15 More Things You Didn’t Know About Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984)
7. Early on, Saavik Shipped Kirk
The Wrath of Khan was filmed with a few moments suggesting an attraction between Saavik and David Marcus, but this was trimmed to next to nothing, rendering their potential romantic relationship effectively a non-starter. No romance is hinted at anywhere in The Search for Spock, albeit it’s overflowing with Kirk-Spock bromance.
But back when Bennett wrote “Return to Genesis he had other ideas. Neither Carol or David Marcus appeared in it, and resurrected Spock wasn’t having any pon farr sexy time, but in a total “whaaa?” moment he wrote that Saavik tells Kirk:
The ship is lost, Spock is an illusion, and she has always loved Jim Kirk.
Admittedly a whiff of such a May-December romance was present as early as the 1981 The Omega System script (one of several scrapped screenplays from which elements were cherry picked for The Wrath of Khan), where beautiful young Lt. Diana O’Rourke put the moves on Kirk, even saying of Kirk’s personal life: “I would like to BE that personal life, Sir.”
Saavik’s semi-flirt with Kirk in the turbolift in TWOK is a spiritual successor to this.
Fraternization, anyone?
It’s an idea Harve Bennett seems to have had trouble letting go of, and, thankfully, it was eventually airlocked.