Compare the Kirk-Spock dynamic to Kirk-Khan. It’s often said that Montalban is the greatest of Trek’s big-screen bad guys. We’ll discuss that more in future installments – particularly once we get to the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon in TheUndiscovered Country and the tantalizing Borg Queen in First Contact – but there’s no doubt that Montalban makes an uncannily perfect antagonist for Shatner. The two characters famously never physically interact, and some scholars consider Wrath of Khan one of the great submarine movies, with two great captains holding court on their bridges.
Montalban would joke ruefully that he wished he could have acted against Shatner; he’s delivering all those great lines to nobody, to the lighting equipment, to an off-screen script supervisor. If, for some curious and profoundly unknowable reason, a filmmaker tried to makeWrath of Khan today, that filmmaker might consider this separation of protagonist and antagonist a problem to be fixed – might film lots of scenes with Kirk and Khan together, talking about their motivations, or just punching each other.