14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
7. Jumping To Conclusions
SAAVIK: My lord, we are survivors of a doomed expedition. This planet will destroy itself in hours. The Genesis experiment is a failure.
[...]
DAVID: Genesis doesn’t work. I can’t believe they’d kill us for it.
Both Saavik and David jump to some very unscientific conclusions here.
Sure, David says he used unstable “protomatter” in the Genesis matrix, but he clearly thought doing so might work, and the Genesis Cave seemed stable (novelization aside). And, in fact, they both overlook what any real scientist would immediately suspect: the experiment was compromised.
Remember, Genesis stage three was designed to be used on “a lifeless space body, a moon or other dead form.” It sure as hell wasn’t intended to go off inside a starship containing things like antimatter which happens to be within a nebula, nor was it intended to congeal a planet from such a nebula.
There were just too many variables to conclude it was categorical failure.
Perhaps the only believable aspect of this entire thing is that the untenable politics of this made the Federation scrap the entire project, destroy all the research, and give Carol Marcus a nice fat pension to disappear into darkness.