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

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.