10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek Into Darkness
7. The Troublesome Tribble
Khan’s fan-dubbed “magic blood” actually isn’t any more dumb than the other medical nonsense thrown around Trek and conveniently forgotten. Omicron Ceti spores? Kironide-fueled telekinesis?
The issue with the blood is the rather unscientific way “Bones” McCoy tests it.
MCCOY: The tribble's dead. I'm injecting Khan's platelets into the deceased tissue of a necrotic host. Khan's cells regenerate like nothing I've ever seen, and I want to know why.
I want to know why he thinks he’ll learn anything by injecting them into a who-knows-how-long-dead corpse with no active circulatory system. Platelets aid in healing by forming blood clots to stop bleeding, releasing growth factors that promote tissue repair, and participating in the inflammatory response at the site of injury, but they don’t have a direct effect on dead tissue. The only way this works is if the Tribble is freshly dead and Bones uses some contraptions to artificially keep it alive until the power platelets work their magic.
Some have questioned why Bones needs Khan to save Kirk when he has the other 72 popsicled super-fiends at hand, but at least the script sets that up when Bones explains that trying to revive one without the proper sequencing could kill them because the cryo tube tech is so ancient that it’s beyond him. But that’s undermined by this:
MCCOY: Get me a cryo tube, now!
Whose? One of the guys you daren’t thaw?