Part of my problem was the seeming age of the "supermen". The Eugenics program would have had to have been started in the 1960's or earlier for Khan and his cronies to be adults in the early 1990's.
when did TOS take place, 23rd century or 22nd century
- Thread starter Gabriel
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Greg Cox's novels have them being created in classified laboratories around 1970 so that's not too far off. Accelerated growth and maturity would explain why Khan looked like he was in his thirties or even forties by the time he was defeated and placed into cryogenic freeze in 1996.
Not canon, I know. But Cox did a good job explaining their origins.
Not canon, I know. But Cox did a good job explaining their origins.
The first two parts of Greg's Khan trilogy are my least favorites of his works.
Plus flying cars. Where is my flying car?
In the impound yard at the moonbase.
Oh, yeah....
The ageing effect upon Kirk and the others in The Deadly Years only resembled that degeneration but was actually more akin to radiation sickness explaining why the crew that went down were all affected at different rates! Ensign Galloway or Gaullway as Kirk pronounced her name died with a porridge skin and thick grey wig upon her head! In the sixties they always gave the actors these cumbersome white wigs to display getting old rather than the thinning hair we all know of today which happens in real life! 
JB
JB
It was The Wrath of Khan's retcon (ret-Khan?) that the "supermen" were created by genetic engineering. "Space Seed" was made before DNA recombination was pioneered, so it said they were created by selective breeding, the same process that's been used for millennia to breed new traits in plants or animals over multiple generations. In real life, the eugenics movement arose in the late 1800s, and there were numerous programs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that attempted to breed "superior" humans, up to and including the Nazis -- but since they were all motivated by racism and assumed "superior" meant "pure white" rather than genetically diverse and adaptable, they all failed miserably. I suspect that Carey Wilber -- a veteran of WWII -- intended to posit that the supermen of the Eugenics Wars (whom he originally intended to be led by a man named Harold Ericsson) were what might have happened if one of those late-19th-century eugenics programs had actually worked and continued in secret for several generations. The decision in the final episode to portray them as multiethnic and genetically diverse made that more plausible, as if that one program had succeeded because it was the only one motivated by real science instead of racism -- and it made it less icky that Kirk saw their leader as admirable and sent him into noble exile. (Although TWOK then undermined that by casting a bunch of pale blondes as Khan's people.)
Has anyone ever asked Harve Bennett the reason for that casting decision? Everyone except for Khan looks pretty young as well.
He and Meyer may have been influenced by the historical link between eugenics and Nazism/white supremacism, as I suggested might have been the case with Carey Wilber.
Yeah, that was just weird. These guys were supposedly stranded as adults 15 years before, and had been princes and dictators on Earth before then. But they ended up looking like a biker gang. What were the filmmakers thinking?
But they did see the actual "Space Seed" episode, no?
I guess the blonde bikers just looked better to them.
Yes, and they used it as a source of ideas, but they were telling their own story and made what changes they found appropriate (like retconning Chekov into "Space Seed," or making Starfleet more militaristic and low-tech). Same as Roddenberry changing the Klingon design in TMP. Productions back then tended to be looser about continuity details; it was more about the broad strokes. The story you were telling now outweighed the exact details of past stories. (Look at Harve Bennett's earlier work such as The Six Million Dollar Man and you'll see a similar flexibility about continuity -- although you could say the same about any TV producer back then.)
That's right. Steve Austin was an Air Force colonel in the original novel, but they made him a civilian for the first pilot movie, I'd guess to avoid offending Vietnam War protestors. Then for the regular series, he was a colonel again. Almost nobody had a VCR yet, and it didn't seem to matter.
We should be glad we don't have to come up with double-talk for why Spock changed his name or something.
And Kirk mentions "controlled genetics" in "Space Seed(TOS)" which could apply to both selective breeding and high-tech genetic engineering so the TOS episode amd TWOK still mesh together well without the need for a lot of nitpicking unless one wants to point out the appearances and apparent ages of the other Augments on Ceti Alpha V.
Oh, and why Khan's necklace has a TOS Movie-era Starfleet insignia on it while in "Space Seed" all the visible Starfleet arrowheads were sewn patches or wall or hull decorations, but perhaps the emergency survival kits Kirk gave Khan and his followers had metallic Movie Era-style arrowheads on them.
That...or Marla McGivers owned it and Khan was wearing her arrowhead as a symbol of love and mourning. That might work best as a theory.
Oh, and why Khan's necklace has a TOS Movie-era Starfleet insignia on it while in "Space Seed" all the visible Starfleet arrowheads were sewn patches or wall or hull decorations, but perhaps the emergency survival kits Kirk gave Khan and his followers had metallic Movie Era-style arrowheads on them.
That...or Marla McGivers owned it and Khan was wearing her arrowhead as a symbol of love and mourning. That might work best as a theory.
I don't recall any dialog establishing that.
There was nothing in the film that established that.
In Greg Cox's novel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh, they're claimed to be the swiftly-grown children of the originals, but that's never asserted in the movie. All the movie tells us is that these 20-something people were stranded 15 years earlier, which doesn't add up.
One of Philip K. Dick's better-known novels, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (one of two Dick stories that mention "a captain kirk" being shown at a movie theater), has a similar problem that's likewise never properly addressed: Two of the main characters, Jason and Heather, are "sixes" - although they prefer not to advertise that fact - and Jason is in his early 40s in 1988 when the story takes place. The genetic manipulation by Dill-Temko, the "muter" who created the sixes (who have greater physical and mental resiliency among other traits), would have had to be done with mid-1940s technology. Well, the book has many other implausibilites but it's still worthwhile. So is TWoK.
