7 Times Someone Caught The Idiot Ball In Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan

One of the biggest problems with the first Star Trek movie, The Motion Picture, is that Kirk isn’t the hero of his own film. There’s plenty of setup for his character and lots of drama surrounding him and his place on the ship, but in the end new guy Decker saves the day. What a let down.

The thing is they did it again in The Wrath of Khan. Even though the movie is all about Kirk, his mid-life crisis, his insta-family, and the vengeance Khan wants to extract from him, it’s Spock that makes the ultimate sacrifice and has the most growth. And all because Kirk sits with his thumb where the sun don’t shine during the entire climax.

This is the biggest gaffe in the film because it betrays exactly who Kirk has always been: a guy who inserts himself in the middle of everything. There was never a crisis in the Original Series that Kirk didn’t personally oversee. If there was a problem in engineering you can bet Kirk would walk through the doors and give Scotty hell for it.

None of that is present in Wrath of Khan’s Kirk. He makes one suggestion to stop the Genesis device from detonating and his son, David, shoots him down. After that he just keeps calling the engine room to complete silence. He never thinks to run down there himself or even send someone in his stead.

Heck, this movie is partially about him never making life-or-death decisions (which we know very well he has). Why doesn’t he just order Spock to do the repair instead of Spock deciding for himself in a command vacuum? Because Spock needs to grow as a character? No! This isn’t his film. No one wants revenge on Spock.

This whole thing is made worse by The Next Generation episode Thine Own Self where Deana Troi takes a command test with this exact scenario. She saves the ship by making the hard decision to send Geordi to die in the radiation filled crawlspace. I don’t know if the episode’s writer Ronald D. Moore was directly addressing Kirk’s failure, but it sure seems like it.