Star Trek: Start to Finish

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan feels like “the Star Trek movie”, as if it were the film that took the successful, beloved franchise and put it in all its glory on the big screen. That it is not that movie but is rather the sequel to it is both the most interesting and least interesting thing about it: most because it gets so much right where The Motion Picture got wrong, and least because there is so much in The Wrath of Khan that is praiseworthy that spending so much time comparing it to its predecessor feels like faint praise.

So let us get the first part over with and then get on to the second.

Leaps and Bounds

There is a tremendous amount of difference between the first two Star Trek films, and nearly every change is for the better. Where TMP had too little plot, WOK has a complex, interweaving story told in three settings. Where TMP had too many abandoned subplots, WOK has myriad themes of life and death and rebirth and aging that support and augment the main story. Where TMP had Trekish exploration and discovery at its heart, WOK has space battles and chases. Where TMP had a problem taking itself too seriously, WOK has every character get in on the chance to be funny. Where TMP hinted that Kirk needed to return to the stars, WOK has Bones and Spock tell Jim to his face. Where TMP had a giant dangerous cloud with an unspeaking robot as its enemy, WOK has a passionate, well-spoken superhuman with glorious pecs and a truly sad tale of woe that makes his desire for vengeance seem almost noble.

In short, WOK takes the things that make TOS good and compounds them onto each other: the characters are thrust into an unknown situation (mysterious calls: check!) featuring people they already know (Khan: check!) and care about (Carol and David: double-check!), they use their wits (trickery and Federation backdoors: check!) and courage (hop in the transporter: check!) and expertise (nebula science: check!) to save the day (spoiler alert: check!).

This all comes from knowing that they were making a movie and figuring out what story they should tell in that context. Instead of trying to push as much of the cast onscreen as much as possible, new Producer Harve Bennett watched the entire series and determined the core of the show: “passion from Bones, logic from Spock, and Kirk in the middle, deciding what to do”. After discovering that formula, he picked a great bad guy and figured out a way to hit those points.

Let’s stop a moment and note the big elephant in that last paragraph: “new producer Harve Bennet”. The old producer was series creator Gene Roddenberry. And visionary as that guy was, he could never have made this movie. He was too fond of the Big Reveal and the Grand Idea. Looked at another way, the difference between TMP and WOK is that those two things drove the first (What does V’gar want? If robots become sentient, what do they believe in?) and are completely absent in the second (the secrets in WOK are over in the first half hour; the more primal revenge story isn’t up to snuff). Pushing Gene aside made Khan possible.

Plot

The plot, simply put, is “an old enemy wants revenge on Kirk, and only the crew’s smart thinking and vast experience can save them.” This is just about the most Treky a plot could possibly be. But there are more spoiler-filled points of interest, too.

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Bringing Khan back was smart, but bringing him back in the way they did was perfect: we’ve got an already-established character with a grudge against our heroes that they are as surprised about as we are, but that makes perfect sense when we hear about it. Making Ceti Alpha V a wasteland and Khan its ruler ties in smartly with the biblical illusions (“To Rule in Hell” is the official novel that tells of these years).

Bringing the training crew in to man the Enterprise is brilliant: instead of displacing the current crew or weirdly being in all the same positions as they used to be, this gives our heroes an excuse to step in when the going gets tough, and lets us root for the little guys in over their head alongside the old hands.

Kirk and Khan never meeting is a stroke of (almost certainly accidental) genius. If they had met, Khan is one superhuman-strength punch away from ending the franchise. Instead you get the two of them circling like fighters warily watching one another, with each scuffle prefixed by banter and suffixed by recriminations. The advantage is constantly shifting, and the balance is always close enough that everyone is on edge at all times, which makes the circling simultaneously easier to understand and harder to watch. Each skirmish could tip the balance, and the stakes are always high.

The Genesis device is almost an afterthought. It is a McGuffin in the purest sense: everyone wants it because everyone else wants it. It drives the plot without being the central reason that anything is happening. It ties together the factions and ups the stakes without being seen for most of the film. It fulfills its duties perfectly.

One of those duties is bringing Carol and David into the action. Trek’s best trick is pulling characters into the plot using old acquaintances, rivals, and lovers, and here we get Kirk’s own son as the ultimate draw. I’d almost say that David himself is underused, but his purposes are fulfilled nearly by his presence: he highlights Kirk’s aging, he demonstrates the win condition of saving your family, and he forces and helps Kirk face death and life.

Speaking of death and life: killing off Spock is a ballsy move. Even with the caveats they put into the film and the various outs they left themselves, it is a way to turn the foregone conclusion of the good guys winning into an interesting mixed-emotion scene, with a price being paid for the troubles they’ve survived. That this is then tied into the themes of winning, life, and death is what moves this movie from being good to being great: the Kobayashi Maru becomes a way to understand the characters better (Saavik hasn’t yet faced death; Kirk wins in unorthodox ways; Spock knows that sacrifices must be made).

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There are shortcomings, of course. Lt. Saavik is oft-onscreen but seldom used. Carol is little more than an excuse for David’s existence, and her history with Kirk is far less than adequately explained. Khan’s “superior intellect” seems to get outgunned at every opportunity. These are, in the whole, minor sins, but they are sins nonetheless.

Design

From the moment the titles appear on screen you know that this movie is a departure. Gone is the loopy, terrible font of the first movie, and gone is the oh-so-familiar-sounding score from that film. The new look is firmly of the 80s, and it sets the tone that will carry this movie: everything you’ve seen before is in the past, and Star Trek is about exploring the future.

Everywhere you look, you see a significantly revamped production design in this movie. Director Nick Meyer tried to make “as many changes as I could get away with” and seems to have succeeded; the look is much more militaristic, which puts a rationale behind the sparse (aka cheap) lines of the original series. This naval influence becomes especially pronounced during the climax, which harkens back to the terrific submarine-warfare-inspired episode Balance of Terror.

You can see, though, that The Motion Picture design language cannot be entirely shed: this movie reuses a lot of props, sets, and costumes, and so that style still appears with some regularity. Scotty’s ridiculous engineering uniform is one example.

But then you have a number of things that are very new. Aside from the groundbreaking use of CGI to illustrate the Genesis Project (Ed Catmull of Pixar fame is interviewed on the Blu-Ray) and the use of Industrial Light and Magic for all the (terrific and beautiful) model work, the new uniforms are an obvious step between the odd-angled Motion Picture attire and the later designs.

One thing that stands out as particularly odd, though, is the costume design for Khan’s crew. They look like a glam rock band, which probably says loads about what Hollywood thought was the counterculture at the time. Putting them side by side with the Reliant’s stuffy, middle aged crew makes the distinction even more pronounced. You see a similar interaction when the hippies come aboard or the tech-obsessed Borg become the boogie man in TNG.

Grade

A; this movie is great. I watched it yesterday and already kind of want to watch it again.

Whom Gods Destroy

Whom Gods Destroy (Memory Alpha; Video) is a great little episode filled with crazy people. It’s fun and smart and damn hilarious.

Kirk and Spock beam down to Elba 2, where the last fifteen criminally insane people in the galaxy are housed in an asylum. They bear medicine to cure their insanity.

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But as you would expect, the asylum has been taken over by the madmen. They’re all extras with the exception of an Orion Slave Girl and Garth of Izar, a former starship captain who has picked up the ability to transform himself to look like anyone he’s seen. Handy, that.

Garth is played wonderfully by Steve Ihnat; his manic swings from rage to joy to logic and back again are well written and ably performed. He’s one of the best villains in the entire series, and he manages to attain that rank without ever being a real threat to anybody but Kirk, since he’s trapped on this little world and delusional about what would happen if he escaped.

The Orion Slave Girl is Marta, again played well by Yvonne Craig, who played Batgirl in the old Adam West Batman. Here she’s a crazy vixen who meets her end onscreen quite a bit more horribly than I expected.

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This episode also has what may well be the first which-doppelgänger-should-I-shoot scene ever, and manages to do so without being terribly obvious about the resolution. I was quite amazed.

Best Bit of Dialog

Marta: [quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII]
Garth: You wrote that?
Marta: Yesterday, as a matter of fact.
Garth: It was written by an Earth man named Shakespeare a long time ago!
Marta: Which does not change the fact that I wrote it yesterday!

Grade

A-; would be a solid A if not for the echoes between this episode and Dagger of the Mind

Assignment: Earth

Assignment: Earth (HD Video; Memory Alpha) starts with the Enterprise in 1968 to conduct historical research. No extraordinary circumstances; they’re just there. Or then, I guess. Time travel being new and interesting is so last season.

But oh no! Someone is beaming onto the Enterprise from a thousand light years away! What the heck!?!

Oh, it’s a guy and a cat. They can’t be all that bad. And “Gary Seven” just wants to go down to Earth and make sure everything turns out like our favorite starship crew remembers it. But how can the crew be so sure that he’s not trying to muck up history? (why the heck are they there, again?)

The rest of the episode involves the crew trying to decide if Gary Seven is a good guy trying to help the Earth or a bad guy trying to screw things up. The audience, though, is almost immediately told that he’s a good guy.

That’s a mistake when you’re viewing this as an episode of Star Trek; the tension would be more interesting if you weren’t told. But this is only nominally an episode of Star Trek; this is really the pilot for another show about the mysterious Mr. Seven and his spunky twenty-year-old secretary, and the Enterprise crew is largely relegated to reacting as those two do the interesting parts of the episode.

And I’ve got to say, Gary Seven would have been a pretty neat show. Gary is a good leading man and has a lot of moves that make him fun to watch. The spunky secretary is a bit of an overdone trope but isn’t played too far here; her primary role is as exasperated modern and she does that well.

The show has a heavy dose of Trek (pacifism; utopianism; light humor) but has some decidedly un-Trek aspects: Gary’s computer isn’t cooperative and gives him guff when he’s terse; Gary has no problem lying and sneaking around; the secretary actually wears clothes.

Overall, it’s a good episode, but not great. I’m a little sad the spinoff never went anywhere (at least in the canon).

Grade as Star Trek

B+

Grade as Pilot

A

Journey to Babel

Journey to Babel (Memory Alpha; SD Video) starts with the Enterprise picking up the Vulcan Ambassador to the Federation, Sarek. He comes on, is a little cold and a little rude to Spock, and then we learn that he’s Spock’s dad.

The Enterprise, you see, is picking up delegates to convene and decide if a new planet will be allowed to join the Federation. Everyone is traveling toward Babel, where the conference will take place. As such, this episode seems like part one of a two-parter, but the second part would have been more political and more challenging, and was never shot. I’m not sure if that’s because it would have been too political (which Trek mostly skirts) or because it would have been too challenging (involving lots of stuff Trek mostly skimps on, like big sets and nitty gritty details).

But in the course of talking a little bit about politics, we get this from Kirk:

Kirk: [In] Star Fleet force is used only as a last resort: we’re an instrument of civilization. And it’s a better opportunity for a scientist to study the universe than he could get at the Vulcan Science Academy.

This plays quite nicely into my view of the Federation as an interplanetary UN. It is also pretty much completely at odds with the series so far. The Enterprise does go on the occasional scientific expedition, but is just as often a warship looking for a fight. It fits very closely to what I would have told you about Star Trek before watching TOS closely, and it’s stated quite clearly in Next Generation, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not as explicit as it could be, or as obvious as I think Roddenberry thought it was.

This episode also goes to great lengths to make Spock a little more alien:

McCoy: [Spock, you had] a teddy bear!
Spock: Not exactly, Doctor. On Vulcan, the teddy bears are alive. And they have six inch fangs.

Seriously, that’s just bullshit. It would be incredibly illogical to give a youngster anything alive, let alone something with six inch fangs.

Also, this:

Telerek: There will be payment for your slander, Sarek!
Sarek: Threats are illogical.

Again, that’s just crazytalk. Threats are incredibly logical: they are a way of stating your position in such a way that the opposite party is aware of your intentions and the price you expect to exact for noncompliance. This could just be bluster, but Sarek is a freakin’ ambassador; he should know how threats work.

And why can’t they replicate blood?

Focus…

But we’re getting lost in the weeds, here. This episode is really rather good. It’s not as political as it first appears, which is disappointing but par for the course. It continues the trend of putting more moving parts into the picture than early episodes, which is great; the beginning of the show felt like it was trying too hard to fill airtime, but with the introduction of B-plots, layered mysteries, and progressive revelations the pacing has really gotten a thousand times better.

Grade

A

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis (Memory Alpha; SD Video) really doesn’t have anything to do with a metamorphosis, but it’s a good enough episode that we can forgive it a misleading title.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have picked up a Starfleet Commissioner, who was acting as a diplomat to stop a war when she caught Sakuro’s Disease. Now, she needs to get back to the Enterprise to be treated, or she’ll die.

Why didn’t they pick her up in the Enterprise, you ask? Well, because if they had the episode wouldn’t work. So instead they’re in a shuttlecraft. And their shuttlecraft is easily abducted by a shimmering field of energy, which takes them to a planetoid not too far away.

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There they meet Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive, who disappeared 150 years ago, at the age of 87. But here he is looking hale but bored on this planetoid in the middle of nowhere.

He’s survived because that shimmering energy field is The Companion, and it has healed him, cared for him, and loved him for all that time.

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This episode deals in the currency of love. What does it mean to love? Can love be stifling, and can the lover be made to realize it? Whom can you love?

These are all interesting questions, but they’re not enough to fill up the episode. But here, for a rare change, that doesn’t matter. This is a leisurely paced episode that pulls off the slow burn. You feel the truth of it when Cochrane claims that “immortality consists mostly of boredom.” And the grinding pace makes it obvious that this story– which has been going on for decades before this episode begins– is a slow burn itself, and it’s not a comfortable one. But it is worth telling.

Grade

A

Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, Mirror (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is that episode where they go to the alternate universe where everyone has a goatee.

Except only Spock has a goatee.

Now, everyone remembers the savage-alternate-universe thing, but it’s played rather nicely as a foil against the planet this episode takes place in orbit of. The inhabitants are a peaceful people who are refusing to give their dilithium crystals to the Federation, because they as a people are pacifists. The episode begins with Kirk’s assurance that the Federation can be trusted with the crystals, since they are good guys. And immediately we’re thrown into the goatee universe, where no one is a good guy.

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Except the one guy with a goatee. Chekov attempts to assassinate Kirk, and fails. Sulu does, too. So all the foreigners are sinister in the mirror universe, but the jewish guy is alright. There’s some subtext here, and it’s not buried very deep.

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There’s also a nice talk by Kirk about society, and how harmonious living is beneficial for all and sustainable, whereas the kill-or-be-killed mirror universe is destined for destruction down it’s path of constant sorrow. I read this as Kirk’s preëmptive rhetorical strike against the neoconservatives. Especially this bit, which seems rather prophetic:

Kirk: Conquest is easy; control is not. We may have bitten off more than we can chew.

Also, Uhura is actually important this episode. She gets not one but two good scenes, and a fight sequence. She almost but doesn’t say that she’s frightened. She actually makes a difference.

And Marlena is another female character who’s interesting and strong and smart, who takes a stand. She’s a love interest, but not really; her interest is the other Kirk, and the internal conflict she plays with “our” Kirk is well done.

All told, this is a strong episode. The mirror universe is cheesy, but not really more so than the “actual” universe. And the mechanics for interdimensional travel are all sorts of vague while also being a snap for the computer to calculate. But if you overlook that, it’s well-constructed and does a fine job.

Grade

A

Amok Time

Amok Time (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is that one episode where Spock goes into heat and goes crazier than a Aldebran Shellmouth.

Spock needs to get back to Vulcan. And by “needs” I mean “orders the ship to redirect there behind Kirk’s back.” By “needs” I mean “can’t recall subverting the chain of command because he’s all crazy on the inside.”

Speaking of crazy, season two is crazy! They moved the writer and director credits to the opening credits. This makes perfect sense; the writing is the strongest part of this show. And they picked up dozens of props that now line all the walls, making the formerly utilitarian crew quarters look like something that people live in. And they got moodier lighting and weirder music.

They even bought an entire new cast member, Chekov! And they gave him some good lines:

Sulu: How do you figure it, Chekov? First we’re going to Vulcan. Then we’re going to Altair. Then we’re headed to Vulcan again, and now we’re headed back to Altair.
Chekov: I think I’m going to get space sick.

Another new thing they brought in is the Vulcan salute. We see it here when Spock finally gets to Vulcan and greets the others.

But they didn’t buy any acting lessons for Shatner. In the most glaring example of der haltingspreken yet, we get this beautiful line:

Kirk: Why…
must he die?
Why…
within eight days?
Explain!

However, amidst all this novelty is a pretty great story. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are all established characters at this point, and this episode makes perfect use of them, really fleshing out the relationship that they share. This trio is what makes Trek approachable, and here they are in fine form at this task. It was perfect to slot this in as episode one of the new season; new viewers will have an easy in and old viewers will remember what they liked.

Grade

A