical youth generation (the generation Roddenberry embraced and admired, of course).
This isn’t surprising. Aaron Spelling and Bennett’s Mod Squad, though described on Wikipedia as highly regarded, strikes as a disreputable concept, superficially “liberal,” glorifying undercover cops who grow their hair long and and snitch their way into the Sixties radical, protest scene, while Bennett’s original idea for Wrath of Khan was David leading a rebellion against the Federation; once again, the young radical as villain and the establishment glorified.
Nicholas Meyer also pointed the film series in a militaristic direction. The uniforms, the naval ritual, more of a feeling of hierarchy and tradition. Essentially the opposite of Whoopi Goldberg’s line, “Not a ship of war, but a ship of peace.” I know a lot of people love this film and I have no quarrel with them, may they live long and prosper, but I believe Meyer and Bennett seriously misunderstood Star Trek.
It is NOT true that Leonard Nimoy was only willing to come back if Spock was killed off. Mr. Nimoy has said over and over again that it was NEVER his idea to kill Spock.
At the time TMP as made, it was called THE Motion Picture, because they thought there’d be only one. When TWOK was made, again they thought this would be the final film. So when Bennett and Meyer decided to kill Spock, Mr. Nimoy figured that if this would be the last Star Trek film, it was okay with him for Spock to go out as the hero who sacrificed himself to save the ship … but even then, it wasn’t HIS idea.
I thought having Kirk say, “I feel young” as the last line of dialogue of the entire movie — shortly after he’s said an emotional good-bye to his best friend of many years — was incredibly tone deaf. Much of the rest of the movie worked for me, but that line completely snapped me out of my willing suspension of disbelief.
@184/Corylea: “At the time TMP as made, it was called THE Motion Picture, because they thought there’d be only one.”
That doesn’t follow. The previous year, we had Superman: The Movie, which was filmed back-to-back with its planned sequel and which ended with an onscreen caption saying “Next year, Superman II.” They knew going in that it was the first of two, but they still called it “The Movie.” So calling something “The Movie/Motion Picture” doesn’t mean it’s the only one they have planned — it’s just a way of distinguishing it from the previous TV/comics/etc. incarnation. It’s being compared against the past, not the future.
In fact, it was always the hope of TMP’s makers that there would be sequels; that’s why it ends with the status quo restored and the ship and reunited crew going out to explore. The marvelously detailed oral history Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture has some discussion of the producers’ tentative sequel plans that were scuttled in favor of a lower-budget approach and a different production team when TMP went so far over budget and Paramount wasn’t willing to work with Roddenberry again.
By the same token, TWOK wasn’t intended to be “the last.” It was meant to be a test to see if further Trek movies could be viable if produced at a lower-budget level. If it had failed to make a profit, it would’ve been the last. But it succeeded, so it wasn’t.
That’s why it’s always naive to talk about filmmakers’ future plans as if they were fixed in advance. Of course they aren’t. Filmmaking decisions are about money, period. Films that make money get sequels; films that lose money don’t.
> Or, rather, endings. Because the only movie I can recall with so many separate denouements is A.I.
I guess you never watched The Return of the King.
I most recently rewatched TWOK with my kids, after we saw Into Darkness. I think I was the one who commented on the seemingly-slow pacing at one point (and, even if it’s no STTMP, the storytelling here is often a bit leisurely, particularly if you’ve just watched a J.J. Abrams flick or two), but my kids said “no, it’s good, it shouldn’t just end”. Even with the slower pace, this movie packs more — thematically, emotionally, and character-wise — into its 110 minutes than the reboots do into 120% of the time.
Re: “I’ve never faced death before” — I always took this as Kirk’s acknowledgement of his own youthful callowness, of which there is plenty of evidence in TOS. Even Edith Keeler’s death only seems to knock him off stride for a moment or two, before the Kirk-jaw squares up and we move on to the next adventure. It seems perfectly fitting given the film’s theme of aging and regret.
#185 @@@@@ Christopher L Bennett — I’m paraphrasing comments Mr. Nimoy made in interviews; it was his idea that it was called “THE” Motion Picture, and as far as they knew it would be the only one. He was also the one who said that as far as he knew, TWOK was the last movie, so he didn’t object when others suggested that Spock be killed.
I’m sorry, I should have made it clear that I was paraphrasing Mr. Nimoy’s comments in interviews. (I’m usually better about this, but someone was talking to me while I was typing, so I didn’t have my full attention handy.)
@184/Corylea: “I thought having Kirk say, “I feel young” as the last line of dialogue of the entire movie — shortly after he’s said an emotional good-bye to his best friend of many years — was incredibly tone deaf.”
As much as I dislike the film, that scene actually works for me.
From my own experience, when you lose someone, it’s possible to have alternating good and bad times almost from the start – or rather, to feel happy on the surface for certain periods of time. In the final scene Kirk is surrounded by friends and family, and there’s a beautiful new planet to look at. I think he has a moment of fleeting surface happiness here. He’s back to being sad at the beginning of TSFS.
@188/Jana: You’re right. The idea was that, yes, Spock’s death was tragic, but it came alongside the creation of new life, new possibilities, with the Genesis planet — as well as the new possibilities that came with Kirk reuniting and reconciling with Carol and his son (since he didn’t know what was going to happen in the next movie), and the new possibilities represented by Saavik and the other cadets that Spock’s sacrifice spared. So there were loss and gain existing side by side.
I kinda went through something similar when my father died. It was a heavy loss, yes, but it brought me back in touch with the larger extended family that I’d fallen largely out of contact with, so the loss was balanced with a gain. And it’s those positive, hopeful things that we cling to when we’re faced with tragedy and loss. That’s what the end of the movie represented.
@189/Christopher: When my husband died, which is the experience I referred to above, an incredible amount of people came to visit and offer help. Since then, I’ve always thought that friends (and not “fortitude”, an ubiquitous item on German sympathy cards) are the most important thing for a grieving person.
In that light, I really like the ending of the film. I also imagine that Kirk’s close friendship with Spock and McCoy helped him to cope with his losses during the five-year mission.
@190/Jana: “I also imagine that Kirk’s close friendship with Spock and McCoy helped him to cope with his losses during the five-year mission.”
You know, that’s the most plausible explanation I’ve heard yet for Kirk’s “I’ve never faced death, not like this” line. Maybe he meant he’s never faced death without having Spock on hand to help him through it. (At least, not since the second pilot. There were all those deaths he witnessed on Tarsus IV in his youth…)
Chris, you mean Spock erasing his memories to ease his pain? :)
192. MaGnUs – And just how many times did Spock do that? If he was willing to over a woman kirk had only known for a few hours, what about Edith and Miramanee, both of whom he knew for weeks or months? And did Kirk ever find out about it? Sort of puts the lie to kirk’s declaration in TFF that “I need my pain”, doesn’t it?
I just tend to ignore that one time they showed him doing it.
@@@@@#14/JanaJansen – actually the aging theme of the movie rings pretty true to me: just earlier this year my mom, who is 67, was lamenting to me when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror how old she’s gotten and how she never envisioned herself being/looking this old. It was kind of sad but I just tried to comfort her in that we all get old, even me. And besides, she’s always looked great for her age, even now. And aside from her, the aging them rings true to me too. I’m a relatively youthful 38 but I feel like my youth is slipping away and I need to try to accomplish all of these goals I associate with being an adult by the time I hit 40 which is my “scary age”. :p
But aside from these real-life examples, I totally buy the age theme as it applies to Kirk because the Trek fans and general audience have mostly seen Kirk portrayed as the hot shot, bare-chested, ass-kicking, ladies man starship captain of the 1960’s show and now he is a tired, older, slower, admiral fully aware of all of these young cadets running around on his old ship that are supplanting him; oh, and meeting his now adult son for the first time. It makes total sense to me that he feels so old.
@195/GarretH: “I totally buy the age theme as it applies to Kirk because the Trek fans and general audience have mostly seen Kirk portrayed as the hot shot, bare-chested, ass-kicking, ladies man starship captain of the 1960’s show and now he is a tired, older, slower, admiral […]”.
I guess that doesn’t work for me because I’ve never seen Kirk that way. Kirk has been my favourite character since I discovered Star Trek at the age of eleven, and in retrospect, I think the main reasons were that he was so friendly, and that he did all the standard action-adventure hero stuff while at the same time being totally unlike the usual (boring) action-adventure heroes.
As for “slower”, one of the small things I enjoy about TSFS is that Kirk is allowed to run in the corridors again. Because I’ll be fifty in two weeks, and I run on the stairs in my house a lot, so it feels true to me.
@196/JanaJansen – That’s great you’re so active!
Perhaps the context of the era, 1982, in terms of how older people were viewed and perceived can also translate into how they were depicted on screen in TWOK. What is certain, and I think is great, is that people are living not just longer today, but healthier too (at least in the Western world). People are more aware of nutrition and physical activity. This has extended to what we see in the movies, evidenced by 80’s action stars like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, and Cruise still looking believable headlining action flicks in the 2010’s.
We see the age theme come up again in The Next Gen with The Best of Both Worlds where Riker misses the qualities in himself that he sees embodied in Shelby and Troi calls Riker “more seasoned” to his horror.
@195 – GarretH: Any Star Trek fan that sees kirk as a “hot shot, bare-chested, ass-kicking, ladies man starship captain” has not paid much attention to TOS.
@198. Oh, I think there’s plenty of evidence for each of those descriptions. Hot shot: Kirk’s rapid rise through the ranks of Star Fleet is well-chronicled, even in TOS. He commands a state of the art Constitution-class starship on an historic mission at the age of 32. I think that qualifies as “hot shot-ish”. Kirk’s gotten his ass handed to him plenty of times, but he holds his own as an ass kicker. He holds his own against the Gorn in Arena, against the genetically superior Khan in “Space Seed”, against a crewman granted godlike powers in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, against Vulcan Spock in “Amok Time”, against his memory’s own creation in Finnegan (“Shore Leave”), against not one but three other gladiator types in “Gamesters of Triskelion”, and when he’s fighting other humans, he’s almost a lock (“Omega Glory”, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”.)
As for his ladies man status, I know there’s been a debate on these pages about whether Kirk’s really the rogue so many take him for, but there’s no denying he’s got a long list of ex’s and he’ll flirt with anyone (even teenagers), especially if he thinks it will help the mission.
And as for “bare chested”, that’s not even debatable. http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/kirks_shirt.htm
@197/GarretH: Thank you!
That wasn’t one of Riker’s finest hours, by the way. There’s a very real threat that the Borg will destroy the Federation, and he’s unhappy about being called “seasoned”.
@199/fullyfunctional: He usually doesn’t flirt unless it helps the mission. And I wouldn’t call five or six ex’s a “long list”.
Kirk was an ass-kicking ladies’ man to the extent that any ’60s action hero was required to be, but he had a lot more nuance, sensitivity, and depth than most ’60s action heroes. So you can read him either way depending on what your baseline is.
Well, this is awesome.
I’ve been doing Star Trek rewatches on this site for six years now. This is the first time a post has gone over 200 comments.
I love you guys. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@201 No argument. Shatner’s natural swagger added an interesting flavor to one of the more intriguing characters on network tv. And this series had two of them.
@203/fullyfunctional: I don’t really think it was the swagger that did it. Macho swagger was the default mode for ’60s adventure heroes on TV, so there was nothing unusual there. From what I read of fan writings from original-generation Trekkies, what resonated most with TOS’s female fans (who were by far the most vocal and active fan organizers and fanfic writers back in the day) were the sensitivity, vulnerability, and intelligence that Shatner projected as Kirk. They liked it that he was secure enough in his masculinity to be able to show emotion and admit to self-doubt. Like I said, he had more depth than most other action leads, and that was what made him stand out from the pack.
@204/Christopher: Yep.
Kirk questions himself. He opens up to his friends. He apologises for mistakes. He shows a lot of emotion – he smiles a lot, and he can be truly afraid, too. He has a desire to help others. He reads poetry. All this, and he still comes across as a believable military commander.
When I hear “swagger”, I think of Sulu :-)
@205/Jana: I’ve always found it odd how society keeps going through pendulum swings and unlearning past lessons. Once the ’70s came along, there was this whole attitude that we were entering a new era of “men’s liberation” where men came to realize that they could be emotionally open and sensitive and vulnerable, that there was nothing wrong with that and it didn’t turn women off (just the opposite) and so forth, and the male role models of the decade included Alan Alda on M*A*S*H and people like that. (I even read some Trek fan writing touting Kirk/Shatner as the pioneer of the trend.) But then the ’80s came along and suddenly the archetypes of masculinity were cold, stoic, ultra-macho tough guys like Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Which always seemed like backsliding to me.
@206/Christopher: Yes, that was so odd! I pretty much refused to watch any of their films. Didn’t help, though :-)
@207/Jana: There are some good Schwarzenegger films out there. Terminator 2 comes to mind in particular, since it’s basically about the cold, mechanical killing machine learning to become a nurturing, protective father figure. Which is much less hokey in execution than it sounds from that description.
@208, agree, and not to get too far afield, but if you want to see the potential that Stallone’s career could have had if he had chosen to spend his Rocky cred on a serious acting career instead of macho mush, check out “Cop Land”.
I know I’m super late to this, but it struck me that you didn’t identify Peter Preston: Ike Eisenmann, co-star of the original Escape from Witch Mountain. I somehow immediately recognized Eisenmann as soon as I saw him when TWoK was released despite the fact that he was just a kid in EfWM.
The other co-star of EfWM? Paris Hilton’s aunt, Kim Richards. Lulz.
@210/jonfmorse: Yeah, I recognized Eisenmann at the time, since I’d seen him in a number of TV roles since Witch Mountain. For instance, he was one of the leads in the short-lived lost-in-the-Bermuda-Triangle series The Fantastic Journey with Jared Martin and Roddy McDowall.
#206
The ’70s also had Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson and a number of other tough guys blowing away baddies in movies and on television. It didn’t start in the ’80s. Every generation has its he-men.
@212/SidneyFalco: But that’s the thing. There have always been tough guys and toxic masculinity, but for a while there in the ’70s it looked like men were starting to outgrow that unhealthy standard and finally get in touch with their emotions and their empathy. There were still some tough male leads in media, but they weren’t assumed to be the only acceptable way for men to behave anymore. But then the culture backslid again.
I imagine those looking down their noses at Wrath of Khan believe proper Trek to be exemplars like Tales of Starfleet Engineering Corps: Plasma Conduit Bypass at Priplanus 9. To those who accuse the film of “garish melodrama” – there was plenty of that in Shakespeare. And if Wrath of Khan isn’t quite Shakespeare, it’s also quite a cut above standard popcorn fare in terms of its dramatic flair.
Nice Guy Yeti: Thank you for insulting the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series I edited from 2000-2007.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@214/”Nice” Guy Yeti: Your imagination needs help, so if you want to know what I consider to be proper Trek tales, it’s easy enough to find out:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/star-trek-fiction/
Hi, I’m late to the party. I’d been re-watching TOS on my own and was looking to see if anyone out there had happened to do a really satisfying and analytical retrospective, and pretty much hit the jackpot here. Well done.
First things… first. I’ve watched WOK more times than I can count and it never occurred to me that the Ceti eels were a straight-up dealbreaker for the Genesis test. Good catch.
I find it a little odd that nobody’s talking about the music, either here or on the article for TMP. Goldsmith’;s score was gorgeous but didn’t quite fit that film, and it wouldn’t become widely appreciated or accepted until it was re-purposed for TNG. Horner’s score manages to be shamelessly derivative and absolutely perfect at the same time. I was 12 when WOK came out and had been deeply disappointed– hearing the Courage fanfare at the top of WOK was the signal that all would soon be well.
And now a correction: Peter Preston is indeed in the theatrical version of WOK, and identified by name, even. The DC reveals him to be Scotty’s nephew but that’s it.
Edit to #217: Should read that I was deeply disappointed with TMP in 1979. As you were…
Hi again everybody. Good to see the rewatch get to the movies, and your reviews are on point as always, krad, and CLB as always I look for your commentary as an addendum to krad’s review. Personal issues have kept me away, but I’m back(although krad is technically done with this rewatch, there’s soooo much to say.)
Ah, this movie. I enjoyed it, but not quite to the degree of some of fandom and the general public. That may be because Trek for me isn’t about the space battles or revenge-obsessed villains. It’s about exploring ideas and the friendships between our characters, something that makes me appreciate this movie’s predecessor and successor more for. I also liked the look of TMP better. Those uniforms look more like space navy uniforms. I could never get past how uncomfortable the TWOK uniforms looked. Even as a kid I liked TMP, because it challenges me to think(and admittedly in my old age now, to stay awake). This movie is straightforward action, but it does keep to Trek with varying degrees of success.
The novelization of this movie, however, will always have a special place in my heart. I read it when I was very young. For me, it IS the movie. The friendship between Saavik and Preston, the Genesis scientists being fleshed out, make the story for me. Also, CLB, I loved The Darkness Drops Again. The scene with Terrell is one of the best things ever, and further my appreciation for the character.
Personally, I like the next movie far more than this one on its own, but I’ll comment on it on that rewatch
@219/DanteHopkins: “The novelization of this movie, however, will always have a special place in my heart. I read it when I was very young. For me, it IS the movie. The friendship between Saavik and Preston, the Genesis scientists being fleshed out, make the story for me.”
And it has Lewis Carroll!
And this is why I read so few books. I made these comments back in May or June but it has taken THIS long to read the 220 others on this article alone, just to make sure my questions were not already answered, you know. (Also, I recently discovered podcasts, an excellent alternative to reading.) I am hoping that Mr. Bennett’s work is now available in our library system so there is at least a chance of my getting to it (I believe I have bought two novels in the last 5 years).
Sadly, I am sure Keith has moved on from this thread and rightly so, but on the off-chance anyone else is still reading this nearly five months later:
Keith 1) He said: “if Kirk didn’t contact them in one day, not one hour. Cha cha cha.”
I don’t see that at all. An hour is an hour and when Kirk DOES contact Spock he says it’s been two hours. Why don’t they think Khan is still listening in?
Keith 2) “Later, Kirk leads a funeral in the torpedo bay, with his coffin shot out the tube toward the Genesis planet.” (I’m pretty sure it’s Spock’s coffin; the phrasing implies it is Kirk’s. Because, you know, grammar.)
@14JanaJansen?
I don’t know about your friends but since turning 50 and since losing my job, I am increasingly terrified of growing old as well as poor. Even friends of mine WITH jobs are worried about that so I disagree about not caring about growing older. It is a terrifying prospect. But every so often there are encouraging stories coming out there, and Carl Reiner’s new documentary was absolutely uplifting to me, although these nonagenarians are often in better shape than I am in.
@39 GREAT back and forth. As an improv student, I applaud that creativity!
I keep following all the threads….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@221/Lou: I’m sorry to hear that. It sounds really bad. Perhaps the difference is that most of my friends (myself included – I’ve turned fifty since I wrote that comment) have either money, or a supporting network of friends or family, or both. Also good social security. And I think none of them have lost their jobs recently. Of course, all this should be true for Kirk too.
Anyway, I hope things will get better for you!
For my money the last scene between Kirk & David was great. “I’m proud, very proud to be your son”, followed by an awkward embrace. Kirk has lost Spock, but gained a family. A time of endings and beginnings, both large and small.
TWOK will always be the greatest Trek film to me.
@188. JanaJansen
“As much as I dislike the film, that scene actually works for me.
From my own experience, when you lose someone, it’s possible to have alternating good and bad times almost from the start – or rather, to feel happy on the surface for certain periods of time. In the final scene Kirk is surrounded by friends and family, and there’s a beautiful new planet to look at. I think he has a moment of fleeting surface happiness here. He’s back to being sad at the beginning of TSFS.”
I think that after his scene with David(hugging), Kirk was operating on ‘happy chemicals’ for a few hours and that’s why we got the “I feel young” at the end. Then he’s all depressed at the beginning of TSFS.
One of my favorite Star Trek movies. Not perfect, but it has a lot of good things in it. I love the new uniforms; they’re my favorite uniforms in all of Star Trek. My 2nd favorite would probably be the TNG movie-era uniforms, as seen in First Contact; although TOS uniforms are also hard to beat.
I love the slower, weighty feel to the ship combat. With lots of enertia and manuevering arcs. I also like the visible damage on the hulls when shots hit home. Something TOS could never do. For me, I’ve always enjoyed the space-navy trappings and also the ship combat. I like those aspects of Star Trek as much as its other elements. Being a veteran myself, I appreciate that although Starfleet does operate in a somewhat military-fashion, they don’t overdo it. There’s still a relatively relaxed atmosphere aboard their ship.
A couple more thoughts to follow ;)
I do think that although Khan is less than he was in Space Seed, its makes sense to me; I find his arc believable. I could see how his bitterness and anger eventually turned him into the revenge-obsessed man we see in WoK.
As far as Khan’s followers go, most of them are dead, so it could just be that the followers who survived just happened to be the more western-European looking ones. Their apparent age never bothered me; I just assumed they had good genes. Which they do I guess, right? ;)
Much hay has been made of the shield-raising issue. I will just say that Kirk does go to yellow-alert and raises defensive-screens almost immediately. As far as defensive-screens go, I’ve always assumed that they were some sort of partial-strength shields that covered the most vital parts of the ship. Including the parts that were targeted by Khan. At least that’s what it looks like on the monitors on the bridge. One has to remember that during the TOS-era, ships didn’t seem to really have the bubble-type shields of TNG. Instead they had what are called “abalative” shields. Which more closely hugged the hull. At least thats what I remember from lengthy discussions on the Interplay/KlingonAcademy forums back in the late 90’s. Also, even if full shields were up, its still possible that Reliant could have damaged the Engine-room. Khan had the element of surprise, and Reliant could have probably easily gotten another round of shots off on the Enterprise if it hadn’t been taken out by the first volley.
Also, I wonder if people would have as much of an issue with Kirk not immediately raising shields if Saavik hadn’t read the regulation out. If that line was removed from the movie, then I think people wouldn’t be so critical of Kirk’s handling of the situation. That line deliberately makes Kirk look bad. One has to remember that characters can only make the decisions that their writers let them. :)
@227/dakota_mike: My problem with TWOK’s approach to Khan has never been about whether it makes sense in-story, just about whether it was the best or most interesting story to tell about the return of Khan. His descent into madness is plausibly justified within the story, sure, but that doesn’t make it satisfying to see the character diminished to such a degree.
“As far as Khan’s followers go, most of them are dead, so it could just be that the followers who survived just happened to be the more western-European looking ones.”
Again, the issue is not whether it can be justified in the fiction, but whether it was a good choice on the part of the real-life filmmakers. No matter what excuses you come up with for it in-story, it’s a bad thing to cast only white people in a movie. Hell, making excuses for it just makes it worse.
“As far as defensive-screens go, I’ve always assumed that they were some sort of partial-strength shields that covered the most vital parts of the ship.”
In fact, the refit Enterprise was intended to have a dual shield system, as alluded to in TMP (“The new force fields held!”). According to a memo reprinted on p. 50 of Star Trek: Phase II: The Lost Series by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, there were two components: the deflector shields, localized skin-tight fields over various portions of the hull, and the force field, a bubble surrounding the entire ship. The deflectors were stronger and could be turned on and off selectively, while the force field provided more comprehensive coverage all at once.
“Instead they had what are called “abalative” shields. Which more closely hugged the hull.”
That’s not what the word means. Ablative armor, like the kind used on the Defiant in DS9, is a thick physical shielding layer that absorbs the energy of an attack by partially vaporizing or eroding away. Ablation means erosion or dissipation — literally “carrying away.” The shield’s molecules carry away the weapon’s energy by breaking their bonds and dispersing into space. In real life, older spacecraft like Apollo used ablative heat shields that burned away on re-entry to protect the capsule from the heat.
“One has to remember that characters can only make the decisions that their writers let them.”
Yes, which is why it’s valid to criticize the writers for their choices. It’s not about what the characters do, it’s about whether it was a good idea on the writers’ part to make them do that.
@CLB, Speaking for myself I thought watching a bare chested Ricardo Montalban chewing all available scenery was one of the best parts of the movie. :-D
@228/Christopher: Ahh, thanks for the info on the shields. My memory from a forum discussion from twenty years ago was obviously a bit fuzzy! So I guess when characters talk about raising shields, they could potentially be referring to either type then? It seems by the time of TNG, bubble-type force fields were the main type of shield in use?
And of course, you’re quite correct about criticizing the writers choices, not the characters. I do see a lot of comments where people say things like, “After that scene, I hated so and so’s character for the rest of the franchise,” or “so and so should be drummed out of Starfleet after doing x.” And IMO, if a scene, or bit of dialog, or character choice, seems wrong or out of place, then I try to hold it against the writer more than the character. I think some people tend to take what’s on screen as absolute gospel, rather than remembering that many creators are involved in the franchise, and they are capable of getting things wrong. But that bleeds into a whole separate discussion on canonicity. With long-running franchises, be that film or television, I usually make my own headcanon. If a crappy sequel ruins a character or storyline from a previous entry, then the sequel never happened in my mind. Of course writers such as yourself, don’t necessarily have that luxury!
I found the extended discussion of McIntyre’s and Duane’s version of Trek fascinating, because of why it was such a non-issue for me. Not because I wouldn’t have cared, but because of what was available to my first extensive readings of Star Trek in novel form. More than half of my initial collection was the novelizations of the movies and a battered copy of “The Entropy Effect”. In my public library Diane Duane was one of the first authors I found, so “The Wounded Sky” and “Spock’s World” became firmly entrenched.
Because I didn’t have VHS recordings, my consumption of Trek screen material was the weekly Saturday episode on my local UHF station, and the second and third movie as they came out. So, originally the McIntyre version (supplemented by Duane, which was fairly compatible) WAS the Star Trek universe to me, and it never occurred to me until years later how much of their personal vision was incorporated. In fact, after I got a copy of the movies on VHS I kept encountering moments where I wondered what happened to the part I read in the book!
In retrospect, they may or may not have written the very best or most faithful versions of Trek, but regardless I remain affectionate towards their work because it was, in many ways, my first in-depth absorption of the Trek universe, and becoming a fan.
@231/tjareth: Those books were so lovely. Back in the day I had a friend who didn’t watch the show and only read the books. And I still reread The Wounded Sky once a year or so.
Not sure if anyone has already brought this up, but in the photo still used above of Kirk inspecting engineering, standing next to Peter Preston is Todd Bryant who would go on to play Captain Klaa in Star Trek V: TFF. He got the latter role by being spotted playing ping pong at a beach party by the casting director, according to Wikipedia.
181. kkozoriz
And it doesn’t have to be Kirk doing the check-ip. There’s an entire fleet out there. But Kirk apparently kept everything secret and it cause the deaths of many people.
As commenters have said before, you always go for the most negative interpretation. And really, there is absolutely no reason to even consider that Kirk did not report the events of “Space Seed.” He makes no comments to suggest it. It would be be a deliberate failure of his duties to do so and a despicable failure. The entire crew knows what happened and what would be his motive for not reporting it? That he put them on Ceti Alpha V? Hardly a terrible decision and Starfleet could always reverse the decision. It seems well within his authority, given the nature of Starship captains and the Federation at this time in its history.
The only time we are led to believe Kirk did not report would be, at least as far as my memory goes, “Metamorphosis.” In that episode, and that episode only, he promises not to tell people about Zefram Cochrane. In that incidence it was a favor and only a small number of people know the details. It was still a failure to fulfill his duty, but at least it can be understood as a compassionate gesture.
@234/costumer: According to Greg Cox’s novel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh, it was Starfleet that decided to classify the discovery of the Botany Bay and its occupants, because they “didn’t want to advertise the existence” of a whole colony of superhuman war criminals.
@234 – If Kirk had reported what he did, you’d think that there would at least be a listing somewhere that the system was off limits for whatever reason. Chekov was on the Enterprise during Space Seed (a retcon to be sure) and yet he doesn’t even recognize the name of the system. It’s not until he reads Botany Bay on the seatbelt that he realizes what’s going on.
How hard would it be to set up a few surveillance satellites to monitor the system and call for help if a ship ignores the Keep Out sign? They might have even noticed the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI and sent a rescue mission. But, like Prime Directive violations, Starfleet appears to prefer to react to violations than to act to prevent them in the first place.
Of course, the reason is that it sets up better story telling opportunities as opposed to showing what a realistic organization would do in these situations.
A million things can happen. Someone may have decided it was necessary to impose a classified status. Someone may have decided it was best not to give anyone the idea the augments were there. The most likely is it just got lost in in bureaucracy.
Regardless, notice that none of the reasons you list involve Kirk not reporting the incident. Once reported it is not Kirk’s responsibility. It is Starfleet’s; or specifically some department’s within Starfleet. Sure, they might assign Enterprise to check up on them, but it is just as likely that one of the other 11 Constitution class vessels could be assigned; or some other vessel.
And that all depends on Starfleet assigning not deciding to bury it or that it didn’t get lost.
@237/costumer: “Sure, they might assign Enterprise to check up on them, but it is just as likely that one of the other 11 Constitution class vessels could be assigned; or some other vessel.”
We now know from Lower Decks that there’s a whole tier of ships in Starfleet whose mission is to follow up on the work of the front-line ships like the Enterprise. Which is in keeping with all the references in TOS where Kirk says “We’ll have Starfleet send teams to help you negotiate peace/rebuild your civilization/teach you how to farm and make babies/etc.” It’s always been implicit that there’s a larger, less romantic infrastructure coming in behind the sexy frontline ships to do the less exciting but more important long-term work. I like the idea of Lower Decks (still haven’t seen enough to judge the execution) because I’ve always known that side of things had to exist. I’ve had thoughts about the possibility of a series along similar lines, though not as a sitcom. I saw it more as a season-arc structure where the ship would spend an entire season or half-season on a single planet exploring its various cultures and biomes in depth, because it’s ridiculous the way so much sci-fi portrays an entire planet as a single uniform location with less variety than a single real-world city.
Pocket did something similar with the S.C.E./Corps of Engineers series, which was often about such followup missions.
“And that all depends on Starfleet assigning not deciding to bury it or that it didn’t get lost.”
Yes, that was Greg’s explanation in To Reign in Hell. One branch of Starfleet classified it so deep that even the part of Starfleet working with the Marcuses on Genesis didn’t know about it. There should’ve been some sort of computer flag saying “This system is off-limits for classified reasons,” but through some bureaucratic mixup or excessive secrecy, there wasn’t.
It’s like a police force deciding to lock a mass murderer away on a distant island and then not telling ANYONE that they’re there. “It’s OK, nobody will ever find them there.”
And there is no proof that Kirk ever told Starfleet about it. And no proof that Starfleet classified it or managed to totally miss telling their captains about it.
As I said earlier, drop a few probes around the system to warn people off or to call for help and you’re done. They managed to make hundreds of ultraviolet satellites in Operation Annihilate!, why didn’t they do something similar here? Could ie be because the same organization that is so sure of itself that they explicitly give starship captains authority to kill millions of people if as few as three of it’s citizens are being held captive or even found guilty and sentenced to death, or allow their captains to make major changes in independent worlds forms of government because they believe that they know what’s better for them than the natives, simply can’t bring themselves to admit that everything may not go as they expect them to? That their people are infallible?
Every relative of a person on the Reliant and Regula One should have demanded answers from Kirk and Starfleet. But Kirk is a hero so he’s above all that.
You have it backwards. Starfleet is a pseudo-military organization. Kirk is required to report to Starfleet. Absent specific evidence that he did not the basic assumption is that he did. You say there is no evidence he did. YOU have no evidence he didn’t. In fact, given the parameters the series it is a fact that he did report it unless he, or someone else onscreen, specifically says he did not. Since no such statement is made, ipso facto Kirk reported it as regulations require.
Kirk didn’t report that Cochrane was still alive, did he? And that helped cover up the real circumstances of the death of Nancy Hedford.
As the above shows, Kirk has discretion in what he reports to Starfleet, therefore we do not know if he reported his stranding of Khan or not. Based on TWoK, either he did and Starfleet is incompetent, or he didn’t is is guilty of neglegent homicide.
241. kkozoriz
Kirk didn’t report that Cochrane was still alive, did he? And that helped cover up the real circumstances of the death of Nancy Hedford.
And the episode specifically said he wasn’t going to. And it would not have been difficult. Hedford was terminally ill without treatment. Only Kirk, Spock and McCoy were there. It would be simple to change records to say they had a malfunction, had to land and Hedford died while they were repairing the shuttle. And he only kept it secret because Cochrane and the Hedford/Companion asked him to.
However, with Space Seed, the entire ship new what was happening. Even if Kirk was inclined to not report is it even reasonable to expect all four hundred odd crew to not say anything?
However, again, it comes done to what happens on screen. Kirk specifically said he would keep Cochrane’s existence secret. He makes no such statement regarding Khan.
There is no reason to think he didn’t report it. You are just assuming that because you always think the worst of Kirk.
In TWoK, Chekov knew that they were in the Ceti Alpha system. It also makes clear that Chekov was on the ship during SS, even though he wasn’t seen. So no, not everyone on the ship knew what was happening. All Chekov knew was the name Botany Bay and about Khan and his history. He had no idea where Kirk had abandoned Khan.
So Kirk falsifying records is tickety-boo? Sure, he’s supposed to report on everything so if he just makes up a false report, that’s just as good, right?
It’s obvious that starship Captains have great latitude in what they report. After all, we see that they have great latitude about “correcting” civilizations that they deem unacceptable. (A Taste of Armageddon, The Apple, A Piece of the Action, etc), all they way up to being able to order them destroyed down to the last man, woman and child. GO 24 ;ays puth their ability to do so right there.
And at the end of Space Seed, we get this exchange –
IRK: Mister Spock, our heading takes us near the Ceti Alpha star system.
SPOCK: Quite correct, Captain. Planet number five there is habitable, although a bit savage, somewhat inhospitable.
KIRK: But no more than Australia’s Botany Bay colony was at the beginning. Those men went on to tame a continent, Mister Khan. Can you tame a world?
—
SPOCK: It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years and to learn what crop has sprung from the seed you planted today.
It sure doesn’t sound like Kirk or Spock intended Khan and his followers to have visitors or assistance.
And let’s not forget this part –
SPOCK: I note he’s making considerable use of our technical library.
KIRK: Common courtesy, Mister Spock. He’ll spend the rest of his days in our time. It’s only decent to help him catch up.
There’s a difference in a general overview of technology and giving someone full access to the “How Everything Works on a Starship”. Khan knew how to shut down bridge control, the turbolifts, life support and how to operate the ship without the crew. Not the sort of thing that Starfleet would look kindly upon. And there’s a difference to having your ship taken over by someone who already has a working knowledge of 23rd century technology and giving a complete unknown the knowledge to take over your ship.
Kirk had lots of reasons not to tell Starfleet what happened. Don’t mention Khan and you don’t need to tell them how someone who’s knowledge was centuries out of date managed to take over a starship. All he needs to do is keep his mouth shut and come up with a reasonable excuse to the disappearance of McGivers.
Okay, your utterly cynical and illogical argument seems to be your only default. Long stretches of dialogue that don’t imply anything at all. I think this discussion is not going to go anywhere.
You’re perfectly free to interpret Star Trek in any way you like. As am I. That’s the cool thing about fiction. Once it’s released into the wild, it’s fair game as to how each person approaches it.
Some people, and even some authors, see Kirk as the almost god-like figure, a hero to all. Others see him as a heroic yet flawed human being.
Me, I take the view that there’s all sorts of Kirks out there. He varies from show to show, movie to movie, book to book, comic to comic.
Like a Chinese menu, you can take one from column A and one from column B if that’s what works for you. Me, I prefer a Kirk most like the one in Errand of Mercy who makes mistakes and laster is the one to learn a lesson as opposed to what David Gerrold called the “cosmic Mary Worth”, going from planet to plant and pointing out what the other peoples of the galaxy are doing wrong and imposing his solutions upon them.
@245/kkozoriz: David Gerrold actually said that approvingly. It all depends on whether you see it as helping or meddling. Me, I like Kirk because he always wants to help, but he is also willing to listen and admit to mistakes. It’s the latter that gives him the moral right to do the former.
@245 & 246: I just reviewed the part of The World of Star Trek where Gerrold talks about ST’s shortcomings and unfulfilled potentials, and it turns out he doesn’t use the “Mary Worth” analogy as intrinsically positive or negative, merely as a shorthand for stories about a protagonist solving others’ problems, which was a standard plot format for an episodic series of the era. What he was critiquing was how that format was executed, how other aspects got in the way of doing it right.
From p. 222 of the 1973 Del Rey edition:
So here he’s saying that the audience cares more if the story is really about other people’s problems and how the hero helps them get through them, rather than just whether the hero will survive a deathtrap, because of course he will, so deathtrap stories just reduce to the mechanics of how the hero escapes, rather than anything more thoughtful.
Later, on p. 237, he says:
But he wasn’t making a moral argument over whether it was right for Kirk to interfere in-universe, but a writing-mechanics argument about how the story trope of the Prime Directive got in the way of plots about solving alien cultures’ problems, so that the producers wrote themselves into a corner where they set up a rule they had to keep ignoring to tell their stories.
Now, once you get to pp. 250-258, Gerrold does critique the recurring tendency of TOS to tell stories about Kirk tearing down other worlds’ societies in favor of more enlightened ones by our standards, but he doesn’t use the “Mary Worth” analogy there; rather, he calls it the “American Way” syndrome. He’s not saying that stories about “meddling” to solve people’s problems are intrinsically good or bad; he’s saying it’s bad when the solution is always “do it my way instead,” rather than helping them find solutions that are organic to their own cultures, or even having the heroes be the ones to learn something and be humbled as in “The Devil in the Dark” or “Errand of Mercy.” He’s critiquing the tendency to set up alien cultures as straw men for Kirk to knock down one by one, rather than telling stories about helping aliens solve their problems in ways more subtle than knocking down one tyrant after another. (I’d say “The Mark of Gideon” is a good example, because Kirk didn’t bring down their system; at most, he made a small modification in their own plan to solve their problem their own way.)
And he’s not even saying it’s wrong to do that, because individually, such a story can be a powerful way to make a social commentary. He’s just criticizing the cumulative effect of doing it over and over until it becomes a shallow formula.
I finally feel confident in the idea that I read this thread thoroughly enough, to be sure that no one has said my solution to the “Never faced death” / “Not like this” line: it’s Spock. The man Edith Keeler said “I see you always by his side”. The man of whom Kirk said “If I hadn’t (tried to save him), the cost would have been my soul.” Hell, this is the pair that Gene invented an ambiguous word that could mean ‘lover’ just to describe the bond. The way those two are portrayed, it’s beyond family. And no, I’m not a slasher, I just respect their opinion, but they’re basically platonic life partners.
Though yes, someone noted that all those other losses of Kirk’s, he had the friendship of Spock to help get him through, while now… obviously he does not. That would certainly affect him more, maybe it’s enough to explain it on its own. But I just never had a problem with the idea that Spock dying would floor Kirk harder than anything before.
@248/woz: The problem there, though, is that Spock is not the first “life partner” who’s died on Kirk. He lost his brother in “Operation: Annihilate,” the love of his life the very next week in “City on the Edge,” and his wife and unborn child in “The Paradise Syndrome.”
“You see, as it’s set up, the Enterprise IS a cosmic “Mary Worth,” meddling her way across the galaxy, solving problems as she goes. “
meddling
/ˈmed(ə)liNG/
noun
intrusive or unwarranted interference.
Perhaps TWOK doesn’t entirely work as Star Trek, but it’s still a very good film. Of all the Star Trek movies I felt this one expresses the deepest sense of desolation and isolation in space (even if that sense of isolation doesn’t really make sense) and a sense of wonder about new discoveries. It also looks great, and even though the naval atmosphere isn’t in keeping with the spirit of Star Trek I found it to be a fun change. Even when the film drags there’s usually something in the set design to look at. It’s competently shot, with decent thrills and great battle scenes. Most importantly, the central story is compelling, more so than in any other Star Trek film, and that gives TWOK a velocity and thematic weight that even First Contact lacks. I also think the new characters are all well-realized and decently acted, and it’s a real pity they can only shine in this one film (especially Saavik).
I agree about TWOK’s faults- the first act is way too long and there are too many endings. The death theme is overcooked and doesn’t work with Kirk’s character. In fact there are way too many themes- death, getting old, revenge, reconciliation- but only Khan and David’s stories really click. If they had cut out some of the angsty stuff about Kirk feeling old (everyone knows he wants to command the ship, just get it over with and get on with the story already!), played up David (who should be a bigger part of the story anyway- it’s kindof a huge shock to suddenly find a son), and overall cut 10 minutes from the run time it would be an even better movie.
I think you’re right about Star Trek movies overall- it’s just not a great format for what Star Trek is about. But at least TWOK embraces that fact, making the best possible balance between Star Trek’s characters and spirit and the movie format.
I’m not sure one can add very much substantive to this prodigiously long series of comments, but I just wanted to note that Mr Spock’s little “Care to take her for a spin, kiddo?” moment with Cadet Saavik has to be one of my favourite ‘Dad’ moments in all of Trek (and Admiral Kirk’s manfully-repressed “That’s MY chair! Why does she get all the fun?!?” reaction always makes me laugh).
Also Cadet Saavik is ridiculously attractive; that is all.
Random question: Is there any explanation for the inconsistent audio quality in this film? For example, when Spock gives Kirk the Enterprise, Kirk’s and Spock’s voices sound muffled (and not only in this scene), but when Khan talks about revenge as a dish best served cold, his voice comes in quite clear — again, as just one example. So, any explanation? I would say it’s because it’s an older film, but unless I’m missing something, both The Motion Picture and Star Wars have consistently clear audio recordings.
I’m sure that whenever Starfleet (the parts with a clearance) ever thought about checking up on Ceti Alpha V, they considered the possibility that Khan could subvert anybody who came within communications range, shuddered, and decided to put things off for another few years. There had probably been a revival of those stories about evil super-AIs talking themselves loose.
I agree wholeheartedly with Keith here. Every single point, what he found good and bad.
I can’t say I blame Roddenberry too much for raging against Wrath of Khan; not long in I was feeling a Star Wars vibe and I realized this wasn’t just something the Bad Robot films did. After becoming more acquainted with Trek, it left me somewhat off-kilter, not helped by how I was also getting sleepy. Speaking of which, that made me grateful for the film’s pacing; Wrath of Khan is brisk compared to the plodding Motion Picture and between the two I’d definitely rewatch Wrath of Khan even with the many, many flaws. By the climactic battle, I wasn’t sure what was happening anymore, especially that radiation-filled room Spock died in; I thought at first Kahn had beamed the Genesis Device onto the Enterprise and Spock had to disarm it.
If nothing else, the movie certainly looks great. I loved the cavern displaying the power of the Genesis Device and the cool blue and purple nebula.
I am a fan of all of the TOS films, and most of the others (though I found Nemesis to be a horrific end to the TNG films, as much as I ended up liking Tom Hardy as an actor later on). Indeed, to belabor the point, one of the things that I find striking about Wrath of Khan — though it has also worked well in so many Naval war films, and of course ‘Balance of Terror’ — is the chemistry between Kirk and Khan without their ever meeting face to face (imagine if they HAD met face to face again!). Well done. Spock’s interactions with Kirk and McCoy are fabulous. I do truly wish that Kirstie Alley had been able to stay on later as Saavik — although Robin Curtis has her moments in The Search for Spock, and shined in her later Star Trek appearances, e.g., TNG’s Gambit parts I and II.
As it is, this is one of those films that I can watch over and over (and I have). I actually taped it off of ABC back in the late 80’s and wore the VHS tape out. This film, despite its flaws, is one of the reasons that I love Trek so much. And, I have always admired Meyer — I loved Time After Time so much that I bought the book. And it may be the only time that Malcom McDowell was a good guy? he wore it well, I think.
Wrath of Khan is a perennial favorite, and a Warp Factor 10 for me, though I am quite sentimental.
How does Reliant jam Marcus’ transmission if they are three days away?
I’ve seen TWoK multiple times since it first came out. I think it is a great action adventure movie, but not a great Star Trek movie. To me, TWoK doesn’t seem like Star Trek. Yes, it has all the characters and the ship. But, TWoK just isn’t the TOS I grew up watching in 70s.
I had to work out the whole Ceti Alpha V/VI thing in my head to understand why it didn’t make sense in the movie and it how it should have been. As others stated, if Ceti Alpha VI blew up and the crew of the Reliant knew how to count, then Ceti Alpha V would still be the fifth planet and Ceti Alpha VII (assuming there are at least 7 planets in the system) would now be the 6th planet. But then that wouldn’t work for purposes of the story because the crew of the Reliant needs to encounter Khan and company. Therefore, the script should have had Reliant looking to use Ceti Alpha IV as the test bed for Genesis not realizing that it blew up now making Ceti Alpha V the 4th planet and the mix-up more understandable. But still, it’s hard to imagine that no one would have noticed a planet exploding and the resulting aftermath of planetary debris; and also it being very odd that Starfleet didn’t check up on Khan after 15 years of marooning his group nor placing a warning beacon to others around his planet.
Regarding Ceti Alpha V/VI:
I’ve been thinking about this a bit. While it still doesn’t make sense, consider:
IRRC, Chekov says to Khan “On Ceti Alpha V there was life!”
And Khan retorts “THIS is Ceti Alpha V!” He then goes on to explain that Ceti Alpha VI exploded which altered Ceti Alpha V’s orbit. The way I’m reading this now is that Chekov is confused, and is protesting that the planet the augments were left on was a vibrant, living planet with an extensive ecosystem. Khan is responding that yes, this is the same planet they were left on, but it is now bereft of most life because of the planetary explosion.
Theoretically, Chekov should know this is CA V, and that is where they left Khan. He mentions the planet’s designation. But it is quite likely that Captain Terrell didn’t know. I can certainly understand that the augments location is top secret and that information wasn’t given to him. (Contrarily, it is equally likely that the search for a test planet for Genesis wasn’t given to the people who knew about the augments. After all, Genesis was top secret as well. The left and right hands don’t always talk to each other.)
It is quite likely as well that Chekov never knew the designation of the planet the augments were left on. Assuming he was on Enterprise at the time of Space Seed, he could easily be assigned to a lower deck. He would know about Khan since he was allowed to socialize with the crew, but that doesn’t mean the general crew was informed about where Khan and the augments were left. The Bridge and Command crew would likely know, but not everyone else.
@258 – Perhaps Chekov lied and they were much closer than he said.
@261/costumer: “Theoretically, Chekov should know this is CA V, and that is where they left Khan. He mentions the planet’s designation.”
I think the intent was that Chekov thought Khan’s people had moved from V to VI for some reason, which was why Khan had to clarify that the planet they were currently on actually was V. If Chekov had known they were currently on V, he would’ve said something like “There was life here.” Referring to a place by its name is something you usually do when you’re not actually in that place, or at least believe you aren’t.
@263.
You could be right, Christopher. I can see it either way.
But if Chekov knew Khan was on Ceti Alpha V, why would they even think if testing Genesis on Ceti Alpha VI? Why test in it an inhabited system at all? All it would take would be for Starfleet to have listed the system as off limits, which it apparently wasn’t. No details needed.
Would you consider changing your comments about Madlyn Rhue in light of this research? A lot of people use your article to bolster the “Rhue was in a wheelchair and unable to be in TWOK” myth when the research in this link proves she wasn’t. Thanks. Trek II Myths Rhue the Day — FACT TREK
David: Sorry for not replying to this until four months later, but the post has been amended. Thanks for the link to FactTrek!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I did not remember Saavik letting out a “damn” in the Kobayashi Maru exercise. Her being created as unusually emotional by nature would certainly help explain that. I’m surprised that it didn’t raise any eyebrows here or in the film.
Shatner’s acting is really quite good overall — we get the meme, yeah, but Kirk’s more contemplative moments are very compelling. Also, Nimoy is particularly great in the moment when Spock realizes what he needs to do and silently gets up from his station.
I agree with the various problems of the film’s cited in the post, large and small, except perhaps for the multiple endings. (That’s definitely an issue with other flicks and, oh yes, so much with A.I.) Most of all, though, is that “Kirk never facing death until he lost Spock just rings wrong on every possible level”. JanaJansen’s read @14 is a good one, however.
While Kirk telling Saavik not to shy away from quoting regulations in the future is appreciated — likewise that she playfully makes one up which should totally actually exist to accompany him to the station —I’m utterly flummoxed by Kirk failing to raise shields on the Enterprise as the incommunicado Reliant approaches. Dunsel puts it excellently @106, that “it’s sort of the inverse of the Kobayashi Maru; all Kirk had to do to ‘win’ was raise the damn shields.”
I can’t say that looking up my television’s code to program a universal remote is entirely hassle-free, but the prefix vulnerability used by the Enterprise to hack the Reliant’s systems feels too easy. Some kind of two-factor authentication deal, say, Kirk also having a code as admiral that must be paired with the ship’s prefix to access its systems, would make it more believable.
KRAD: This movie is the first time Doohan, Koenig, Takei, and Nichols got their own solo credits
I feel like it’s where the core seven was codified as well. On the series they were all credited, when they appeared in an episode, at the end amidst other crew members and guests. Apart from Doohan’s Scotty they didn’t really get singled out for (re)introduction in TMP, nor do I think they had any more screen time than Whitney’s Rand or Barrett’s Chapel. From Khan on through the signatures at the end of Undiscovered Country it’s Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov as the Original Gang, full stop.
KRAD: It was changed by Paramount to The Vengeance of Khan against Meyer’s wishes, and then changed to The Wrath of Khan when it was revealed that the third Star Wars film was to be called Revenge of the Jedi.
Within a year after the film’s release I heard Doohan tell this story at a Creation show in Philadelphia, including the punch line that in the end Revenge of the Jedi was of course retitled itself to Return of the Jedi. Although I don’t recall Meyer’s dislike of Vengeance of Khan being part of the anecdote as told, just that the name change due to Revenge was a blessing in disguise because Wrath of Khan is a more poetic and euphonious title than Vengeance of Khan. I have always remembered it that way, at least, but we’re talking about four decades ago now.
I have always resented this film. I know everybody loves it, but I love The Motion Picture, and this film goes out of its way to act as a reboot of the film series that pretends the previous film never existed. That said, it is an admittedly effective popcorn movie, and, like I said, everybody loves it (well, almost everybody).
Ricardo Montalbon was still hot – even in a mullet!
Kirstie Alley dead from cancer at 71
I always have, and always will, love this film but there is one thing that has always bugged me. The two-way between Kirk and Spock ‘…days would seem like weeks…’ is so bloody obviously a code. The way Spock intonates every word and repeats in the most conspicuous way ‘…by the book…’ wouldn’t fool my 8 year old daughter. I laugh at Khan’s ‘superior intellect’.
I noticed, over Christmas, that All4 in the UK had all the Star Trek films available to stream (but only for the next couple of weeks). That this was timed with a spell of bedrest as I recovered from man flu and my children being utterly distracted by the mountain of toys from Father Christmas was wonderful, as I have to yet to subscribe to Paramount+ (largely on taste grounds, as I haven’t really warmed to Discovery or the reboot films) and so am taking this opportunity to ‘catch up with some old friends’.
The trio of films beginning with TWOK and ending with TVH were the Star Trek films for me, growing up (I’m an 82 baby). They were regularly broadcast in the UK during the late 80s / early 90s and, with VHS, were quickly recorded and rewatched a lot. I was a clever child, not precocious and actually rather lazy, but Star Trek was quickly welcomed as a way of getting me to do more, particularly to read, and so I am the proud owner of 80s editions of the novels for Star Treks II, III, IV (but not VI, more on that later).
As a result, I love this film; it gets so much right. As an adolescent I was less interested in deep themes and more into a rip-roaring adventure, and TWOK delivered to my requirement in spades. The space battles are wonderful, the effects are impressive, the Kobyashi Maru teaser brilliant, the pacing crisp. Kirstie Alley as Saavik is beguiling, she looks, well, alien and stands up, IMO, to the more seasoned Shatner and Nimoy remarkably well. The interplay between Kirk, Spock and McCoy is first rate, not just the perfect discussion in Kirk’s cabin on the risks posed by Genesis, but also the scene with McCoy in Kirk’s apartment. We also get to see more of Starfleet (and the Federation) in the Regula I station and the USS Reliant. On that, I applaud the attempt to progress the careers of the TOS crew: Spock is now a Captain, Chekhov the first officer of a starship, Sulu slated for a command of his own (at least in the deleted scene and novel!). KRAD is right, more could have been done here.
But this is a Meyer film, and therefore, such beauty and spectacle comes at a cost, a cost I only realised the scale of as I matured and looked again at these films that were so important to me growing up. And here, with TWOK, the comparison with VI is (to me) necessary. Both films get some fundamental parts of the TOS culture right, but freely and significantly shift or adjust other elements of that world. In TWOK Meyer ditches or downplays significant elements of Kirk’s backstory, specifically his deep familiarity with death. With this bit of the film, I play deaf, tilt my head slightly, go “la la la la la la” and imagine that it is instead focusing upon Kirk’s reluctance to face the consequences of his actions (David, Khan, perhaps the surprise attack on the Enterprise) or, more easily, his embryonic midlife crisis (which is already liberally sprinkled throughout the film). The misfire with taking a Kirk who survived the Tarsus massacre, the horror on the Farragut, who lost Gary Mitchell, Edith Keeler, his brother and nephew, his wife and unborn child, as well as battalions of redshirts, and portray him as somehow inexperienced of facing death feels like a significant reworking of Trek culture and history (and not even mere backstory, as we see a lot of the events listed above on the screen!). With TWOK I can just, just, live with it as the other characters are largely unaltered and the rest of the Kirk character seems to survive this reworking. FWIW I agree with the posts that suggest that “Kirk as a maverick” begin here; the scene in the Genesis Cave with Saavik certainly supports this theory.
Meyer has been interviewed a lot recently, most notably on The Center Seat TV show and its podcasts. I know that The Center Seat is a flawed oral history, with some inaccuracies and bias, but Meyer, particularly in the podcast, is both illuminating and unapologetic about his decisions. I doubt I’d like to have a beer with the man, but he made for an entertaining hour of podcast interview. He rationalises, a lot, on the fact that he made decisions that challenged the Roddenberry take on the characters. He seems to suggest that his decisions, particularly on changes to the characters, were his to freely make as an artist; in essence his Kirk will differ from Robert Wise’s Kirk, they’re both interpretations of the same character by artists. In TWOK I think he gets away with it, for the reasons I’ve suggested. In TUC, however…
I also reread, at the same time as the rewatch, the novel of the film; unlike STIII, which wonderfully (as KRAD has commented) filled in the gaps in what we saw on screen, this novel felt much more aligned to the screenplay. The significant additions, to me, were the horrifying depictions of Khan’s torture of the Regula I scientists and, in a wonderfully understated way (which made it more shocking), the chilling description of how the Botany Bay survivors slowly and efficiently took over the USS Reliant.