10 Star Trek Moments That Broke Our Hearts
4. You Klingon Bastard, You Killed My Son
For devastation, Star Trek II is rightly lauded. But for Kirk, there has scarcely been a worse period than those last few days of the USS Enterprise. Though we have already discussed the loss of the ship earlier on this list, which we may agree is a pain that the entire crew may share, Kirk's loss is doubled when he arrives at the Genesis Planet. There, he finds a Klingon ship waiting, while down on the surface, a rejuvenated Spock, Saavik, and his son, David, have been captured.
The Klingon Commander Kruge is almost entirely one-dimensional in this film, though Christopher Lloyd lends a fabulously camp performance that raises him above the script. Having said that, hearts turned to hate when Kruge orders the death of one of the captured team on the surface. This is one of the heaviest pains behind David's death - he wasn't even chosen, not specifically, to die. He tried to save Saavik, then ended up on the wrong side of a Klingon blade. It's fast, it's brutal, and it's horrific.
Merritt Buttrick played the scene perfectly, with the small screen time he had. There is a shock and pain in his eyes as the blade hits home. Robin Curtis then manages to inject pain into Saavik's otherwise stoic delivery of the news to Kirk, and William Shatner brings it all home. That stumble on the bridge. Admiral Kirk was finally brought down by the callous actions of a man he'd never met and faces the exact kind of loss that Carol Marcus had been afraid of. She had never wanted David to go gallanting across the galaxy with his father, and now here he was, dead, with Kirk floating in space above, broken. Star Trek III may have some tremendously upbeat moments - the theft of the Enterprise, don't call me tiny, and the reunion on Vulcan - but for all of that, it packs one hell of a whallop.