Plot hole in Wrath of Khan, or am I thinking wrong?

[Timo]

Also, it's true that Terrell's mission did not call for great haste. But slowing down and taking stock is not a game-changing move in this particular case (Khan's invisible settlement wouldn't have become any more visible with waiting) - and it isn't that in the general Trek case, either.

Fundamentally, Khan's presence is a case in point against trusting records. Either those records tried to hide Khan's presence, or then had the harsh but recognizably not desert-like CA V flagged with it - both options meaning that heroes trusting those records would be likelier to stumble onto Khan than heroes trusting their senses and sensors. Starfleet regularly encounters unexpected dangers of this very sort, surprise ambushes by entities never before encountered or never expected to show up where they do. Being prepared for such eventualities is what would define professional. And with such preparedness, studied preconceptions become fairly irrelevant.

ST2 also explicates what was implicit in TOS: that the left hand of Starfleet does not know what the right hand was doing a decade or two earlier. Kirk often dictated deliberately misleading logs, and sometimes downright forged his records. His assessment of what just happened was subjective and haphazard at best even when he didn't try to obfuscate. Sooner or later, something like ST2 was bound to happen - and the more probably, the more faith Starfleet put on its own records and the less it trusted its realtime assessment of the situations at hand.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

On a slightly lighter note, do you actually know someone who's accidentally found themselves in the wrong European City?

I only remember an urban legend from about five years back, involving an extra ferry trip and all, that turned out to be utterly false. But our little Finland is living in perilous times nowadays: reorganization and fusion of municipalities means that a fire brigade previously tasked with keeping a single Church Street safe may now have to deal with half a dozen streets by that name, and navigators have led ambulances fatally astray. That's a case of 911 (or, in the European case, 112) not being thorough enough, though, and not of the paramedics making a mistake of their own.

...I wonder how often Starfleet has rushed to the wrong star system altogether, what with those having names like "Omega".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DonIago]

I've heard of people taking the New York State thruway from NYC to get to Montreal and then ending up in Buffalo.

The actual route itself does change course, but a) the exit is pretty clearly labeled, and b) if you don't notice when you've gone from N-S to E-W for -hours-...might want to bone up on your navigation skills.

 

[Spot261]

No, in the emergency case it's more along the lines of receiving a call to one casualty, but when arriving in the vicinity finding a different injured person and treating them without even attempting to locate the original casualty, but I do get your point. The key thing is as much the wrong "target" altogether rather than just the wrong location and crucially not even noticing because they were just not paying attention on the job.Taking this analogy to it's logical extreme the original casualty would in fact be dead due to unexplained causes which could very easily endanger the crew as well.

Of course, a better analogy might be a non emergency ambulance (as the CA mission was not an emergency) being sent to a particular address for a routine patient transfer job, going to a slightly different address instead as it was "close enough for them" and taking another person altogether, not noticing that their original patient had in fact died and wassuspiciously smeared all over a nearby wall. They then discover too late that the person the have picked up in their place is a violent psychopath suspected of terrorist offences whose surveillance had lapsed because the security services have failed to share crucial information.

He then kills them and steals the ambulance, picking up a load of his mates and uses the ambulance in a complicated plot to steal a nuclear device and hold a major city to ransom, during which they attempt to kill another ambulance crew whose vehicle they had previously attempted to steal in another similar plot. (The very same plot in fact which had led to them being under the botched surveillance). They fail in their plot but detonate the nuke anyway destroying a (happily uninhabited) area of natural beauty and causing a major ecological disaster.

Close enough or did I was I being a little too literal?

 

[Spot261]

I only remember an urban legend from about five years back, involving an extra ferry trip and all, that turned out to be utterly false. But our little Finland is living in perilous times nowadays: reorganization and fusion of municipalities means that a fire brigade previously tasked with keeping a single Church Street safe may now have to deal with half a dozen streets by that name, and navigators have led ambulances fatally astray. That's a case of 911 (or, in the European case, 112) not being thorough enough, though, and not of the paramedics making a mistake of their own.

...I wonder how often Starfleet has rushed to the wrong star system altogether, what with those having names like "Omega".

Timo Saloniemi

Scary in either case

 

[Captain Rob]

Maybe Chekov didn't realize that the planet Ceti Alpha V that his ship was going to was also the same planet, Alpha Ceti V from long ago.
I could see him saying to himself "Ceti Alpha V. ..Sounds familiar. Can't be the same place from the Khan mission. Besides there's not enough planets in the system to be theirs."

 

[PhaserLightShow]

Maybe Chekov didn't realize that the planet Ceti Alpha V that his ship was going to was also the same planet, Alpha Ceti V from long ago.
I could see him saying to himself "Ceti Alpha V. ..Sounds familiar. Can't be the same place from the Khan mission. Besides there's not enough planets in the system to be theirs."

How did he not realize?

 

[Nebusj]

How did he not realize?

The man has been to hundreds, possibly thousands, of planets over the course of twenty years, many of them spent receiving traumatic injury to the head. Why would he remember yet another boring nothing planet in yet another boring nothing system?

 

[Avro Arrow]

many of them spent receiving traumatic injury to the head

ETA: I know there's nothing actually funny about real-life traumatic head injury. The combination of the phrasing here, plus the invocation of a well-known trope related to the fictional character of Chekov, is what caused the laughter. No offense is intended to anyone suffering from, or watching a family member suffer from, a traumatic head injury.

 

[Timo]

The fun thing here is, had a character with actual onscreen history with Khan been chosen, the argument could be made that his or her first meeting with Khan would have left an impression. Chekov can easily be argued to have been among the 429 people who got Khan's autograph in an intimate area in "Space Seed", but apart from that, he would have been experiencing nothing more special than the ninece-a-year ship-in-hands-of-hostile-force event, from the belowdecks vantage point. Would he even have been aware that the ship had visited the Ceti Alpha system?

(Well, he does seem to know when addressing Khan at Ceti Alpha V. But "You had it nice at CA V" sounds more like hearsay than a firsthand look at the place where Kirk dropped off the superman.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Steve Willis]

I almost wish Sulu had been on the Reliant. This big plot hole wouldn't even exist. If Sulu had been on the Reliant though, there would not have been Kirk's witty comment on the cadet's steering abilities. A very interesting way to fill the hole would have been to make Uhura first officer of the Relian .

 

[DonIago]

I honestly don't think it constitutes a "big plot hole" that Khan remembers Chekov. If we're going to assume since we never saw them meet that it couldn't have happened, we should make many other assumptions I would advise against.

 

[Steve Willis]

You do have a point, but a cardinal rule of Trek canon is "If it is not on screen, it never happened." We can cuss and discuss assumptions till we are green in the face, but the point remains that canon is canon, therefore I submit the plot hole remains. The problem is that in 1982, that was a huge plot discrepancy, and created a discontinuity. All of us second generation Trek enthusiasts stared at each other and said "Chekov wasn't there!" We then ran home, then got on the phone with a friend that had "Space Seed" on tape as well as me reading Blish's novelizations. Those of us that love Star Trek dislike the unexplained and inaccurate things like that that happen.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I almost wish Sulu had been on the Reliant. This big plot hole wouldn't even exist. If Sulu had been on the Reliant though, there would not have been Kirk's witty comment on the cadet's steering abilities. A very interesting way to fill the hole would have been to make Uhura first officer of the Relian .

Sulu isn't in the episode.

 

[Steve Willis]

As honor demands, I throw myself on my sword. Apologies friends, 30 years of disrupted memory. The helmsman for that trip was one Lt Spinelli. Then Uhura would definitely been the better choice for First Officer for plot continuity.

 

[Timo]

OTOH, "Space Seed" doesn't need to show every Trek hero ever interacting with Khan - because it already tells that this very thing happened! There wasn't a dry eye or a pair of knickers aboard the ship when the dashing superman walked the corridors; if one of the 430 did not meet Khan in person, he or she would have been sure to send him a selfie.

Essentially, any random TOS character could have been inserted in ST2 and it would still have been okay...

...ish.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nyotarules]

ST2 also explicates what was implicit in TOS: that the left hand of Starfleet does not know what the right hand was doing a decade or two earlier. Kirk often dictated deliberately misleading logs, and sometimes downright forged his records. His assessment of what just happened was subjective and haphazard at best even when he didn't try to obfuscate. Sooner or later, something like ST2 was bound to happen - and the more probably, the more faith Starfleet put on its own records and the less it trusted its realtime assessment of the situations at hand.

Timo Saloniemi

The whole TOS crew should have court martial ed for hiding Khans existence.

 

[Nyotarules]

IMO Khan was a future Hitler, why Kirk admired him I do not know.

 

[Timo]

Well, past Hitler, from Kirk's POV and that of most of us. It's pretty standard to admire past tyrants for their audacious achievements, as it all no longer matters one way or another.

Although if Kirk and pals weren't lying or misinformed, Khan was actually a pretty civilized guy overall. No genocide campaigns, no wars apart from defensive ones, and OTOH no known evilness in evidence (although that might simply have been left unmentioned, rather than explicitly denied like the other things).

...Apart from apparently not being democratically elected - but is Elizabeth II a Hitler, too?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nyotarules]

Well, past Hitler, from Kirk's POV and that of most of us. It's pretty standard to admire past tyrants for their audacious achievements, as it all no longer matters one way or another.

Although if Kirk and pals weren't lying or misinformed, Khan was actually a pretty civilized guy overall. No genocide campaigns, no wars apart from defensive ones, and OTOH no known evilness in evidence (although that might simply have been left unmentioned, rather than explicitly denied like the other things).

...Apart from apparently not being democratically elected - but is Elizabeth II a Hitler, too?

Timo Saloniemi

Only when she passes genocidal legislation and rules without restrictions to her powers. So far it has not happened...yet but its never too late she is 90 in a few weeks.
Anyway according to Myriad universes where Khan won, he was a tyrant and created the Terran Empire.