20 Most Messed Up Deaths From The Star Trek Movies

5. David And d'tahg

"wa' yIHoH! jISaHbe'" or "kill one of them. I don't care which" was the order from orbit. As with his gunner, as with that big worm, Commander Kruge was comfortably casual in his brutality. On the Genesis planet, "one of them" was odds of one in three. Well, this wasn't The Search for David or The Search for Saavik, so let's call it 50/50!

As it was, the blade was meant for Saavik, but David bravely leapt at the Klingon goliath, in this case with little to no chance of winning. "You Klingon bastard, you've killed my son" becomes, then, the unwritten subtitle of this entry, and almost that of Star Trek III itself. Like Kirk, we, the viewer, had barely come to know Doctor David Marcus before his death at the end of the d'tahg. A father's anguish at a future without was palpable through the screen.

Later, in The Undiscovered Country, Kirk has a photo of David in his quarters. That was as much a touching tribute to a son as it was to the actor, Merritt Butrick. Butrick had sadly passed away in 1989, just 29 years old, from toxoplasmosis, complicated by AIDS. Butrick has two panels dedicated to him in the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.