The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan

By Maurice Molyneaux / March 11, 2022

Many think this is the greatest Star Trek movie ever, but it's imperfect the way "most human" endeavors are. This is unsurprising given that when director Nicholas Meyer was offered the film there was—shades of The Motion Picture—no workable script.

In fact, THREE different scripts had been developed: The Omega System; The Genesis Project; and Samuel Peeples' The New Star Trek. But due to a deadline to get a visual effects bid from Industrial Light and Magic, they were under the gun, so Meyer and the producers identified all the bits they liked from all the scripts and Meyer wrote the first draft of a new script—titled The Undiscovered Country (eventually retitled The Vengeance of Khan and finally The Wrath of Khan before release)—in just under two weeks.

Many revisions followed, but time was wasting and money was tight. The script and resulting film were of astounding quality for such a crunch-time project, but in that hurry a fair amount of dumb things slipped through the cracks.

With that history in mind, let's place tongue firmly in cheek and have a bit of fun looking at 14 dumb things that happen in the film:

14. The Story Is Reliant Upon Incompetence

One thing that The Motion Picture had in spades but Khan lacked, was scientific advisors. Their absence becomes apparent very early in the story when the U.S.S. Reliant crew mistakes planet Ceti Alpha V for missing planet VI, and the titular villain explains the blunder to Terrell and Chekov:

KHAN: This is Ceti Alpha Five! ...Ceti Alpha Six exploded six months after we were left here. The shock shifted the orbit of this planet and everything was laid waste.

Admittedly, Khan’s perspective of this event is based on his subjective point of view and not on high tech scientific instruments. All he really knows is planet VI violently went bye-bye and his planet’s orbit got changed.

But at least one of these super geniuses ought to have known that planets don’t explode of their own volition, and that a “shock” can’t shift the orbit of a planet: shock waves don’t propagate in a vacuum, after all.

One can invent various scenarios to account of VI going “poof” and V’s orbit shifting (e.g. a rogue body slammed into planet VI, and a big chunk of resulting debris hit Khan’s planet with enough force to alter its orbit and wreck the environment…albeit this probably would have been unsurvivable), but the reality is that whatever object caused it should have been spotted by the Enterprise when they dropped off the supermen (don’t tell me Spock didn’t check for such a possibility), and the resulting debris from a cataclysm of this magnitude ought to have been plain as day to Reliant’s sensors even after decades.

That Reliant’s crew didn’t notice that an entire planet was missing, or that what they thought was planet VI wasn’t the same mass and diameter, atmospheric composition, or even in the exact orbit as previously charted, just makes Terrell and crew look like complete nincompoops.