14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
8. Missing Mama Marcus
The film effectively pretends that Carol Marcus — and the rest of the Project Genesis team — didn’t exist. In The Wrath of Khan it’s clear that Genesis is Carol’s baby, and David works with her, but in this film she’s literally erased from the picture when she’s removed from the Genesis tape and replaced with Kirk.
She doesn’t even make the cut in the film’s opening flashback, where Spock’s funeral service has been edited to excise both her and David’s faces. All the dialog about Genesis makes it sound like it's David's baby instead of his mama's.
Fine, we get it, they didn’t want to use the character so didn’t want to have Carol as a loose end in this picture (or pay to use footage of her from the previous one), or confuse the seven viewers who would watch this film without first seeing The Wrath of Khan. This makes things tidier, but how hard would it have been for them to throw a bone to the members of the audience who remember the previous installment by simply mentioning her name?
Actually, in Harve Bennett’s March 23, 1983 first draft of the screenplay there are several references to Carol by Saavik and David, which make clear that she didn’t know about David’s use of protomatter. But, no, they wanted David to be solely responsible in order to justify his sacrifice. And speaking of that…