Original Sins (or, My Grypes with TWOK!!)

[Lance]

As a side note, stardestroyer-dot-net calls these things 'Brain Bugs', and defines them as being any little thing in an episode or movie which isn't so objectionable in it's original form, but which becomes ingrained and then gets bigger and bigger until it eventually affects negatively on elements of the franchise in the future instalments.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/BrainBugs.html

A lot of the points raised in the article are good ones, particularly the one about Jeffries Tubes, as well as the ones about the sanding away of the complexity of the Klingons, Ferengi, and Borg.

 

[Christopher]

-- Kirk's paralysis during the Genesis countdown. What was he doing on the bridge? Did he slip into an introspective mode? Did he stop thinking? Did he give up? He didn't once look over to Spock and notice he had left the bridge? Really?

Good point. But then, there are a lot of moments of "paralysis" in the movie -- scenes where Kirk or Khan is told that something immediately dangerous is happening and they just sit there dumbly for 5-10 seconds before reacting. It's a bizarrely slow-paced film in many ways, and I say that as someone who likes TMP.

-- You can call it science fiction if you want, but a nebula is nothing like it's portrayed in the movie. Pure fantasy.

The best theory I've come across is that the Mutara Nebula was actually in the process of collapsing into a protostar and planetary system. That would explain it being unusually dense, and would also explain where the hell the Genesis Planet's sun came from -- it was there in the center of the nebula all along.

-- Iffy science, or magic science. A person-sized apparatus can turn an entire lifeless planet into the Garden of Eden? That stretches credulity even more than red matter does.

Yeah, that always got me too. I read the novel long before I saw the movie (since movies stayed in theaters for months back then, often more than a year), and I imagined the Genesis torpedo as this massive missile, something big enough to contain the kind of power source necessary to achieve a planetary-scale transformation. When I eventually saw the movie (or maybe read the photonovel) and discovered that the torpedo was this dinky little 5-foot thing that was mostly hollow, I laughed at the sheer absurdity of it. It was like asking us to believe that a single tiny firecracker could blow up a city.

Some of the above are picking nits, except maybe Khan letting Kirk off the hook. Still, TWOK is a fine story. However, it is as flawed in its own ways as any of the other Trek movies.

Yup. Some of my favorite gripes:

How come Khan's followers are almost all white, Aryan types when they were said to be multiethnic in "Space Seed?"

How come they're mostly in their early to mid-20s when they were stranded as adults 15 years earlier?

How can Kirk say he's never faced death after losing his best friend Gary Mitchell, the love of his life Edith Keeler, his brother and sister-in-law, and his wife Miramanee and their unborn son, all within the space of 3-4 years?

 

[BigJake]

So, going back through the thread starting with Franklin:

Hence this thread, which is half serious and half parody of the "My Gripes with STID!" tread in the other forum.

In all honesty if there's parody going on, it's mostly just of me, because I know that in some eyes I give the impression of holding TWOK sacrosanct and it really isn't so; TWOK's being the best of the Trek movies (to whatever extent that's the case) still hardly makes it the Citizen Kane of science fiction cinema, given that Trek as a whole has been... a little uneven on the big screen.

That said:

Khan was obsessed with getting Kirk. It drove him from the moment he took the captain's chair of the Reliant. It drives the movie. So, he had him on Regula, then instead of beaming him up when Terrell didn't kill him, he beamed up Genesis instead. Sorry? (He couldn't beam up both?)

Khan at this point doesn't know about the Genesis cave and believes that Regula One is a genuinely dead planet. He thinks he's stranding Kirk to starve (because he's about to kill his only near-at-hand source of rescue) which he sees a sweeter form of poetic justice than just killing him. This of course is a bit thin given some of the film's other conceits (cf. Everywhere in the galaxy is next door to everywhere else) but Montalban sold it beautifully as a consistent part of the character's revenge obsession, so I don't have a tenth the problem with it that you do.

Kirk's paralysis during the Genesis countdown. What was he doing on the bridge? Did he slip into an introspective mode? Did he stop thinking? Did he give up?

He mostly seemed to be praying for Scotty to get the mains back online. And in fairness there are sometimes situations where there is nothing more you can do than wait and hope... although of course one could say he could have ordered the necessary repairs, fatalities included, before Spock went off to do it himself. I actually liked that his reaction when they do come back online is perfectly in line with a "Scotty produced another miracle!" moment... not yet realizing who the author of the "miracle" was and what it cost, but:

He didn't once look over to Spock and notice he had left the bridge?

Yeah. Uh. Mumble-mumble-uh-distracted by impending death-something-something. Another squinter for sure.

You can call it science fiction if you want, but a nebula is nothing like it's portrayed in the movie.

To get in Andy Rooney mode for a moment, you know what else bugs me as a standard visual sci-fi trope not unlike this one? Asteroid belts. Can we please have a movie where asteroid belts aren't these Star Wars-style close-packed demolition derbies? Just once?

A person-sized apparatus can turn an entire lifeless planet into the Garden of Eden?

Actually, so far as I can tell the Genesis device actually creates a planet out of the raw matter of the nebula. I can see where they got the thematic connections but person-sized apparatus or not, Nebulas and Planets Do Not Work This Way.

And following on from that:

How come Khan's followers are almost all white, Aryan types when they were said to be multiethnic in "Space Seed?"

How come they're mostly in their early to mid-20s when they were stranded as adults 15 years earlier?

This was something it took me a while to notice (mostly because Khan's followers in TWOK look something like a KISS revue and don't impinge on the consciousness much), but it does stand out once you've finally noticed, especially with Joachim.

(And thanks Lance for that "brain bugs" post. Exactly what I had in mind. More replies to come to earlier posts later.)

 

[Christopher]

Actually, so far as I can tell the Genesis device actually creates a planet out of the raw matter of the nebula.

Oh yeah, that's another thing that bugs me. The Genesis device is not programmed to do that. It's programmed to act upon a planet that already exists, merely transforming its surface into a biological matrix. It's designed to create "life from lifelessness." It's not designed to create an entire planetary body from a nebula, which is an entirely different physical and chemical process. By all rights, when this instrument that was programmed to operate on a pre-existing planet was activated in an environment where no planet existed, it should've simply given some sort of 404 Planet Not Found error message and either shut down or gone into an unresolvable loop. Or at most, if we assume it operated like some sort of replicator technology (dematerializing raw matter and rematerializing it according to a biological pattern), then it might've turned some nebular gases into some diffusely scattered algae and bacteria and mosses that would've been floating in open space and quickly died. Having it actually manufacture a planet when it was never designed to do that, when it's a completely different type of creative process from the one it was built to perform, makes it sheer magic, not technology.

 

[Franklin]

Just some quick responses to some stuff immediately above (don't want to create a wall of quotes).

-- Khan was rather clearly Captain Ahab and Kirk was Moby Dick. The idea that he would become distracted by anything else takes away significantly from that driving obsession. I can't imagine Ahab all of a sudden coming across a mermaid and deciding that's more worthwhile to go after than the whale. After all, the whale ain't going anywhere. As far as assuming Regula is a dead planetoid goes, superior intellects don't assume. They account for every contingency. Beam Kirk up, kill him. The problem is, if he does that, the movie's over. Believing he left him stranded there may have been a form of poetic justice to Khan, but that seems soooo contrived to me. Like someone wrote himself into a corner, so he suddenly changed his antagonist's motive so the story could start moving again. Notice how quickly he resumes his obsession after finding out Kirk's free.

-- Joachim has to basically plead with him to take Genesis and run, but Khan can't do that. Now, he knows Kirk is free and he's 100 percent obsessed with him, again. He takes Kirk's bait. Not very clever for a superior intellect holding what could be the galaxy's greatest weapon. That's a great opportunity squandered. But no, all of a sudden, killing Kirk is job-one, again.

Let's face it, TWOK Khan was crazy as a loon and inconsistent.

 

[Lance]

Actually, so far as I can tell the Genesis device actually creates a planet out of the raw matter of the nebula.

Oh yeah, that's another thing that bugs me. The Genesis device is not programmed to do that. It's programmed to act upon a planet that already exists, merely transforming its surface into a biological matrix. It's designed to create "life from lifelessness." It's not designed to create an entire planetary body from a nebula, which is an entirely different physical and chemical process. By all rights, when this instrument that was programmed to operate on a pre-existing planet was activated in an environment where no planet existed, it should've simply given some sort of 404 Planet Not Found error message and either shut down or gone into an unresolvable loop. Or at most, if we assume it operated like some sort of replicator technology (dematerializing raw matter and rematerializing it according to a biological pattern), then it might've turned some nebular gases into some diffusely scattered algae and bacteria and mosses that would've been floating in open space and quickly died. Having it actually manufacture a planet when it was never designed to do that, when it's a completely different type of creative process from the one it was built to perform, makes it sheer magic, not technology.

When I first watched TWOK, way back in the day, I thought I'd missed something, and just assumed that there was some planetary body there already which absorbed the Genesis effect or something (I think as a six year old I was probably thinking of the 'planet surface' scene earlier on Regular One and getting confused). It was only later that I realised, in fact, there is no planetary matter, it just goes 'poof' and suddenly there we go, instant planet.

One can rationalise that it has taken the matter from the Reliant, combined with the nebula, and formed it into a planet. But that's clearly a bullshit, quasi-magical explanation with no basis in what we're told the Genesis Device actually does. It's a complete failure of plot logic.

 

[Christopher]

Let's face it, TWOK Khan was crazy as a loon and inconsistent.

That's really the only explanation -- that he was insane and irrational. Which is part of why he's so much less interesting as an adversary in TWOK than he was in "Space Seed." They really ruined his character, squandered all the potential that "Space Seed" created.

Bottom line, it's just not an intelligent script. It doesn't make sense on any level, and it goes for cartoony melodrama when TOS aspired to be as thoughtful and sophisticated as the classiest adult dramas of its era. There are many who think that TWOK embodied the essence of the original series, but I think its creators totally misunderstood what Star Trek was and turned it into something much dumber.

 

[BigJake]

The idea that he would become distracted by anything else takes away significantly from that driving obsession.

I don't think deliberately stranding the guy and going off to kill any potential rescuers qualifies as "distraction" at all. It qualifies as sadistic. (As for Khan assuming the planet was dead, there was no particular reason he shouldn't. Everyone involved assumed it, Spock included, until Marcus showed them the Genesis cave.)

Basically Khan's character has two perfectly consistent through-lines. Priority one, kill Kirk (quickly or slowly as the opportunity presents itself... in fact his actions at Regula, come to think of it, echo his earlier stranding of Reliant's crew). Priority two, provide for the future of his people (hence Genesis). At all times he is visibly pursuing those priorities in that order. He's obviously crazy as a loon while doing it -- which impairs his judgment and is part of the point -- but no, he's not particularly "inconsistent" about his priorities. (This might have "ruined" his character for some people, per Christopher's post above; IMO those flaws were precisely what made him a memorable antagonist. So I can't really fault TWOK's script for it.)

 

[UssGlenn]

You could also put the Praxis explosion under the "2-D thinking" category, since it introduced a really annoying cinematic trope that's since been copied by other movies like Stargate and the A New Hope Special Edition: giving an explosion in space a circular "shock wave" that expands along a flat plane. First off, shock waves don't propagate without a medium; there can be shock waves through the tenuous interstellar gas, but they'd be way too faint and diffuse to be felt by a starship. As a rule, the only hazards posed to a spaceship by a nearby explosion are radiation exposure and direct impact by shrapnel. And second, any faint shock wave or front of expanding gases would propagate spherically, not circularly. Space is not flat.

This never really bothered me. I just chalk it up to the odd properties of subspace. It's a subspace shockwave that travels at superluminal speeds. It bleeds into normal space along a single plane, at which point it drops to sub-light speed. Basically, it hits you at warp speed but once you are in the wave you are dealing with a sublight phenomena until it dissipates.

Actually, so far as I can tell the Genesis device actually creates a planet out of the raw matter of the nebula.

Oh yeah, that's another thing that bugs me. The Genesis device is not programmed to do that. It's programmed to act upon a planet that already exists, merely transforming its surface into a biological matrix. It's designed to create "life from lifelessness." It's not designed to create an entire planetary body from a nebula, which is an entirely different physical and chemical process. By all rights, when this instrument that was programmed to operate on a pre-existing planet was activated in an environment where no planet existed, it should've simply given some sort of 404 Planet Not Found error message and either shut down or gone into an unresolvable loop. Or at most, if we assume it operated like some sort of replicator technology (dematerializing raw matter and rematerializing it according to a biological pattern), then it might've turned some nebular gases into some diffusely scattered algae and bacteria and mosses that would've been floating in open space and quickly died. Having it actually manufacture a planet when it was never designed to do that, when it's a completely different type of creative process from the one it was built to perform, makes it sheer magic, not technology.

I always figured that was why the planet was unstable, not enough mass to work with but (somehow) forced to create Earth style gravity. That sounds like it would tear a planet apart.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

There are many who think that TWOK embodied the essence of the original series, but I think its creators totally misunderstood what Star Trek was and turned it into something much dumber.

I don't know seeing as The Cage is usually held up as a form of Star Trek's purity and it plays out like all the more actiony entries in the franchise which fans seem to treat as not trek.

I mean it had fist fights, explosions, fan service, and kind of resolved things with a series of threats of violence.

 

[Franklin]

Meh. Kirk lures him into the nebula by "laughing at his superior intellect." To which, Khan responds like a drunk in a bar, "You want a piece of me? You want a piece of me? Fuck you. Let's go." Too easy. He thought nothing of stranding Kirk a little while before. Now, he decides to go hell bent for glory after him rather than saying, "Kirk my friend, you can't goad me. You want me in that nebula. So, I won't go. Besides, you know what I have. You know the power I possess. No, Kirk, I won't come after you. You need to come after me. You're still alive, but I've defeated you because I now control the fates of billions of lives, not just yours. Billions of innocent people will die because you can't stop me. You laugh at me? I laugh at you and say, 'Stop me.' Have your entire Starfleet stop me. No, I can do more than kill you, Kirk. I can destroy everything you stand for. Entire civilizations wiped out. Joachim, set a course for the nearest populous planet."

To which Spock would turn to Kirk and say, "Captain, do you think it's time for a colorful metaphor?"

 

[BigJake]

Going a bit earlier in the thread:

You are completely wrong!

That's the spirit!

I'm not sure that "confirming" it is much of an accusation. After various plots in TOS, not to mention TMP, used this device, TWOK simply used it yet again.

I agree with Christopher's point above where he said that TMP (for all that he prefers it as a film) is a worse offender in this regard, and certainly there are vastly worse offenders in canon than TWOK, especially any of them that have Enterprise as Earth's only line of defense. However, the Enterprise being the only ship in a region in the series often made sense because it was out in deep space and the basic conceit of the show was that deep space was vast and lonely and there weren't many ships.

TWOK bears more of a family relationship with the former trope than the latter, since it has the Enterprise being dispatched from Earth orbit to the frontier as "the only ship in the quadrant."

Why would Starfleet check in on this remote colony in particular? Enterprise seems to frequently meet colonies who've been out of touch with Earth for decades. And if Kahn is such a superman, why is he bitching that Starfleet wasn't providing oversight? That's like an Ayn Randian complaining someone should do something about the local roads.

Fair point. It is true that at the end of "Space Seed" they imply that Khan and his people aren't going to be seeing anyone for some time ("It would be interesting, Captain, to return to this world in a hundred years"). Also true that Khan bitching about the lack of oversight given his pretensions of superiority is rather ironic.

(It is rather less explicable that they don't seem to have any record of the prior voyage or the Ceti Alpha system at all in TWOK. On this one I have to disagree with martok2112, I don't believe there's any reason to think that encounter wouldn't have been recorded, and they seemed even at that time to have basic charts of the system.)

I think it's obvious there's a difference between having an intellectual awareness of three dimensions, and actual experience in 3D space combat.

True, I just think the presentation of this and the nautical metaphor of space combat is heavily literal -- in a way that was understandable for the time, maybe, but that eventually became entrenched as a habit in a bad way.

It's "movie time". Unlike STID, it's never seemed false to me.

It never bothered me as a kid (but then neither did Star Wars' rubbery space-time either). It's something that mostly occurs to me as an adult, because I have the experience and frame of reference to compare it with other kinds of stories. I'd agree that STID is a much more radical example.

Actually, I think none of the other TOS movies feature an arch-villain or nemesis.

A great many of the films after Khan are structured around villains who were advertised as selling points of their respective movies and most of whom were directly compared with Khan: Kruge, Sybok, Chang, Soren, Ru'afo or whatever his name was in INS, Shinzon and Nero were all examples. They were all different from each other and none were really like Khan, of course, even when they directly tried to be, but the point is that the fixation on building the films around defeating villains and trying in one way or another to one-up Khan started with TWOK. Even the Borg in FC were part of this... although they were spared comparison with Khan and were more arguably successful than most because they had their own cultural cachet to work with.

 

[BigJake]

Meh. Kirk lures him into the nebula by "laughing at his superior intellect." To which, Khan responds like a drunk in a bar, "You want a piece of me? You want a piece of me? Fuck you. Let's go." Too easy.

No, it made sense. Stranding him was satisfying when he believed that had worked. The prospect of it not working brought him back to option one.

He thought nothing of stranding Kirk a little while before. Now, he decides to go hell bent for glory after him rather than saying, "Kirk my friend, you can't goad me. You want me in that nebula. So, I won't go. Besides, you know what I have. You know the power I possess. [etc]

Uh, no thanks, to have him blathering about all the people he was going to murder would definitely have been far worse for my money. His beef with Kirk was obviously personal and Khan had never been sold at any point as a gratuitous genocidaire (however ruthless he otherwise was); turning him into one would have genuinely ruined the character, and there was really no evidence that his interest in Genesis was in its application as weaponry (indeed given his recent experiences, an interest in its life-giving properties makes far more sense). On this one I'd say Meyer made the correct call.

I guess it kind of comes down to whether what you're looking for from Khan is menacing bad-assery or tragedy. I'm fond of menacing badassery in its place, but it's not a be-all and end-all for me and it's not what made TWOK Khan interesting. What made TWOK Khan interesting was precisely that he was a mixture of menacing villain and querulous, irrational old man (yes, his story is as much a part of the theme of aging as Kirk's is) -- his byplay with Joachim where his second-in-command tries to reason with him are some of the best parts of the movie for me to this day, because they make it clear that he's a shell of a formerly great man going down a path of madness. I prefer a convincingly tragic character to a stock menacing badass any day of the week; that's why Wrath's character work isn't on my list of gripes. It's one of the primary reasons I still love the film despite the gripes.

 

[Christopher]

This never really bothered me. I just chalk it up to the odd properties of subspace. It's a subspace shockwave that travels at superluminal speeds. It bleeds into normal space along a single plane, at which point it drops to sub-light speed. Basically, it hits you at warp speed but once you are in the wave you are dealing with a sublight phenomena until it dissipates.

Yeah, but in that case, what are the odds that the Excelsior just happened to be traveling in that exact plane? Again, space is 3-dimensional. If we assume the "shock wave" was, say, five degrees thick in either direction, then there was only one chance in 36 that it would happen to hit the Excelsior.

I'm not saying the event can't be rationalized in-story. I've established in my Trek novels that warp-capable vessels are susceptible to subspace disruptions due to resonances in their warp coils, and I just disregard the visuals as figurative and assume that's what happened to the Excelsior. But I'm just annoyed by the stupidity of the "2-D shock wave in space" trope that's been copies by so many movies, and I'm embarrassed on Star Trek's behalf that it basically started the trend.

I always figured that was why the planet was unstable, not enough mass to work with but (somehow) forced to create Earth style gravity. That sounds like it would tear a planet apart.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that the torpedo should never have created the planet in the first place. It wasn't designed to be capable of doing that. Accelerating the condensation of a cloud of gas into a massive agglomeration of solid, lifeless minerals is a totally different process from converting the lifeless elements on the surface of an existing planetary body into biological matter, surface water, and an oxygen atmosphere. It's like trying to use a word processor to edit video, or use your microwave oven to mow the lawn. It's just not the same procedure at all. A machine designed to do one thing should not be spontaneously capable of doing an entirely unrelated thing.

 

[Franklin]

A person of superior ability and intellect doesn't run head-long into a trap unless he's unstable and not thinking clearly. That's my point and I think one Christopher was making: Khan's ability to outthink people was compromised in this movie. At the end, he merely becomes Kirk's catspaw. He's not rational, any more. Nowhere in the movie do we ever see the calculated cleverness, the superior ego, the self-satisfied swagger that Khan has in "Space Seed" and shows bits and pieces of in STID (though there he's a bit emotionally compromised there, too).

As far as not committing genocide goes, it wasn't above the rulers in 1996, even if Khan resisted. Considering he's stumbled across Genesis, given his enhanced ambitions, why wouldn't the option of at least he threat of mass murder cross his mind? What good is having Genesis if he doesn't gain from at least threatening to use it? In "Space Seed" he tried to commit mass murder on the ship.

If stranding Kirk on a planetoid seemed far more delicious to Khan than killing him outright, then how great would it be to make Kirk feel billions of lives hang in the balance because of him? "You will be their hero, Kirk. The one who gave his life so billions could live. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, wouldn't you agree? The choice is yours, admiral."

 

[BigJake]

Yes, Khan's ability to out-think people was indeed compromised by his irrationality. That's part of the tragedy of the character... albeit note that he came within a hair of successfully killing them anyway. (I talked a bit in an edit above which you may not have seen yet about the virtues of tragedy vs. badassery and I would argue that Khan was made more memorable by opting for the former, however much nerd rage his failing to act as a superior being provokes. I think Meyer's judgment on that one has been borne out pretty thoroughly as indeed the film's strongest element, so it's not something I can fault.)

As far as not committing genocide goes, it wasn't above the rulers in 1996

It wasn't part of Khan's character (the "genocidal madman" thing was an innovation of STID) and would have broken the vestigial sympathetic qualities with which his villainy was leavened, nor was it in any way necessary. So again, I'd say Meyer was right on this one. (And I mean really, at a certain level what you're describing is just stock moustache-twirler Because He's Evil behaviour. "Commander Cody, with you trapped in that nebula, now the universe will be powerless before my death ray!" It's Doctor Chaotica you need for that, not Khan. )

 

[Mudd]

As a side note, stardestroyer-dot-net calls these things 'Brain Bugs', and defines them as being any little thing in an episode or movie which isn't so objectionable in it's original form, but which becomes ingrained and then gets bigger and bigger until it eventually affects negatively on elements of the franchise in the future instalments.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/BrainBugs.html

A lot of the points raised in the article are good ones, particularly the one about Jeffries Tubes, as well as the ones about the sanding away of the complexity of the Klingons, Ferengi, and Borg.

That's a really good article.

 

[J.T.B.]

3. "Two-dimensional thinking."
Having Khan undone, in the end, by his lack of experience in space is a great idea. And back in 1982, the way they did this -- actually specifically and explicitly reminding us that we're in space and can navigate in three dimensions -- seemed like a natural progression from the effects we had seen on the show. In retrospect, though, this doesn't really make sense (how could you not be aware of needing to maneuver in three dimensions when you're in space?) and is an example of Meyers' tendency toward a certain... literal-mindedness. His use of nautical themes and metaphors was part of what made Wrath a great film, but he's so deep inside them that he has the Enterprise "surface" to launch its final volley at Khan.

I completely agree and have said as much before. If Khan is indeed so inexperienced, past master of space fighting tactics Kirk should be efficiently giving orders that will have him rolled up quickly and without much fuss. Instead, Spock has to point it out to him! If the idea had to be conveyed to the audience, how about Kirk giving a helm order, someone questioning the intention, and Kirk saying something like "Just taking advantage of his inexperience. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking."

I group that with another thing that bugs me in TUC: The "tailpipe" epiphany. No one in the entire Federation, in all the years of Romulan and Klingon cloaked threats, had thought of something that was apprently easily done and highly effective? Look at all the ways that were devised to detect submarines: Passive sonar, active sonar, exhaust "sniffing," magnetic detection... It's not plausible that something so obvious would have just been overlooked.

^I'm getting tired of this "Starfleet doesn't know how to count to six" bit, to be honest. Ceti Alpha, a star out on the fringes of unexplored Federation space* was never described as a system with six planets. In 'Space Seed' they simply said they were going to leave Khan and his people on the fifth planet in the system, as it was Class M. The system could have forty planets and dwarf planets orbiting it, complete with a couple of gas giants. The implication of CA six exploding and successfully ruining CA five is that they were twins, each being the moon of the other. This is far more likely if there are multiple planets beyond them in the system. Also, if Starfleet has classified the Khan incident, the only records the Reliant has are to a binary planet that is now just one, which matches relatively closely to the one in their databanks. Probably followed in its orbit by a slowly expanding asteroid field that will continue to damage the planet for the rest of time.

No matter the composition of the system, Reliant's crew knew what planet it was supposed to be, and would have to have navigational information to arrive there. Unless Starfleet's classification of the Khan incident extended to falsifying its own ships' navigation references, it still doesn't make sense.

Let's face it, TWOK Khan was crazy as a loon and inconsistent.

Well, stress can get to you. Like Scotty's bridge-instead-of-sickbay moment!

I pretty much agree with everything in the OP, but I mean it in the nicest possible way. It's a movie I enjoy a lot.

 

[BigJake]

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/BrainBugs.html

A lot of the points raised in the article are good ones, particularly the one about Jeffries Tubes, as well as the ones about the sanding away of the complexity of the Klingons, Ferengi, and Borg.

That's a really good article.

Yeah, I like some of the general sci-fi brain bugs in particular. The "gravitics" thing always makes me cringe.

 

[BigJake]

I group that with another thing that bugs me in TUC: The "tailpipe" epiphany. No one in the entire Federation, in all the years of Romulan and Klingon cloaked threats, had thought of something that was apprently easily done and highly effective?

Heh, yeah, that was clunky for certain.