Where's the fun in overthinking a simple popcorn action film's plot holes?
What was the Admiral's plan?
- Thread starter mahler
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Where's the fun in overthinking a simple popcorn action film's plot holes?
I think that overthinking the original plan is an exercise in futility. We don't know what the plan was, who was to be involved, or how it might have played out.
For me, the details of Marcus' plan weren't important to the story. It was all about bringing Kirk and Spock closer together as the friends we would see later in their lives.
For me, the details of Marcus' plan weren't important to the story. It was all about bringing Kirk and Spock closer together as the friends we would see later in their lives.
It wasn't Khan that he needed to trust. Once Khan was on Kronos, his "trust" was basically immaterial. He couldn't beam back to Earth to change the plan, nor could he really convince someone in Starfleet to come to his aid (given that Marcus' rivals in Starfleet would be even less inclined to help him even if he hadn't strafed them all the night before).
It wasn't Khan who screwed up the plan, it was Kirk, by physically going to capture him and thereby putting himself in a position to talk to him and get manipulated (hence Marcus' "Well, shit. You talked to him.")
And yet history is replete with examples of intelligence organizations doing EXACTLY that, often with disastrous consequences.
Besides which, Marcus probably figured that Khan's people wouldn't last long on Kronos and that they would eventually be hunted down and killed after a long and perplexing guerilla campaign. Inserting them there would mainly serve as a distraction (and a plausibly deniable one at that) while Section 31 did all the real work.
Totally unnecessary. Once the augments are on Kronos, they're the Klingons' problem. Even if Khan decides to betray Marcus at THAT point, the worst thing he can do is defect (good luck with that!)
Actually it can be pretty hilarious adding the internal monolog to the lunatic fighter pilot in "live free or die hard" who goes on a remarkably aggressive airstrike impossible against an entire interstate highway system just to shoot down a fleeing semi truck.
"This is your air force.
This is your airforce on cocaine.
Any questions?"
There we go. That is exactly what I was saying, but in a more polite way.
That makes a lot of sense, Nebuj, and if Khan was indeed secretly working for Marcus at the beginning of the film, it might explain why Khan chose Kronos as his location to escape after his attacks on Earth - Marcus maybe told Khan to go "hide" on the Klingon homeworld, so the admiral could "spin-doctor" the fact that a rogue agent who had committed terrorist attacks on key Starfleet targets and infastructure decided to flee to the Klingon homeworld, as "evidence" that Harrison was somehow working for, or in league with, the Klingons. If the Federation was made to believe that the Klingons were somehow promoting terrorist attacks on Earth, that would give Marcus more support for his argument for a response strike against the Klingons.
... In that scenario, Khan might have gone along with Marcus' plan, perhaps having be promised by the admiral that he would finally release Khan's "supercrew" back to him, after the war Marcus wanted had been ignited (that would assume the whole sob story Khan told Kirk, tears in his eyes, about attacking London in retaliation believing Marcus had killed every single member of his crew - was actually a lie on Khan's part to gain the young captain's empathy ("tell me Kirk ... is there anything you wouldn't do for your crew?)...
However, when Khan discovered (via Sulu's message to the surface) that the Enterprise was armed with exactly 72 warheads to shoot at him, Khan realized Marcus was actually planning to betray him, and kill him and his crew ... so Khan decided to manipulate Marcus' plans by surrendering to Kirk and actually telling the Starfleet captain the whole (or much of) Marcus' plan, including the coordinates of the Vengeance. Kirk would be confused about Khan's motives, then Khan could manipulate the situation ... which he did in the film.
Marcus manipulating the situation on Earth, using Khan, would also explain why Khan was able to attack Starfleet HQ without any opposition, and why Marcus escaped the attack without a scratch ... Section 31 was manipulating things in the background?
Khan seemed to know that the Enterprise would be experiencing mysterious "engine failure" in Klingon space, and had key details of how Marcus hoped the Klingons would then destroy the Starfleet ship that came after him, triggering "the war Marcus always wanted".
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Aww, and they put so much effort in keeping all that secret. Now I feel twice as ripped off. Not only was the payoff stupid, but it wasn't even meant to be important anyways.
In all seriousness, having your entire story revolve around the relationship between Kirk and Spock is stupid. Yes, Kirk and Spock were friends in the original series, but part of what made that relationship work was how they could work together in a professional manner. In these new movies, everything has to generate a relationship conflict between these two.
Do you really want to see Star Trek reduced into nothing but a "Kirk and Spock are friends!" franchise? I think Star Trek needs more perspective than that.
Why would Khan be helpless and harmless when reaching the Klingon homeworld? He's more dangerous than ever before - he has a super-transporter, he is in a position to dictate war and peace for two superpowers, he's where Marcus definitely cannot physically reach him, and (whether or not Marcus knows about the sleepers) his liberation from the clutches of Marcus' blackmail is approaching, literally at warp speed.
Marcus can't be thinking Khan would be neutered now. But neither can Khan be thinking that he's safe where he stands. He must know he's at Ground Zero one way or another - and he must be there voluntarily, as he has all the choice in the universe to be elsewhere if he so wishes. The only way for Khan to choose to be a torpedo magnet is if that's his plan - and hey, we know it's his plan to be a torpedo magnet! He always wanted those torpedoes to leave Earth and then rendezvous with him somehow.
Klingons are just a species, and Qo'noS is just a planet. Such things are resources to the Augments, as Marcus very well knows. Khan has already hijacked one spacecraft (that we know of), and everybody is baffled why he aimed so low. It wouldn't be beneficial for Marcus if Khan were to commandeer a Klingon battle cruiser next, and the Admiral must know this is well within the superman's abilities, especially if he has his crew back.
Timo Saloniemi
Marcus can't be thinking Khan would be neutered now. But neither can Khan be thinking that he's safe where he stands. He must know he's at Ground Zero one way or another - and he must be there voluntarily, as he has all the choice in the universe to be elsewhere if he so wishes. The only way for Khan to choose to be a torpedo magnet is if that's his plan - and hey, we know it's his plan to be a torpedo magnet! He always wanted those torpedoes to leave Earth and then rendezvous with him somehow.
Klingons are just a species, and Qo'noS is just a planet. Such things are resources to the Augments, as Marcus very well knows. Khan has already hijacked one spacecraft (that we know of), and everybody is baffled why he aimed so low. It wouldn't be beneficial for Marcus if Khan were to commandeer a Klingon battle cruiser next, and the Admiral must know this is well within the superman's abilities, especially if he has his crew back.
Timo Saloniemi
And a very large Arnie-esque gun...
Well, there is more than one way to look at it. I think the friendship of Kirk and Spock got framed with more importance when it was an origin story of how they grew to become friends, rather than at first belligerent and hostile.
The fact is, the new movies frame themselves around the friendship because it reflects the differences in the two characters arcs as the world changes around them.
It may not be the TOS style world building, but I think the new films have to look at that relationship as the constant, because this world is different from the TOS world, and provides a groundwork for the characters, and their relationship with the world and each other.
He would be neither, to be sure (that's probably why Marcus allowed Khan to place an arsenal at Ketha Province for his personal use). Significantly, he would not pose an immediate threat to the FEDERATION.
You mean the transporter he left in the cockpit of the jumpship that then crashed and exploded, leaving the device utterly useless?
No, I don't think he still has it.
I agree with that completely. It's just that I'm pretty sure that was MARCUS' plan, not Khan's.
If you actually believe Khan when he claims he thought all his people were dead, then what the hell was he planning to do on Kronos anyway? Slum it out be the campfire? Curl up and die? Hijack a ship and go somewhere else? Or maybe recruit an army from the ranks of Klingon society's disaffected underclass?
I'm thinking a little of Option C and D. But that again leads us to wonder if the delivery of the rest of his crew wasn't part of the plan in the first place.
And yet Marcus is a self-proclaimed military man and probably isn't thinking in the long-term. You and I know that Khan having free reign on Kronos is immanent disaster for the Federation since he could and probably WOULD wind up in charge of the High Council just by sheer badassery (Klingon nobles respect little else). Adding 72 similarly badass augments to the equation would merely hasten that process, but not before a spectacularly violent campaign that would sap most of Kronos' military strength.
Which, most likely, is the objective. Kronos would be so distracted trying to contain Khan that the Federation would be defang them that much more efficiently. Marcus then probably assumes that the "Khan problem" could be dealt with later.
Again, assuming that Khan was actually playing along with Marcus up to this point, it stands to reason that Khan went along with the "Bay of Pigs" plan as a means to do exactly that. But SINCE he was playing along, Marcus didn't know (yet) how dangerous and unpredictable Khan really was. He may have had his suspicions -- which were confirmed when he found out Khan was on the Enterprise -- but then, at that point all he had to do was destroy the Enterprise and then the problem would be solved.
Granted, but only with key conditions:
1) Marcus always thought he would be a long term threat, hence the blackmail scheme. There would be little point in neutering the blackmail scheme at this juncture, and indeed great risks at doing it. Much better to lose sight of the sleepers after Khan is assuredly dead.
2) Khan does pose a threat to the Federation, and specifically Marcus' plans regarding the Federation, by being at the very location where such matters are decided. Everything depends on what the Klingons do, and Khan is now a resident with a very loud voice and good command of the (physical) language!
But every time he flaunted the device, he did it for no reason beneficial to his own plans. As said, it is as if he is making a show of "illegally" obtaining and then "losing" the device, when by all logic he should enjoy professional access to it for any of Marcus' plans to work.
At the very least, he should possess a copy on Qo'noS, even if it is one sabotaged by Marcus (with Khan easily guessing this).
The related problem is that Khan is good at acquiring hardware. While "stranded" on the enemy homeworld, he gets an anti-spacecraft hand cannon easily enough, so it shouldn't surprise anybody much that he moments later commands an entire starship.
But I don't. Khan is manipulating Kirk with his "I'm so pitiable" act, so anything he says at that juncture is probably a lie. There may be a kernel of truth there: Khan may have realized his cover was finally blown, forcing his timing and perhaps even details of his plans and actions. But if he really thought his crew was lost, he would
a) stop doing anything that benefited only Marcus, such as this plan to have war with Klingons
b) start doing real damage to Marcus, such as killing him (easily doable, as demonstrated with the penthouse attack), exposing his plans (even simpler - he had physical secrets that could be uncovered), or hurting everything dear to him (if Khan could bomb a secret S31 workshop, he could terminate Earth if he really wanted)
c) be free to be himself, that is, take over Earth and the universe.
The one thing he would not do is go and play target where it benefited Marcus. He could recruit an Untermensch army anywhere, or (if really able to pull working equipment out of the S31 wreckage) single-handedly level planets. Klingons would be an unnecessary diversion from his ambitions, an ineffective channel for his wrath, and too much of a service to his worst enemy.
A valid point - but Marcus is also the man who sent S31 looking for exotic means of long term UFP survival. He revived a 20th century survivor because he understood the potential. He may have misunderstood it, or underestimated it, but he did have plans for it. And he thought those plans required the blackmail leash, holding onto which cost him nothing. So why let go, even if you happen to be a shortsighted amateur? In that scenario, you are patting yourself on the back for your clever blackmail scheme, the one thing you know is working beautifully, so that's also the one thing you won't lightly abandon.
Not that I'd have anything against the idea that Marcus either
a) wanted Khan to survive on Qo'noS and cause chaos with guerilla tactics or
b) wanted Khan to believe that this was the plan.
Khan himself might have suggested the former, counting on Marcus actually going for the latter. But that would all only make sense from Khan's point of view if the greater plan was to have the torpedoes come after Khan. And in order to make the odds of that great enough, Khan really would have to suggest that part to Marcus, too, and then count on the Admiral betraying him on that one, too.
Timo Saloniemi
Acept the plan was pretty much spelled out.
Enterprise goes to Kronos, breaks down, fires ARMED torpedoes and Khan which kill him and get rid of all the evidence of him and his buddies, Enterprise gets destroyed by vengeful Klingons , war ensues.
How get Khan and Marcus were planned to invade the Klingon Empire with Augments from that confuses me.
I mean seriously Marcus included armed warheads on his invasion deliver system?, and we're expected to believe that the cryo pods would survive plowing into the hard ground at a significant speed even if they didn't explode from the armed warheads.
I guess it depends chiefly on how much of what transpired we believe was planned greatly in advance, and how much was improvisation.
I'm simply in the "it was all planned long ahead, by two twisted masterminds who built backstabbing into their plans from the get-go" camp, which is hardly the only viable camp for this. But the less improvisation, the easier it is to accept "major coincidences": if Khan gets exactly 72 torpedoes containing all his crew delivered to where he can pop open their cryotubes right when he's free of the clutches of Admiral Marcus, then that's planned down to a tee, not a coincidence. Etc.
Timo Saloniemi
I'm simply in the "it was all planned long ahead, by two twisted masterminds who built backstabbing into their plans from the get-go" camp, which is hardly the only viable camp for this. But the less improvisation, the easier it is to accept "major coincidences": if Khan gets exactly 72 torpedoes containing all his crew delivered to where he can pop open their cryotubes right when he's free of the clutches of Admiral Marcus, then that's planned down to a tee, not a coincidence. Etc.
Timo Saloniemi
The Feds would be in control of the Galaxy had they pulled that one off.
No, Marcus thought he would EVENTUALLY be a threat. He calls waking up Khan a "tactical risk" without going into details exactly what he hoped to gain from that risk. If Marcus really thought (or knew) that Khan was that dangerous, he never would have woken him up in the first place, as whatever nuggets of insight Khan could provide for 23rd century technology (of which he has almost no advanced knowledge and can contribute only conceptually) would be far outweighed by his danger.
But it wasn't Khan's superior intellect Marcus was after. It was his "savagery." That implies (to me) that Marcus intended to send Khan into combat from the very beginning, assuming he would be killed in action.
I'll again remind you that many REAL world governments have made this mistake in the not-too-distant past, often with disastrous results. Given who Admiral Marcus decided to recruit for this mission, he is clearly not the kind of person who learns his lessons from history.
He never "flaunted" the device. He quietly STOLE the device after blowing up a building and then used it to escape at the last minute. The device didn't beam to Qonos with him, so unless he went and planted one there ahead of time, he no longer has it.
Which is exactly why he seized on Kirk's clearly deviating from the original Marcus plan as a way of getting what he REALLY wanted, namely a chance to try and conquer Earth. Marcus had offered Khan a shot at Kronos, and Khan went along with it purely because he had no real way of getting his people out of cryo without Section 31 knowing about it. But with Kirk on the scene, Khan had a way in. Thus his final "Give me back my crew!" gambit when he finally had control of the Vengeance.
Nope. If he was thinking long term he would have been thinking about what to do with the Klingons AFTER the war, what the endgame in that scenario would be. Would the Klingons be assimilated into the Federation or would Kronos fall under occupation? Or would he simply cripple them to neutralize the threat and then keep starting a war every couple of years to keep them off balance? All three outcomes are attainable, but only if your opening moves create a path in that direction.
Marcus' plan, on the other hand, is war for war's sake, thinking that the Klingons respond to little else. He isn't thinking long term. He is thinking "Let's win this war" and is already seen arranging for sacrifices that will make the postwar situation difficult for Starfleet to manage.
I don't think Marcus was betraying him, for the simple reason that Marcus doesn't realize how dangerous Khan really is (none of them really do, since none of them saw Space Seed or Wrath of Khan like we did). A thing to remember is that the torpedoes are stored with what appear to be boobytrapped live warheads set to blow if anyone tampers with or tries to open them, complete with a helpful 30 second timer in case of accidental triggering. I'm thinking that Khan would have had a password or something that would allow him to safely open those torpedoes once they landed but that anyone else -- say, a Klingon patrol -- would be blown to bits if they tried.
Beyond that, it's unlikely the torpedoes would actually detonate if fired from a tube. The only reason the torpedo still HAS a warhead is to kill anyone who tries to open it.
Yes it was. Twice. The first time it was spelled out, the plan turned out to be a load of bullshit. I'd be amazed if Marcus told the whole truth the second time.
What's confusing about it? Enterprise fires the torpedoes. The torpedoes land at Ketha Province, soft land and are recovered by Khan. While Kirk and crew are scratching their heads wondering how it is that all 72 torpedoes turned out to be duds, the Klingons trace the firing points of the supposedly (but obviously far from) untraceable torpedoes straight back to Enterprise and blow it out of the sky, eliminating anyone who might know how the augments got there in the first place. This way, if the Klingons accuse Starfleet of planting Khan there, they can believably claim ignorance (not that the Klingons will care, but the Federation Council certainly will).
Of course, especially since they appear to be rigged to detonate when the torpedoes are being tampered with. They're otherwise pretty difficult to open unless you know exactly how they're wired.
Given that none of the torpedoes detonated while Vengeance was kicking the crap out of the Enterprise, they don't seem easy to detonate otherwise.
http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/qq62/madmatthias/twok1248_zps5a7a9a6a.jpg
[Dude, you're not Mad Matthias. Host it on your own damn Photobucket account instead of leeching from someone else's. - M']
It's been done before.
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Is there a meaningful difference? Marcus set up the blackmail scheme from the get-go, and supposedly sent "John Harrison" on a number of missions in addition to milking him for military ideas of all sorts. He had Khan under control from start to finish, and it doesn't seem logical for him to define "finish" as the moment when the Klingon war hasn't yet been successfully started and Khan is very much alive and at large.
Yet defining "finish" is very much Marcus' call, if the frozen crew is still in his possession. OTOH, the events of the movie suggest that Marcus has already lost control of Khan, and the crew indeed has slipped from his hands. They do not suggest that Marcus would be eager to let go of control by delivering the crew to Khan's current location guarded only by a simpleton who has already been suckered once.
He appeared in public view carrying it. Being more clandestine would have been trivial; making arrangements so that the device could not be accessed after his escape and used to track him down should have been simple as well.
Either Khan is ineffective in what he does, or he is laying a trail of evidence for others to follow. Since we see others following him along such a trail, and Khan being quite pleased with that turn of events, I'm leaning towards the latter.
So Marcus wouldn't send Kirk on the scene while knowing about the crew and the way in that it offered to Khan.
Sure, Khan may have been sent to wreak havoc on Qo'noS. But from that it follows that his crew either should have been sent with him, without all this public gesticulation (if Marcus trusted Khan), or that his crew should have been kept carefully under lock and key (if Marcus did not trust Khan).
And perhaps he did. We don't know. What we do know is that he set up this S31 search for esoteric means of unspecific, long term survival and prospering of the UFP. He wasn't a one-trick pony, that much has already been established. He need not have been Satan himself, or a Hari Seldon who covered every angle from Big Bang to Big Whimper, but he wasn't a man of narrow horizons.
If the S31 bombing and penthouse massacre wasn't jointly planned by Marcus and Khan, then this would be the Admiral's wake-up call for what Khan can achieve. It is at that point that Marcus would make the decision whether or not to ship the crew to Khan's current location. I really can't see him deciding "Heh, that'd be a good joke on the amicable little rascal! Perhaps I'll also personally go and gloat, now that I have seen he can't hit me even with an invigorating five-minute Gatling phaser bombardment!"...
Now whose idea would that be...?
Khan's? Why on Earth (or Qo'noS) would he want his crew dead?
Marcus'? Possibly. But the torps supposedly were built/modified by Khan. At which point of the story would Marcus decide to re-modify them with this booby trap? And to what purpose? It would do him no good to kill Kirk or his crew if they stumbled onto this secret. And it would do him little good to prepare against Khan with this booby trap when he could much more effectively prepare against Khan by not shipping the crew to him in the first place!
In the end, it's not much of a booby trap: our heroes cope with it easily enough. We might just as well chalk it up to Khan making some risky crosswirings when modifying the weapons to his purposes, and not having the time or other resources to worry about some innocent tampering with them.
If Marcus did the tampering, then the booby trap wouldn't kill him personally: he'd have goons for opening the torps if he thought they were worth opening. It would just kill Khan's crew. Marcus opening the torps without a booby trap would leave the crew alive and again in Marcus' hands - a neutral outcome, not even a turn for the worse.
Exactly. Whatever Marcus wants, he can't get it from well-informed and well-behaving Starfleet officers, or he would just openly give the necessary orders - he's their official boss, after all. So whatever he tells Kirk must be a lie by default!
This is a plan that Marcus could order Khan to execute, while always intending to backstab him instead. And it's a plan Khan could suggest for Marcus, in order to arrange for a backstabbing scheme of his own.
However, it's not a plan that I could ever see executed. It is not in the interests of either party, and both must respectively realize that.
OTOH, it appears to be trivially easy to bypass the detonation if one wants to access the innards. After all, that's what Spock and his crew did, in very limited time and obviously with more pairs of hands than just McCoy's expert ones.
At the very best, a single torpedo might detonate if tampered with. So why bother? If Marcus intends to kill Khan with such a blast, he'd be much better off removing the crew and using a proper torp!
Timo Saloniemi
There is.
Marcus assumes he can eliminate Khan when he ceases to be useful or becomes more trouble than he's worth. That isn't a "long term" threat in that regard because it wouldn't actually TAKE very long to solve that problem.
Hell, it didn't even take the Enterprise that long to track down and destroy the Reliant, and even then after Khan had the advantage of sucker-punching them and their inexperienced trainee crew. It took only slightly more time for NX-01 to track down and eliminate Arik Soong's augments in the Borderlands. Thus, if Marcus is assuming that a renegade Khan could be handled by conventional application of firepower, that's actually a pretty safe assumption.
Did he? If you go by the IDW comics, it was actually more of a Bourne Identity scheme with Khan having no idea that his crew even existed.
Leaving that aside, though, Khan's behavior is entirely inconsistent with that theory. If Marcus was really using the crew to control him, he would have used the threat of their execution to force Khan to surrender after the London bombing. More to the point, Khan would have no reason to believe Marcus had killed his crew when his supposed plan had been discovered; in fact, he'd have every reason to believe that Marcus was not only keeping them alive but had gone to exceptionally great lengths to HIDE them in order to reassert his control. In that case, Khan's best move would be to try to capture Marcus and beat the information out of him, not kill him in an airstrike.
Khan isn't behaving like someone who's trying to get his "family" back. On the contrary, he's behaving like someone who has been paid an obscene bounty to do someone else's dirty work.
First of all, it's not at all clear how or when Marcus lost control of Khan. We ASSUME Khan had gone rogue at some point prior to blowing up the Kelvin archive, but the only evidence for that assumption is Marcus' say-so. We also assume Khan was a renegade when he attacked the Daystrom Conference Room, again based entirely on Marcus' version of events. In NEITHER case is Admiral Marcus being entirely truthful about what's really going on, and it remains a strong possibility that Khan was actually acting on Marcus' orders right up until the moment he surrendered to Kirk.
Second of all, the Augments never slipped from Marcus' hands. He knew exactly where they were the entire time. Much more interestingly, Khan ALSO knew where they were, since he was able to tell Kirk with absolute certainty that his crew were inside of the torpedoes Marcus had given him.
Think about that for a moment: what reason does Khan have to believe Marcus would give Kirk the very same torpedoes he'd loaded his crew into? Is that a logical thing for Khan to assume if he believes that Kirk was sent here to kill him with a torpedo strike?
OR
Is Khan aware of the torpedo's payload because delivering them to Kronos was part of the plan?
And yet we never SEE Marcus use the augments as a mechanism of control. That, again, is part of Khan's spiel and we already know he's full of it.
The fact is, based on Khan's behavior, it's a lot more likely that the cryo tubes weren't a form of blackmail, but a form of payment. "You do this job for me, and I'll give you back your people." That would be the creepy hidden meaning behind Khan's performance in the brig: "Is there anything you wouldn't do for your family?" That line doesn't make sense if Khan believes his crew were dead, but it makes perfect sense if agreeing to murder all of Marcus' political rivals is only way he can convince the Admiral to set them all free.
THAT deal fits pretty well with what we already know about Khan's history:
Or he doesn't have any particular reason to BE clandestine because he knows the only person who's actually looking for him is the person he's working for.
No we don't. NO ONE is following Khan's trail except for the people in the Daystrom Conference Room. That's explicit from the film: Marcus mentioned that "Starfleet has jurisdiction" which means local authorities in London aren't investigating the incident. Starfleet (meaning Marcus) has pulled some strings to keep the civilian authorities from getting involved.
Which means any surveillance footage of the attack -- or any evidence at all that might have lead to Khan's whereabouts -- would be in the possession of Starfleet, and ONLY Starfleet, which will only act on that evidence in a way that Admiral Marcus directs it to.
If Marcus is in on it (which he is) then Khan knows that the only people who are following his trail are disposable patsies (which they are). That means part of the trail -- the coordinates on his beaming device -- can be left deliberately. The rest of the trail is simply irrelevant.
That begs the question of why Marcus put the augments on the Enterprise in the first place. If his goal was to eliminate Khan, he would have given him non-modified (stealthy?) torpedoes and then dropped all the cryo tubes into the Great Red Spot.
Failing to tell Kirk about the augments poses a certain tactical risk, and yet there's no actual BENEFIT in loading the augments into the torpedoes that will be used for the assassination (it's actually A LOT riskier than disposing of them separately). Unless, of course, it's not really an assassination, in which case his not telling Kirk about the augments is a practical necessity.
You're forgetting the "Start a war with the Klingons" angle, which requires a starship to be blown to bits in the neutral zone. A fundamental problem with THAT plan is convincing some poor dumb bastard to fly his ship into the neutral zone and then do something that causes to Klingons to blow up his ship. Marcus probably would have given that dubious honor to one of the ships that had just lots its senior officers in the Daystrom room, but then Kirk volunteered, and seemed to already know that Khan was on Kronos and therefore was already a potential loose end to be disposed of.
More to the point: Marcus DOESN'T trust Khan, and therefore won't give him his payment until he has actually completed his assignment as ordered. Reuniting with his crew is Khan's reward for a job well done, but even then, Marcus doesn't actually WAKE the augments for the reunion and even rigs the torpedoes to explode if anyone tries to open their tubes.
Correction: Section 31 isn't a one-trick pony. Admiral Marcus, however, is neither the founder nor even the most prominent specimen of that organization. Quite the contrary, he appears to be a rather unhinged and power-hungry aberration, which is more or less confirmed in the IDW comics.
Exactly. So why the hell did he leave the augments in those torpedoes?
If, on the other hand, Marcus was in on the plan, then leaving the augments in the torpedoes finally makes sense. Marcus not only knows what kind of havoc the augments are capable of, he's actually COUNTING on it.
Undoubtedly Marcus, although Khan would be made aware of this and briefed on how to safely open the torpedoes without blowing himself up. The point of the booby trap isn't to kill Khan, it's to prevent the Klingons (or anyone else) from finding out what was inside those torpedoes.
That doesn't follow. It's VERY MUCH in the interests of Marcus, who has the opportunity to plant 72 incredibly formidable super-soldiers behind enemy lines with no paper trail and no strings attached.
You could argue that it's not really in the interests of Khan, but Khan is the only one who knows that. He could easily convince Marcus that a chance to conquer a whole world of their own -- even a world as crappy as Kronos -- is an acceptable compromise, made all the more convincing by the fact that Marcus DOES have the cryo-tubes under lock and key and effectively has Khan by the balls.
We know this scenario is plausible because Khan made a similar deal with Kirk under similar circumstances in "Space Seed." Marcus, who has no firsthand experience with Khan's deviousness, has no reason to believe that marooning them on Ceti-Alpha V would be less dangerous than marooning them on Kronos, and every reason to believe that sending them to Kronos would be the Empire's worst nightmare.
The only thing Marcus doesn't know (yet) is that Khan is as devious as he is brilliant. Finding out that Khan let himself be taken into custody by the Enterprise was probably his first clue...
No, that's what Carol Marcus did after having studied Section 31's weapon designs for the last several years, and then passed that information on to Doctor McCoy, who passed it on to the engineers. Like most things, it's not actually difficult to do if you know how.
But then, how many Klingon bomb technicians have spent any amount of time studying classified Starfleet weapons technology?
That's exactly my point. It therefore follows logically that Marcus never intended to Kill Khan.
And if you think about how the entire situation is framed, you have to wonder why exactly Marcus would have taken the risks he did, trying to combine his "Start a war with the Klingons" maneuver with "dispose of Khan and his crew in the most convoluted way possible" plan. Doing so introduces a whole lot of unnecessary risk into two already high-risk gambits, and Marcus deliberately avoids doing sensible things in order to make those two plans work together.
My theory is that this was all about the Klingons from the very beginning, and even Khan's attack at Daystrom was meant to clear house in preparation for combat (as Marcus says: "If I'm not in charge, our entire way of life ends!"). The plan only went awry when Khan realized he didn't have to play along with this Klingon bullshit anymore and decided to turn the tables on his handler.
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