Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Just one thing that I've never settled. When the Genesis Device is activated at the end, how does a single, Miranda-class starship have enough mass to be reworked into an average-size M class planet?
    • The nebula provided the necessary mass.
    • Yeah, it kinda looks like it is drawing in matter from the entire sector. Also explains why the Enterprise would need warp power to escape.
    • Yeah, notice the nebula disappears when the explosion goes off.
      • It wouldn't even need to be the entire nebula. Nebulae contain a LOT of mass. Like enough mass to form many MANY stars. There would be more than enough gas there to convert into solid matter to form one planet. Now the star that genesis was orbiting had to be the same star that Regulus was orbiting. The genesis device probably couldn't create a star too, although all it takes is gravity to turn nebula gas into a star...
  • Scotty had to take the Enterprise's main power source offline because of radiation. However, Kirk tells to Scotty to reenable the warp drive to escape a pending detonation of the genesis device. Spock goes down to engineering to fix the power source, but Dr. McCoy and Scotty will not let him proceed because of the deadly radiation in the room with the power source. However, the ship is about to be destroyed with all hands unless they get the warp drive working, so logically it is one of those tough times when a commanding officer needs to order a crewmember to his death to fix the power source. Furthermore, if Spock feels he should do it and can take the rads better, why is the engineering staff impeding him instead of suiting him up in a radiation suit as fast as they can to allow him an outside chance to survive the repair job?
    • In point of fact, Spock had no chance of surviving. Spock's greater radiation tolerance was barely enough to let him live long enough to actually finish the repairs before dropping dead. Of course, if Spock is the only crewmember physically capable of doing the repairs, then you have to send him in, so your objection still applies.
      • Because they don't want Spock to die. That simple. People don't always act rationally or think things through, especially in the middle of a life-or-death crisis.
        • It does seem odd that on a nuclear powered SPACE-ship with 23rd century technology they have no a) radiation suits or b) robots that could do the repairs by remote control. Don't the environment suits have radiation protection?
          • The novelization states that the coolant pipes are so heavily reinforced that Starfleet Engineering had calculated that anything that hit the engine room hard enough to break one would already have destroyed the rest of the engine room, so no point in worrying about it. Turns out they got their math wrong.
      • In the novelization of the movie, Scotty states that the suits and robots they had available would "freeze up" due to the excessive radiation (presumably ionizing) affecting their motor circuits.
      • So... their radiation suits are so vulnerable to radiation that they will be paralyzed by radiation that a human(oid) can (temporarily) withstand? That's actually quite poor engineering.
      • This troper always assumed that there was no time to suit him up. Considering that in Star Trek, the clock will always stop at one, then he was correct in assuming that the time required in suiting up was not an option. Don't ask why no-one else suited up. Rule of Drama.
      • Hey, flame-retardant firefighting gear isn't designed to actually let you survive inside a roaring fire, its just intended to help you get closer to one. Same logic could apply to Starfleet radiation suits.
      • One sudden bit of Fridge Logic is "with dozens of engineering grunts down there, why don't they keep one guy in a rad suit 24/7, just in case something goes wrong?"
      • Possibly that one guy (or several guys) who was suited up was killed, ran away, or was otherwise occupied trying to keep Engineering from falling apart/being consumed by flames/releasing a Negative Space Wedgie due to a containment failure. Or maybe it was just Cadet Preston's turn to be in the suit that day, and nobody thought to pick somebody else after he died.
      • The dialogue strongly suggests that Spock would have sent Scotty (who was suited) in, if Scotty hadn't been almost unconscious at the time

McCoy: You're not going in there!
Spock: Perhaps you're right. What is Mr. Scott's condition?
McCoy: Well, I don't think that he-- (gets nerve-pinched)
Spock: Sorry, Doctor, I have no time to discuss this logically (Begins pulling Scotty's gloves off).

        • I dunno; to me, that looked like Spock deliberately misdirecting McCoy so he'd be in perfect position to nerve-pinch.
  • Kirk suggests that they beam aboard Reliant to turn off the Genesis Device and David says that they can't. Well, okay, but what's to stop them from beaming Genesis onto the Enterprise and then beaming it into deep space, like they did with Nomad in "The Changeling"?
    • Because that won't stop the device from activating, and it won't make it any easier for the ship to get out of range when it does.
    • Yeah, but they were desperate. They didn't stand much of a chance flying away at impulse power either, so beaming the device away would have given them at least slightly better odds, wouldn't it?
      • Maximum range of the Genesis device: the entire width of the nebula. Maximum range of the transporter: enormously less. Without the Enterprise's warp drive, beaming it would have been the equivalent of your house being 200 feet away from a detonating nuclear bomb instead of 100 feet, IOW, not really being any safer at all.
    • Beam it into the transporter pattern buffer, keep it there for a few days while they repair the warp drive, beam it back out, and warp off before it explodes. Or stick it in the buffer and deliberately degrade the pattern until its dangerous components turn to mush.
      • Or just beam it out on "Scatter Mode". They've done that before too. Or here's an idea: OPEN UP WITH ALL WEAPONS. Or, failing that, beam over an antimatter bomb right next to the stupid thing.
        • Smacking an unstable protomatter construct in the process of charging up to a giant reality-warping wave with a big lump of antimatter is very likely to give you more boom, not less boom. As for the transporter, given that much lower levels of ambient radiation have prevented transporter use elsewhere its entirely possible that you can't use a transporter on a Genesis torpedo while its building to detonation, even if you could while it was inert. Nobody's ever transported an operating warp core, either.
      • Toy just pointed out a major problem with transporter tech. Doing things like that could fix problems in a lot of episodes and movies but no one ever thinks of it. The plot always demands they do not.
      • ^That actually happened in the Voyager novel "Echoes", which involved a planet being transported(but not Transported) one universe over every X hours and Y minutes. This worked fairly well until they reached a universe where the planet had been destroyed. The Voyager in that universe eventually hit upon the solution of holding as many people as possible in their pattern buffer. They got the entire sentient population of the planet, but it'd only work once.
      • They did it in a Voyager episode, too. They were smuggling telepaths through psi-unfriendly space, and the transporters were conveniently in "test cycles" during every inspection.
      • And let's not forget that Scotty managed to stay in a pattern buffer for, what - 70 years? So, it seems very clear that it's possible to keep things in there for a while... but as stated above, it's TOO useful.
        • Ah, but Scotty stayed in the pattern buffer for seventy years based on a technique he had developed, which the Enterprise-D crew were shocked had worked. Keeping something in the transporter buffer wasn't a viable option at the time of TWOK. An in-universe Science Marches On.
          • Let's not forget that Scotty put himself AND another crewman into the "Transporter Suspended Animation Thing," but said other crewman was not so lucky.
            • "Not so lucky" would have been perfectly acceptable in this case. The signal degraded too much for the Device to be rematerialized? Problem solved.
    • It's quite possible that the energy wave produced by the device during its build-up would interfere with a transporter.
    • Actually, I wonder if energy was the reason this Enterprise couldn't do this. My knowledge of the physics involved is shaky at best, but it seems that a device like Genesis-- a device that could affect an entire star system--would have a massive amount of stored energy. From what we've learned about Starfleet transporters, they work by converting matter to energy, briefly storing that energy, directing that energy towards a target, and finally converting that energy back to matter. This would require an unfathomably huge amount of (among other things) computer memory to pull off. Since Genesis' stored energy would not simply disappear during transport, it seems possible that the heavily damaged Enterprise simply didn't have the available resources it would need to transport the Genisis Device.
    • They are in a crippled ship that is in the middle of a nebula that scrambles the sensors so bad they can barely run the viewscreen and are unable to solidly lock weapons. If they can't lock the weapons, then they certainly cannot lock the transporters.
      • At the end of the battle, Enterprise ordered Reliant to prepare to be boarded, and later Kirk suggests that a team beams over to Reliant and disarm Genesis manually. Both suggest that they could use the transporters in the nebula--although I suppose that it could also mean that Kirk doesn't understand how transporters work.
  • Why did Kirk decide to be an idiot and not raise shields when they first encountered the Reliant? Khan and Joachim even made a point of being amazed that he didn't raise shields. Presumably, this is what Saavik was going to tell Kirk to do before Spock interrupted her, especially considering Kirk later told her "you can go right on quoting regulations". So... what was Kirk thinking?
    • I think it was supposed to be an example of Kirk's humanity (i.e. his arrogance/hubris), and his over confidence that go them in a bad situation.
      • It's a shame, too - it's not as if he has anything to gain by NOT raising the shields, why take the risk?
      • Reliant and Enterprise are both Federation ships. Yes, Reliant is behaving strangely, but what kind of trouble will Kirk & crew be in if Reliant was just having comm troubles and Enterprise reacted like it was a hostile? Kirk had no reason to believe Reliant had been hijacked, and he had a ship full of rookies.
        • I would say that whatever the state of the Reliant, the fact remains that the Reliant did raise her shields. This basically means one of three things: 1. The Reliant intends to attack. 2. The Reliant is responding to some threat the Enterprise is not aware of, possibly one that could threaten both ships. 3. It was a malfunction, which means you are dealing a well-armed Federation starship that is, at the very least, not in full control of its systems if not outright compromised by a computer virus/saboteur/etc. In any of these cases, raising the shields is fully justified as a precautionary measure.
        • The Reliant only raised shields just before attacking, and Kirk did give the order to raise the shields as soon as Spock reported the Reliant was doing so - it was just too late.
        • Actually, it was even worse than that. Kirk didn't order shields up until Reliant had actually locked its weapons on Enterprise.
    • Because he made, by his own admission a few minutes later, a catastrophic moronic total newbie mistake. Maybe he'd been off the bridge and driving a desk too long and lost his old instincts for when a situation has gone bad, maybe he was just having an off day. The most professional people make mistakes from time to time, and in certain professions (soldier, heart surgeon, airline pilot, etc) those mistakes can lead to a lot of people getting killed needlessly.
    • On that note, what was Khan thinking? Its repeatedly pointed out that the Reliant is a glorified science vessel while the Enterprise is a battleship which could smash it without breaking sweat if Kirk had raised shields. So what was Khan's plan? Call up and hope Kirk doesn't notice his old crewman acting like a robot? Open fire and make like a bug on a windscreen? Sit there and let Kirk get suspicious? C'mon, Khan, you're meant to be a super-genius!
      • His plan was to take Kirk by surprise, disable the Enterprise, then call him and gloat before destroying him. Which nearly worked, except for Kirk's quick thinking and Khan's eagerness to get the Genesis Device.
    • Kahn expected he would have total surprise on Kirk. It's not like Kirk was expecting him to suddenly turn up.
      • Khan couldn't have done the former of those -- Chekov and Terrell were imprisoned on Regula One by that point.
      • Also, remember that, as Spock puts it, Khan is using "two-dimensional thinking," i.e., navigating his ship as if on an ocean instead of in a weightless vacuum. From this we can infer that Khan, whatever his strengths, is no tactician. Khan is also blinded by his desire for revenge, in keeping with the Moby Dick theme of the movie, which would have further dulled his instincts.
    • According to Memory Alpha specifications of the USS Reliant, it has six dual phaser banks and twin forward and aft torpedo launchers. Not exactly under-equipped when it comes to weaponry. Khan probably assumed he could match wits tactically with Kirk, or give him a good run for his money at least. Besides, he was out for REVENGE - that hardly puts you in the most objective state of mind. He wanted to hurt Kirk - and he succeeded.
    • I think Kirk's failure with raising shields was done on purpose. Throughout the whole film, Kirk is mourning over how much he's past his prime as a commanding officer. It's this failure, and realizing Khan was responsible, that makes him pull himself together to stop Khan and his followers for good.
    • Also, we never find out what precisely General Order 12 says. For all anyone knows, it might've said something along the lines of "the ship should go to Yellow Alert, and ready ship's defense systems."
    • The Reliant is a Miranda class starship. The Memory Alpha article understates the actual abilities and role of the class. Various sources and games clearly show the class rated as a medium cruiser. In a straight fight the Enterprise has the advantage, but Khan could reasonably assume that the element of surprise would make the odds at least even.
  • How come, only Spock gets the glorious funeral? Didn't a whole lot of other crewman, including Scotty's nephew, die in the fighting against Khan? If they would have shot all those people onto the Genesis planet, they all would have been resurrected like Spock, and Scotty could have brought his nephew home alive. All in all, the Genesis device (like the transporter) is yet another Trek gizmo that can only bring certain people back to life, and then its resurrection powers are swept under the table, rather than shown for the society altering device that it really is. Think about it: Fire the Genesis device over a graveyard.....
    • Why would you want to do that? The resurrected Spock was mindless.
    • I don't think they knew the Genesis Planet would resurrect Spock.
    • Again, nothing says there weren't. However, it would have rather dissipated the emotion of Spock's death to have a montage of standard regulation services before or after it...in other words, Rule of Drama. And, in the novelisation, it's mentioned that the torpedo-coffin was redirected to land softly instead of burning up (presumably like the others), by Saavik.
      • This. Spock's funeral was the only one that was relevant to the plot.
    • They probably brought the humans' bodies home to Earth for burial. Being shot into space was presumably Spock's own stated funeral preference, kept on file along with his will, as he was the son of two worlds and space was really more "home" to him than Vulcan. Aiming the coffin/torpedo at the nascent Genesis planet was a romantic touch that Kirk felt was appropriate, given Spock's role in creating the place.
    • Officers always get fancier funerals. Look at the news a few years back. A dead butterbar gets mentioned on national news, but an enlisted is lucky if he gets mentioned in the local paper.
    • Spock wasn't just an officer, he was the cadets' long time instructor and The Captain of that ship, one who stepped aside for Kirk, admittedly, but if ANYONE of that crew deserved a full honors funeral, it would be him.
      • And, really, of the dozens of Red Shirts we've seen die, not a one got a funeral.
    • Because Spock's the character the audience most cared about and was emotionally invested in. In-universe, they probably did get their own send-offs and emotional farewells from their friends and loved ones. But the filmmakers didn't show us them because they reasoned, not entirely unreasonably or irrationally, that the audience wouldn't really give too much of a shit about seeing Red Shirt #2214985's heartrending send-off, while they would care about Spock's.
  • Dr. Carol Marcus says that the Genesis Device takes a "moon or other dead form" and transforms that "dead moon" into "a living, breathing planet", implying that a planet is differentiated from a moon by the ability to sustain life. You Fail Astronomy Forever, Dr. Marcus!
    • At the time the movie was made, there was no technical definition for "planet". It took a big group of scientists to do that, and it resulted in Pluto getting the boot (and America's hearts!) It's not unreasonable to assume that Federation scientists agreed that a "planet" was a habitable body of a certain size (gas giants are habitable for some Star Trek critters), and by the time of The Next Generation, had somehow changed the meaning.
    • Frankly, This Troper would be more concerned with the fact that the Genesis Device can apparently make any planet/asteroid/moon/rock/whatever into a habitable biome regardless of distance from its sun, gravitational force, or mineral components. Come on... really? Granted, This Troper usually lets this slide because Wrath of Khan is otherwise so awesome.
    • Pretty simple, really. The commonly used terms of "planet" and "moon" evoke images of life-bearing and barren, respectively. Hell, even among Sci-Fi types, nearly 30 years later, people don't get that the planet that they destroy the second Death Star shield generator was a moon around a lifeless gas giant. The gas giant was Endor, the moon was never actually named.
      • It was called "the forest moon of Endor" and "the sanctuary moon" in the film itself, which makes it even more annoying when people keep calling the moon itself Endor.
        • Well, the line "A small rebel force has penetrated the shield and landed on Endor" didn't help matters.
      • Same for the location of the rebel base in the first movie. The base is often said to be on the planet Yavin when it's really on Yavin IV, the fourth moon of the gas giant Yavin.
  • Kirk and Dr. Marcus have a frank discussion about David, revealing (to the audience) that David is Kirk's son. Throughout it all, Chekov, who has been stated to be "coming to" and is holding a cloth to his ear. So is Chekov listening to the whole conversation and probably thinking how very awkward that is?
    • Either that or he's too concentrated on thinking "don't throw up...don't throw up...don't throw up..." to realize Kirk is having a heart-to-heart with an old flame. He did just have a mind-controlling bug crawl out of his ear after all.
  • The Reliant has been looking for a lifeless space body on which to test the Genesis device. "So far, no success." Is it really that hard to find a planet or moon that's completely lifeless? As of 2010, we've yet to find a single planet other than Earth that has life.
    • If you go by actual science, the Reliant had to find a lifeless space body that existed in a location that would provide ideal conditions for carbon-based life: the Goldilocks zone. Not too close or too far from its parent star. One could probably use the Genesis device on mercury or pluto, but any life generated there would burn or freeze to death in short order. It's possible in the trek universe that most known planets in Goldilocks zones are already host to life of SOME kind.
    • Alternatively, the scanners are picking up what may be just 'a speck of pre-animate matter' but which turns out to be Khan and several of his followers and a ship about a quarter the size of the Enterprise. Really, speck?
      • There are two possibilities. Terrell ask if it's possible the ship's sensors were out of adjustment, and even if they were, it's possible the constant sandstorms were disrupting their sensor readings.
    • I, the original poster, have since bought the novelization, and its explanation is: It's even more complicated than we thought. The test planet has to be of the right size, orbiting the right kind of star, within the star's biosphere, and in a star system otherwise uninhabited. Ceti Alpha V was the sixteenth planet they surveyed.
  • Wait, so the entire reason this all happened is because Chekov thought he was beaming down to Ceti Alpha VI but got a faceful of KHAN instead and wasn't on guard for it. But... if Ceti Alpha V's ecosystem was messed up by CA VI exploding, why did the entire crew of the Reliant think that the planet was the sixth? Shouldn't that only mess up the count from the "seventh" planet on? Couldn't anyone count the planets from the star and notice one was missing and one was not as it should be according to the very star charts Kirk filed? Plot Hole! But They Just Didn't Care. And this movie is so good, neither should you.
    • The Ceti Alpha system appears to have only had six planets to begin with; it's the only plausible explanation for the Reliant crew missing the freaking obvious. Still, it's not so much Fridge Logic as it is the Idiot Ball from hell...
    • Well still a goof of grandest Idiot Ball proportions, if the system only had 6 planets to start with, it IS possible they just parked at the one furthest from the sun ans assumed it was the sixth one.
    • They spend paragraphs trying to explain this away in the EU novel "To Rule In Hell". The Ceti Alpha system was way out in the sticks and nobody had been there since Kirk, Reliant approached from the outside of the system and assumed the outermost planet was Ceti Alpha VI, Kirk's logs weren't shared with the Genesis Project crew, and Chekov had forgotten about Khan in the intervening years until they found the Botany Bay.
    • I always just assumed that Ceti Alpha V was where they were expecting Ceti Alpha VI would be and as a result never bothered to check the rest of the system. Pure laziness as a result of trust in their star charts.
    • This troper always assumed that there were more than six planets. Could be seven, eight or ten. Six blows up, so that leaves one less planet. Six, seven or nine. And Khan said that the orbit was messed up (explaining why the planet looked different than when Khan was dropped off in "Space Seed") and one can infer that this means the orbit is no longer what it was. Perhaps the explosion knocked the planet in such a way that Ceti Alpha V was now on the other side of Ceti Alpha VII. And so, it would appear to be Ceti Alpha VI, as Ceti Alpha VII would appear to be Ceti Alpha V.
    • Maybe Ceti Alpha isn't a single system, but a cluster of stars numbered from I to VII, and the Reliant was in wrong star system. Although you'd expect someone would have noticed a star was missing...
    • It's also possible that after months of "Standard Orbit...scan the planet...there's something there...ok, next planet..." the routine got really boring and somebody fell asleep at the starcharts.
    • For what it's worth, the novelization says that the Ceti Alpha system had 20 planets.
  • Kirk needs to go through some procedure to show a Star Fleet Captain and a Veteran Medical Officer some classified information that obviously neither of them knew. Earlier, Chekov and Terrell are sickeningly persuaded to tell Khan what they were doing on the planet. Terrell, an officer with an equal rank of Spock, Star ship captain, and his commanding officer, would presumably know nothing about the Genesis project. They were, after all, at the disposal of the scientists, so if they were curious what it was Starfleet had them working on for the scientists, the scientists easily could have (and in the case of David, probably would have) simply told them that they didn't need to know. If anything, all they would have known was that it created life. This is presumably all that they would have known, since Spock is really only guessing (correctly, as it turns out) what the Genesis Device would do to living people, and since Khan allegedly has a superior intelect, then presumably, he would have made the same unusual leap in logic, presumably. But that still leaves the bizare nature of how the officers on the Reliant all knew what was going on. For all we know, they were just given very strange orders like "find a completely lifeless planet."
    • Or it's quite possible that Terrell was fully briefed, since his ship was assigned long-term to the project.
    • I'd assume that Terrell knew more than Spock did because the project was relevant to Terrell's orders, while Spock was doing something entirely unrelated.
      • Exactly: Chekov's log entry specifies that they're looking for a Genesis test site.
    • It's just like classification is handled now, there are two factors determining whether a person can be told classified info; security clearance, and need-to-know. Spock and Terrell could have the exact same clearance level, but Spock simply doesn't have a reason why he should know about Genesis, while Terrell has a very good reason to know about it.
  • Why in the name of everything that's holy did Scotty take his dying nephew to the bridge and not directly to Sick Bay?
    • In the novelization, Kirk and Spock leave the bridge to check the damage in Engineering, and run into Scotty with his dying nephew part of the way there. Presumably, this was thought to take too much screen time, so Scotty showing up on the bridge was used instead (even if it makes no sense). Alternately, Scotty has got to be pretty distraught at the time, to the point where maybe he pushed the wrong button in the elevator...?
    • Rule of Drama. Kirk says "Let's see how badly we've been hurt.", and whaddya know, Scotty shows up with his dying nephew. Cue Oh Crap reactions by Kirk and company.
    • The ship was heavily damaged. Scotty may have had to take the turbolift to the bridge before he could go back down to sickbay.
      • That's how the Novelization explains Scotty's arrival on the bridge: he wasn't able to reach sickbay from engineering.
      • SF Debris speculated that this might have been the original scene where Spock died, and when it was changed they changed which character did what to attempt to keep the emotional impact.
  • Why was Khan inferred to be unable to account for the third dimension in the Enterprise/Reliant battle? It is not as if there wasn't fighting involving three dimensions in 20th-century naval warfare, especially if you take into account submarines and air strikes.
    • Maybe because the chess board he was left with on Ceti Alpha 5 wasn't a 3D chess set?
      • Look more closely - it's a Checkers set. Genius-level intellects and they play Checkers instead of Chess?
    • Seriously though, most people who haven't directly experienced combat where the third dimension comes into play have trouble with the concept as it's not intuitive to humans, who spend most of their lives moving in two dimensions. Chances are that most of the battles Khan participated in on Earth were ground-based. As Spock says, he's intelligent, but inexperienced.
  • Why exactly does Kirk go ballistic (KHAAAANNNNN!!!) when Khan leaves him and the others stranded? He already had an escape plan in place and he knew he just had to wait. I can understand faking a little so Khan wouldn't suspect, but come on!
    • Kirk was probably just really mad at Khan for all of the horrible things he did to him and those close to him. After seeing all of the people Khan tortured and killed, having to hear him gloat probably just made Kirk snap.
      • Kirk wanted Khan to think he had won. And what better way to bait Khan into thinking that then by convincing him that he had caused the nerves-of-steel Captain Kirk to completely lose his shit?. Acting all cool like he had a plan would be the worst thing Kirk could have done short of just telling Khan that the Enterprise would be back to pick him up in a few hours.
  • When Spock takes over the Reliant via the "command console" and lowers her shields, why doesn't he do something more destructive like order Reliant to dump all her fuel into space or blow out all her airlocks?
    • Considering Khan had just knocked out their main power and weapons, Kirk and Spock needed to do something incredibly simple. Dumping fuel would still leave Reliant with enough power to blast Enterprise, and opening the airlocks would do nothing as ships are built with multiple failsafes to prevent total loss of atmosphere.
    • I'm wondering why they didn't use the command console in comparable situations later on in Trek. We've seen other instances of one or another crew having to bring in a Starfleet ship that had been hijacked or whose captain had gone renegade or that was taking orders from an admiral attempting a coup. TNG's "The Wounded," Deep Space Nine's "Defiant" and "Paradise Lost," Voyager's "Equinox," to name a few.
      • Renegade Starfleet officers would be fully aware of the code and would have to be carrying an Idiot Ball the size of a small solar system to not change it. Spock worried that the command console plan might fail on account of Khan changing the code. As for hijackers, well lets just say that they were also aware of the command console codes or something.
      • They actually did use this tactic in "The Wounded" - it was only partially successful, though.
      • Khan's line suggests that there was a way to override the remote access, and that the only reason the trick worked at all was that the crew was unfamiliar with the ship and couldn't block it quickly enough.
    • Kirk also had no idea where Reliant's real crew was. Blowing out their airlocks or ordering an Auto-Destruct or something could have killed the Reliant crew along with Kahn and his followers. It's also possible that the command console code can't access vital functions, but only stuff you would need to recover an out-of-control ship, like ordering the shields down so you can beam a recovery crew over.
  • So what did Khan want with Genesis anyway?
    • Nothing, really. He just saw an opportunity to escape into space, and draw Kirk into a battle, so he went with it.
      • But he tried to get information about it from Kirk (The stalling to "get" the information was the only thing which saved the Enterprise from being blasted to high-hell after Khan was finished gloating), he even takes time out of trying to kill Kirk in order to go to Regula 1 and steal it from them. So he obviously went out of his way to obtain it.
        • He wanted a one-hit planet-killing torpedo. The Genesis device was supposed to create life, but, as McCoy realized, it has to wipe out all existing life on a planet to do it. Khan was probably going to have his followers build a whole arsenal of them to pave the way for a new empire.
    • If you're a deposed dictator who wants to get back into the business of conquering and subjugating foreign nations, wouldn't you be intrigued by the existence of something that could very easily be used as a superweapon?
    • It's also remotely possible that Khan just wanted to use Genesis to create a new homeworld for he and his people. Either way, the man's just a touch emotionally compromised and isn't going about any of it the best way. It does seem that he first became interested in Genesis because Admiral Kirk was in charge of the project.
  • This is a small and silly one, but if Khan & Co. had been marooned on Ceti Alpha V for fifteen years, why did all his crew look like they were in their late 20's at most? You could argue that their superhuman genes were behind it, but since Khan himself aged normally, that doesn't really work. Conversely, they were too old to have been born to the original crew in the intervening fifteen years.
    • The expanded universe fluff mentions that the original survivors started paring off and having children soon after they were marooned, and over the course of fifteen years most of them died from in-fighting, accidents, disease, or the Ceti Eel. As for the new ones, Khan apparently mentioned in a diary that they aged at an accelerated rate (He noted that at age 10, Joachim looked as though he were 15). It's all on the Memory Alpha (pretty much the Star Trek wiki).
    • Khan doesn't look that different from "Space Seed" except that he's wearing rugged clothing and some other cosmetic details, and that his hair is white. Might be the pressures of leadership: Look at the effect of the US Presidency on its officeholders' hair color, and none of them has ever had to guide a civilization through anything like the rigors of Ceti Alpha V.
  • Where did Kahn get the contemporary Starfleet belt buckle he was wearing as a necklace? I'm pretty sure he was wearing it before his encounter with the Reliant crew.
    • The cargo container had a crate full of belt buckles?
      • Except that Starfleet Uniforms didn't have belts when Kahn was marooned. It can only really be explained by "wardrobe goof".
        • I think the IDEA was that it belonged to his wife. Probably more of a "Did Not Do Research" moment.
  • As the main characters frequently point out, Genesis is the most powerful weapon in probably the whole galaxy. Why wasn't this technology dug up and weaponized by the Federation for its later wars? There wouldn't have been a Wolf 359 or Dominion War if Federation starships could just do Genesis at their targets.
    • At the end of the third movie, everyone with the potential knowledge to recreate Genesis is either dead, or has no desire to share its secrets with Starfleet. It's given a brief Shout-Out in Voyager as something deemed too dangerous to exist (remember, if we've got it, it's only a matter of time before they've got it too; see also atomic weapons).
    • "Genesis was perfectly named-- the creation of life, not death." Sarek hit it on the nose in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (although he was incorrect in saying it was the Klingons who first shed blood to possess its secrets). Only bad people would use the Genesis device as a weapon.
    • Aside from Carol Marcus, everyone involved with Project Genesis is dead and all their data was lost when the Genesis Device destroyed Reliant and Regula 1. Once they knew it wouldn't work as a terraforming tool, there's no way the Federation would give funding to develop it as a weapon of mass destruction. The other problem is that if the Federation had the technology at the Battle of Wolf 359 and defeated the Borg, that would have made them even more determined to assimilate the Federation to get that knowledge.
      • That explanation is basically confirmed in the Genesis Wave series of novels: Starfleet realized that if the Borg ever assimilated Genesis technology and combined it with their transwarp network, it would be Game Over for the galaxy.
  • Saavik, you can quote the entire Starfleet reg book from memory, and you throw a fit because Spock used a content-sensitive code in a situation where regulations demanded he encode his message?
    • I'd hardly call, "You lied." to be throwing a fit, even by Vulcan standards. Recall the witty retorts between Spock and Valaris in ST:VI as they accuse the other of lying to stall for time. I'd assume it's a game Vulcans play with each other since honesty is exceptionally important in their culture (logic only works if the data you're given is true) yet they understand that it's necessary to lie if duty demands it.
      • In Star Trek VI the Undiscovered Country, however, we learn that a Vulcan throws a fit, they do it so subtly that even other Vulcans might not notice it. Pay attention to the scene in Spock's quarters, one of the characters is on the verge of a nerve breakdown.
  • Okay, I know the "real" reason (to set up the plot of Star Trek III: The Search For Spock), but why exactly did they leave Spock's body on the Genesis planet in the first place? I know Kirk's spiel about "giving his life" to save the new world was supposed to be an explanation, but that really doesn't make any sense, either (especially since said "world" didn't really exist at the time Spock sacrificed himself). And while he didn't know about the katra and thus couldn't have known Spock could be saved, didn't Kirk think that MAYBE Sarek and Amanda would have appreciated the chance to bury and properly mourn their only child back on his home planet? As for Spock's wishes, somehow I doubt "just dump me on the nearest rock and move on" was part of his final resting plans. Rule of Drama or not, this has always bugged the hell out of me.
    • The other structural reason is to provide the closure for Spock's death without having to vault forward in time long enough to have a funeral on Vulcan. Narratively, I would agree that it doesn't make a lot of sense.
      • I have to disagree. From a character perspective, it makes sense that Spock would want to be "dumped on the nearest rock". First, funeral rites are highly illogical, and I doubt Vulcans are overly concerned about such things. Speculation aside, though, Spock's relationship with his father is strained, to say the least, because Spock struggled to control his emotions his entire life (and Sarek, being a high-ranking Vulcan, didn't need or want a problem child). His relationship with Amanda is better, but is also strained, because of his emotional restraint (and I'd guess there's a healthy dose of shame involved for him, because he loves her). Even if you set that aside, Spock's first devotion was to duty. It would be extremely inconvenient to force Enterprise back to Vulcan to deliver his body, and disrupting the mission in death is the last thing he'd want. YMMV.
      • Whether funeral rites are illogical are not, the Vulcans do care about them. We know this from the next movie. Vulcan society is highly ceremonial and ritualistic.
      • I believe this is already addressed further up the page. No, I'm sure "Dump me on the nearest rock" wasn't the exact final wish Spock had on file, but I see no reason not to believe that "In the event of my death in the line of duty, I wish to be buried in space" was on file. His coffin landing on the Genesis planet was probably due to someone adding their own bit of all-too-human sentimentality to the proceedings. (Also keep in mind that originally, this was not done with setting up Star Trek III in mind; the original intention was that Spock would die for real, since Leonard Nimoy didn't want to continue with the role due to some disagreements with Paramount.)
  • Having watched only the movies and the TV series, I'm curious: what exactly did Spock do to fix or reconnect the mains? Without technical insight on his actions, all a casual moviegoer (like myself) sees is him put his thickly-gloved hands into a tube and fiddle with something inside while working against a strong blast of (presumably radioactive) vapors. That's not exactly conductive to delicate work, whatever it was.
    • That's basically like asking how a warp engine works. All we know is that he needed the glove to keep his fingers from melting off as he reconnected/rerouted/fixed whatever was preventing them from going to warp. The precise technical details are really irrelevant to the plot. I imagine the work was not so delicate that it could be done while wearing gloves, and it's just Spock's high pain threshold and ability to work by memory and sense of touch that allowed him to do it.
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