Star Trek The Wrath of Khan Book Club

[Greg Cox]

Joachim is very interesting here. Too bad I don't think Judson could've pulled this off as an actor. Where did I get the idea in the movie that he was Khan's son?

For what it's worth, Judson Scott believed that Joachim was Khan's son and played him as such.

Or so he told me at a convention once.

In my novel, I split the difference by making him the son of the original Joaquin, whom Khan then raised as his own.

 

[Tallguy]

Joachim is very interesting here. Too bad I don't think Judson could've pulled this off as an actor. Where did I get the idea in the movie that he was Khan's son?

That's pretty much how he plays it. I think he thought he was.

Edit. What Greg said.

 

[Christopher]

Whereas I always thought he was just a recast/misspelled Joaquin.

 

[Greg Cox]

Whereas I always thought he was just a recast/misspelled Joaquin.

At the time I wrote my book, the Star Trek Encyclopedia listed them as two different characters, so I figured that was the "official" position on the subject.

 

[Tallguy]

Whereas I always thought he was just a recast/misspelled Joaquin.

And (if so) mispronounced as well.

 

[Tallguy]

(Happy Birthday, kiddo!)

Chapter 8

The chapter breakup for this book is a little nuts. (I like smaller, more defined chapters myself.) We only have one more chapter after this and the Epilogue! And this one is kind of a lot.

In the storage bay of Reliant, Khan Singh completed his inspection of the massive Genesis torpedo.

So massive!

When he tired of ruling over worlds that existed, he would create new worlds to his own design.

Ahem:

... it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory, either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink...

There are two characters that are just hunky dunky in the film but Vonda is putting through the wringer here: Joachim and Scott.

Foolish of Mr. Spock to transmit the ship's vulnerability to any who could hear.

Mr. Spock is not a great fool so Khan should clearly not choose the wine in front of him.

Pavel Chekov had to be moved to where he could be made more comfortable.

Oh good. Vonda remembered.

More Saavik stuff. I love Saavik stuff.

David Marcus, it seemed, dealt with grief a good deal better than she did.

Ron Howard narrator voice: He could not.

He was afraid he was about to go crazy.

What difference did it make who his biological father was? Neither the man he had thought it was, who had died before he was born, nor the man his mother said it was, had ever had any part in his life. David could see no reason why that should change.

OK, I want to hear more about this. So he never believed who Carol told him his dad was?

David and Saavik are probably fairly complicated people at the best of times. These are not the best of times. So small talk does not go swimmingly.

"I do not even have a proper Vulcan name."

I always wondered about this the first time I read it. I did not realize that it had become accepted wisdom that masculine Vulcan names were like Spock, Sarek, and Stonn while feminine were T'Pring and T'Pau. I realize that we only had a handful of examples to go on to build an entire planet's worth of naming convention. (Which is a little silly.)

This is the kind of detail that proves that Vonda certainly had a lot of Star Trek lore in her head. But she also obviously had "her own Star Trek" rattling around up there as well. It was 1982. You could do that back then. And she was one of the people who got to publish it.

I neither look like a Vulcan nor behave like a Vulcan, as far as other Vulcans are concerned.

Over the years it has interested me that in early Trek even the occasional non-Vulcan (OK, Harry Mudd) could tell that Spock was not "full Vulcan". Having met Sarek and some others one might wonder what the "tells" are that Spock and Saavik are not "pure".

I realized when I put the scare quotes around pure: It's a really weird idea, although common in sci-fi. We're not talking half Irish, half Japanese. It's more like half Human half Rabbit. We're not talking "race" we're talking literal species. So yeah, pure.

Of course going back to the very first chapter: While this is more applicable to Spock, in the case of Saavik we're talking about two different cultures more than species. (If you want to make sense of it. Star Trek does not always do this.) Then we get TNG where the Romulans really do look different from Vulcans. It's been 37 years and I'm still mad about that. But these people's would be as genetically distinct from each other as we would be from ancient Romans! (<-- Hey, I picked that at random, but it works, doesn't it?)

Again, I'll skip ahead. I know there were people who read Star Trek III without having read this book. So there is a lot in the first half of the book (before the movie even started) that left these people rather bewildered. One of those things is this budding relationship between David and Saavik. But between these two books I am a serious shipper for these two. I gather this did not spring entirely out of Vonda's imagination. There are bits of it in the shooting script. ("She's learning by doing.") But none of it is as detailed or character based as this.

Saavik paced through the meadow, wondering what had possessed her to tell David Marcus so much about her background. She had never volunteered the information to anyone else before, and she seldom spoke about it even to Mr. Spock, who of course knew everything. The obvious explanation, that she had wanted to be certain Marcus would never speak in a completely offensive manner to Spock, failed to satisfy her. But she could think of no other.

Awww.

and she had seen the sleek shape of a winged hunter skim the surface of the forest. It was too far away for even Saavik to discern whether it was reptile or bird or mammal, or some type of animal unique to this new place.

Here be...

I don't like to lose.

This is one of my favorite scenes. In the movie. In Star Trek. In Ever. I like the balance, I like the pace, the performance, the button, Horner's music as the button at the end.

I know Jim Kirk is not the swaggering cowboy that many people have come to think of him as, with this story contributing to some of that. But this? This is James T. Kirk. This is Balance of Terror and The Corbomite Maneuver and Journey to Babel wrapped up in a bow.

Hey! Janice Rand is here! (So everyone works on a teaching ship now?)

I never understood this part of the plot where Reliant is firing "warning shots". "Hey, if you don't stop we'll shoot you." "But if we stop you'll shoot us." "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

Freedom was in Khan's grasp, yet he was throwing it away. Joachim indeed felt betrayed.

I also wonder if the Enterprise might have escaped while leaving Kirk and company safe in the Genesis cave. (Probably not. And that's the plot.)

Sulu is wounded when his console explodes. (Kobayashi Maru!)

"I shall avenge you," Khan said to Joachim, his voice a growl.

"I wished … no … revenge. . . ."

Khan laid his friend down carefully. He stood up, his fists clenched at his side.

"I shall avenge you."

Khan is, of course, a fool. In Space Seed. And in this.

David saves Sulu's life. I always forget this part. I'm always surprised when something that I thought was strictly an invention of Vonda's turns up as a deleted scene or something, but I'm pretty sure this is original to the book.

(I forgot that Vonda was the first person to use Hikaru as Sulu's first name!)

It also gives Pavel motivation to get to the bridge.

"Pazhalsta," Chekov said, "help me, bozhemoi, the ship has nothing but children on its crew!"

Khan has played too much Star Fleet Battles.

David reacts badly to Kirk saying that he's proud of him. Again, even though this will dovetail nicely with the end of the book I'm almost certain this was Vonda.

He had been tempted to say, "Dive! dive! dive!" earlier, but refrained; now he kept himself from ordering the young Vulcan officer to let the ship surface. This was not, after all, a submarine, and they were not hunting an enemy U-boat.

Too many old novels, Jim, he thought.

Subtle.

Is this the least that Uhura has to do in all of the movies?

Since Vonda has no budget for sets to worry about, Genesis is not stored on the bridge. Khan goes down to the cargo bay to activate it.

Spock does the math. He makes a decision. Again, the book is allowed more than the economy of the film which, for film, is perfect.

"You cannot escape me, James Kirk," he murmured. "Hades has taken me, but from his heart I stab thee. . . ."

OK. I get that Vonda has been putting her own spin on the dialogue. But this is Moby Dick!

I love that she has McCoy figure out what Spock was going to do and has him try to dodge the neck pinch.

OK. What the frak is this?!?

Spock hesitated. One possibility remained, before he performed his final duty to the ship. Should he even make the attempt? If he were wholly Vulcan, or if another Vulcan were near to help, he would have less doubt. But young Saavik had no instruction, and in any case he had no time to summon her. McCoy was his only chance. He hoped the doctor would understand, and forgive him.

Spock laid his fingers against the side of Leonard McCoy's face. He experienced the undisciplined energy of the doctor's mind.

"Remember," Spock whispered.

(Goes and checks his original paperback.) Nope. This was most certainly not there in 1982. Now I want to know what else they may have changed that I missed?

As he worked, he recalled the events in his life that had given him intellectual, and even—he could admit it now, and who was to despise him?—emotional pleasure. Fragments of music—Respighi, Q'orn, Chalmers—and particular insights in physics and mathematics. Bits of friendship, and even love, which he never could acknowledge.

This passage always bugged me. For all that Vonda references The Motion Picture, far more than the film ever does, she does not acknowledge the character most changed by it: Spock. I always thought that Nimoy plays a more serene, integrated Spock in the film. It's not an on screen acknowledgement of TMP as such, but one can see it in the performance. (If you disregard TMP you can chalk it up to Spock being 10 years older.)

The only real captain of the Enterprise was and ever had been James Kirk.

Well. There had been that Pike fellow...

In front of him, Saavik shuddered. Her shoulders slumped. She did not face him. "He left," she whispered. "He went … to the engine room." She covered her face with her hands.

This would never in a million years happen on screen. And it probably should not. But I'm so pleased it is here.

He sprinted for the lift.

See you all after Christmas.

 

[David cgc]

OK, I want to hear more about this. So he never believed who Carol told him his dad was?

It's phrased awkwardly, but I think "the man his mother said it was" is Kirk. Probably missing a "now."

 

[Tallguy]

It's phrased awkwardly, but I think "the man his mother said it was" is Kirk. Probably missing a "now."

Ahhh you're right of course.

 

[Christopher]

So massive!

Ah, I see, so I wasn't just assuming the torpedo was huge; it's actually stated in the book.

For what it's worth, the script describes it as "a LARGE PROJECTILE, a giant version of the model we saw earlier." (Although I can't find an earlier reference to a model in the script; maybe it was rewritten to be the computer simulation.) Yet it also says the torpedo can fit in the transporter room, which would constrain how "giant" it could be.

I always wondered about this the first time I read it. I did not realize that it had become accepted wisdom that masculine Vulcan names were like Spock, Sarek, and Stonn while feminine were T'Pring and T'Pau. I realize that we only had a handful of examples to go on to build an entire planet's worth of naming convention. (Which is a little silly.)

I think it was a pretty common assumption in fandom, although you're right that the tendency to assume an entire species has only one language or naming convention is silly (though unfortunately pervasive in science fiction).

Over the years it has interested me that in early Trek even the occasional non-Vulcan (OK, Harry Mudd) could tell that Spock was not "full Vulcan". Having met Sarek and some others one might wonder what the "tells" are that Spock and Saavik are not "pure".

At the time "Mudd's Women" was written, I suspect the assumption was that a full "Vulcanian" would look more alien, maybe with greener skin and bigger pointed ears, and that Spock was visibly halfway between the species in appearance. But by the time they made "Balance of Terror," they decided to give the Romulans the same makeup as Spock, probably for story reasons so that Stiles could credibly suspect him of being a Romulan spy, or perhaps simply because they had to make up multiple actors as Romulans and that was easier to do with a simpler makeup. And then "Amok Time" confirmed that full Vulcans look like Spock, and the original intent from "Mudd's Women" was forgotten.

Of course going back to the very first chapter: While this is more applicable to Spock, in the case of Saavik we're talking about two different cultures more than species. (If you want to make sense of it. Star Trek does not always do this.) Then we get TNG where the Romulans really do look different from Vulcans. It's been 37 years and I'm still mad about that. But these people's would be as genetically distinct from each other as we would be from ancient Romans! (<-- Hey, I picked that at random, but it works, doesn't it?)

I tend to assume that many of the Sundered belonged to a minority population of Vulcans with ridged foreheads, and maybe none of the others survived the nuclear war after the Sundered left, or maybe there are just a very few of them left and they keep to themselves.

Or maybe the biochemical conditions on Romulus reactivated a dormant gene and caused an atavistic trait to re-emerge. Maybe it's how Vulcans develop in a cooler, wetter climate. There are some species on Earth whose phenotype is affected by the environment in which they grow up. Although that wouldn't account for what Picard established as a difference between "northern" and "southern" Romulans.

David saves Sulu's life. I always forget this part. I'm always surprised when something that I thought was strictly an invention of Vonda's turns up as a deleted scene or something, but I'm pretty sure this is original to the book.

The script says "The Bridge rattles from the explosion below [in the torpedo room] ; Sulu is thrown from his chair." And later: "Sulu is being helped by David." But that's the extent of it there. McIntyre clearly punched it up quite a bit.

(I forgot that Vonda was the first person to use Hikaru as Sulu's first name!)

Yes, she coined it in The Entropy Effect. She based it on the hero of The Tale of Genji, which I wish she hadn't done, because when I read (an abridged translation of) the book in college, I found Hikaru Genji ("Shining Genji") to be a truly awful person, a spoiled and shallow idle-rich womanizer who saw women as playthings and serially seduced and raped them (even to the point of kidnapping one and holding her prisoner), and who had no life skills beyond being rich and pretty and engaging in rich-person pastimes. Yet the author intended us to admire him as this sublime paragon of noble manhood. (I recently saw an anime episode where a middle-school class was planning to do The Tale of Genji as their school play, which I found rather astonishing. I imagine it would've had to be censored quite a bit.)

Is this the least that Uhura has to do in all of the movies?

Uhura's name appears 56 times in the TWOK script, only 29 times in the Search for Spock script. At least in TWOK they actually bring her along on the mission.

This passage always bugged me. For all that Vonda references The Motion Picture, far more than the film ever does, she does not acknowledge the character most changed by it: Spock. I always thought that Nimoy plays a more serene, integrated Spock in the film. It's not an on screen acknowledgement of TMP as such, but one can see it in the performance.

Indeed. Really, Spock's emotional epiphany in TMP was the only change in the movies that wasn't reversed, aside from changes that happened in the final movie in a series. Spock died and was brought back; the Enterprise was destroyed and then replaced; Chekov became security chief and then first officer of another ship, but ended up back as the Enterprise navigator; Saavik joined the crew but then left the crew; and in TNG, the Enterprise-D was destroyed and then replaced one movie later, and Data got an emotion chip but it was systematically eroded away until it was as if it had never existed. But what happened to Spock in TMP had a permanent impact on how Spock was written and played for the rest of Nimoy's life. (Except in "Unification II," where Spock was written as if he still denied his emotions, though Nimoy still played him as the more serene version.)

Yet for some reason, few novelists chose to pick up on it. Most authors writing post-TMP novels wrote Spock no differently than he'd be written in a 5-year mission novel. Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath were the only novelists to acknowledge TMP's events, but only so that they could completely reverse Spock's epiphany and have him embrace a supposedly ultra-Vulcan mode of behavior. Part of the reason I wrote Ex Machina was that I felt somebody had to tell that story that had never been told about how TMP transformed Spock.

 

[Tallguy]

Uhura's name appears 56 times in the TWOK script, only 29 times in the Search for Spock script. At least in TWOK they actually bring her along on the mission.

And yet she has a more memorable scene in the movie where they don't. I think even at 13 years old I noticed that she has very very little to do in this film, even for Uhura.

Really, Spock's emotional epiphany in TMP was the only change in the movies that wasn't reversed, aside from changes that happened in the final movie in a series.

It wasn't reversed as much as it kind of had to be re-told in The Voyage Home. (Which made sense given the story.) IMHO it was not as moving as in TMP. Although TVH had his reunion with Sarek. That's not nothing to be sure.

I don't think we ever got this Spock ever again. Well, not surprisingly, we get him a little bit in The Undiscovered Country. But I would say that we don't in The Final Frontier. The TWOK Spock would never be baffled by human idiom, for example. I call it the "Data-fication" of Spock. He becomes a little more child like and little less educated about humans.

 

[Christopher]

It wasn't reversed as much as it kind of had to be re-told in The Voyage Home.

Yes, but that's the point -- they could have used TVH to reset Spock to his old emotion-denying self, the same way nearly every other change in the movies was reset, but instead they had him recapitulate the same journey faster and end up in basically the same place. So the change in how Spock was portrayed was not reversed. Contrast that to how Data was given an emotional breakthrough in his first movie, but the sequels hastened to undo it and reset him to how he'd been before.

The TWOK Spock would never be baffled by human idiom, for example.

I don't think he ever was, really. I mean, he served on Pike's crew for 11 years, so it makes no sense that he was still naive about humans by the time he served under Kirk. I think it was an affectation, and perhaps a form of teasing.

 

[Tallguy]

Chapter 9
Spock dies. The biggest change here is that Saavik interrupts to tell Spock about the Genesis planet.

Afterwards Saavik stands guard over Peter and Spock's bodies. This is one of my favorite scenes in the book. Possibly just my favorite. You can just feel that this is the climax to Vonda's story here. She just happened to wrap it in a movie to tell it.

Sulu is told by Chris Chapel about Spock. Meanwhile, Carol is helping Kirk grieve. It's sweet.

We get more detail on the funeral. The reactions of Spock's shipmates. It has a conclusion (rather than changing scene to the torpedo launch) where the proceedings end, people disperse, and Kirk retreats to his quarters, explicitly avoiding David.

David and Saavik have a conversation. There really isn't any place for this in the film, but I would have liked to have seen these actors do this scene. Flirting a little, sure, but also coming to terms with the events of the last day.

David and Kirk. This is a great scene. Yes, Kirk has faced death. Yes, Gary Mitchell, yes, other parts of TOS. But this is great scene. Shatner knocks this out of the park. And when David says that he's proud to be Kirk's son? (With the able assist of James Horner.) 43 years later this still kills me.

Also, in true Hornblower fashion, Kirk doesn't think he has faced death. Kirk probably thinks he's just simple tricks and nonsense. It's not true. But it's how Kirk sees himself. (Horatio Hornblower had a very low opinion of himself. He only counted his failures as legitimate.)

The dialog change that I like is that David straightforwardly asks Kirk if he is running from David. And Kirk immediately admits that he is.

Vonda expands the scene a bit and makes David's statement of pride a callback to a scene on the bridge. And it works a treat.

 

[DonIago]

^Reading that made me want to rewatch the end of the film, in a good way. And made me tear up a little, especially knowing that David will meet his end in the next film, and Merritt Butrick would himself be deceased less than a decade after this film (at 29, which is unconscionably young). :/

I think maybe one reason why the TNG films never made the same impact on me as the TOS films was because they never hit as hard as TWOK and TSFS did, where the crew seemed to face real challenges and losses. Picard loses his brother and son in GEN, but it's off-screen and we barely knew them. The destruction of the E-D, besides feeling contrived, feels cursory for the characters as well (GEN needed a, "My god Bones; what have I done? The same thing you always do: turn death into a fighting chance to live." moment.) The loss of Data is executed so arbitrarily and with an escape clause built in at the start of the film that it's hard to feel it has much impact.

 

[Christopher]

The loss of Data is executed so arbitrarily and with an escape clause built in at the start of the film that it's hard to feel it has much impact.

That was a case where the filmmakers failed to communicate what they intended. Really, the film went to great lengths to show that B-4 could never become Data 2.0, that he just didn't have the capacity. They made a point of having Data try to download his memory to B-4 and fail, to get it out of the way up front that it wouldn't work, that there could be no convenient "katra transfer" to bring him back. The point of B-4 was not to provide an escape clause for Data's death, but to create a parallel between Picard/Shinzon and Data/B-4, to illustrate the theme that the difference between the pairs was that Picard and Data were able to learn and grow, while Shinzon and B-4 were forever trapped by their inability to change. The ending with B-4 humming "Blue Skies" wasn't meant to show that he would become Data, but simply that Data's download had given him some slight ability to learn, a final legacy left by Data that could hopefully help B-4 grow into his own identity.

Unfortunately, telling the story that way created an unavoidable resonance with TWOK/TSFS, so everyone just assumed the point was to resurrect Data, despite the film explicitly and repeatedly telling us that B-4 was simply incapable of that. People were so distracted by the metatextual parallel that they didn't pay attention to the actual text. So the strategy misfired and people came away perceiving the opposite of what was intended.

(And yes, I have no doubt the studio executives saw B-4 as an escape clause they could use to bring back Data in case there was another sequel, but that was a plan B at most, not the actual intent of the filmmakers in creating the character. Since the film did not have a sequel, we should focus on what role B-4 actually played within the film's self-contained story, not on what we might conjecture about his role beyond it.)

 

[DonIago]

You're right, of course, that we're told repeatedly (including by Data himself) that B-4 would never be able to 'become' Data, but killing Data off at the end after having introduced another Soong android was, I think, inevitably going to create an 'unavoidable resonance', as you said.

I think the only real options they had if they wanted to avoid that were not to introduce B-4 at all, introduce B-4 as a more fully developed android where destroying his personality to implant Data's would seem incredibly immoral, or not kill off Data at the end of the film. Even waiting until a (hypothetical) next film would have allowed them to develop B-4 a bit more as 'his own person', or do something else with him and differentiate him to a point where trying to turn him into Data 2.0, if they'd gone in that direction, would have felt less like a cheap copy of TWOK's climax and might have (more strongly) raised interesting moral questions over whether Our Heroes were willing to kill what personality B-4 had in hopes of restoring their friend.

But beyond that, Data's demise is just so quick and out of the blue and arguably contrived that even if it didn't echo TWOK as much as it does, I think it would still lack the same level of gravitas.

As much as my feelings about PIC are heavily conflicted, I did like that S1 gave them an opportunity to do Data's passing a bit more justice. Unfortunately undermined by subsequent events.

 

[Christopher]

You're right, of course, that we're told repeatedly (including by Data himself) that B-4 would never be able to 'become' Data, but killing Data off at the end after having introduced another Soong android was, I think, inevitably going to create an 'unavoidable resonance', as you said.

Yes, that's the point. They were trying for a thematic parallel between Picard and Data and their respective "clones," and that might have worked if it hadn't been in the same movie where Data was killed off. But since it was, people just assumed B-4 was meant to be a backup Data, so to speak, and that worked against the intent of the scriptwriters.

introduce B-4 as a more fully developed android where destroying his personality to implant Data's would seem incredibly immoral,

I object fiercely to the assumption that destroying a sentient being is somehow less immoral if he's developmentally disabled. If anything, it's even more awful, like killing a baby to save an adult.

But beyond that, Data's demise is just so quick and out of the blue and arguably contrived that even if it didn't echo TWOK as much as it does, I think it would still lack the same level of gravitas.

As much as my feelings about PIC are heavily conflicted, I did like that S1 gave them an opportunity to do Data's passing a bit more justice. Unfortunately undermined by subsequent events.

The ironic thing is that the only reason they killed off Data was because Brent Spiner assumed he couldn't keep playing the character as he visibly aged, but that didn't stop them from bringing him back decades later, whether with digital de-aging or just handwaving the whole issue. And they'd forgotten that TNG: "Inheritance" had put in a throwaway line about Data having an "aging program" enabling him to simulate the appearance of human aging. Insurrection forgot that too, claiming that Data was unchanged from the day he was built, even though that was visibly not true.

I agree about PIC season 1, but the ironic thing is that the way season 3 brought back Data is one of the only two things about the season that actually worked for me (the other thing being the evolution of Worf's character). I would've preferred it overall if they hadn't brought him back, but the way he "defeated" Lore through generosity was absolutely beautiful, and mercifully they didn't bring him back by overwriting B-4 (though that's kind of academic given that B-4 was established as disassembled in season 1).

 

[Tallguy]

Something I've never looked at or even knew that I could see: The (final?) draft of the screenplay.

https://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/scripts/twok.txt

As far as I know, this is Meyer's uncredited draft, yes? From what I understand (with a little help from Memory Alpha) if the Kobayashi Maru is at the start of the movie, that's Meyer's script. And Meyer has said "I never looked at the scripts again, so there were no words that were appropriated. It all had to be in my own language and in a way that I could understand it." So all of the dialogue is Meyer's and presumably what Vonda McIntyre was reading when she wrote this novel?

What amazes me (and may be old hat to some here) is how many scenes and ideas from this script made it into the book! I suppose when I get done I can make a list? (I have a fascination with lists.)

But here's a partial list (some that we have already noted).

• The child from Ceti Alpha (we knew this one).
• The scene on Reliant where Beach and Kyle are told they will be receiving visitors.
• The descriptions of March and Vance are closer to the book than what is on screen. @Christopher noted that the script says Jedda is Deltan.
• Kirk saying that the Enterprise is "blind as a Tiberian bat" in a callback to Preston.
• McCoy knows Terrell. AND chastises David for ignoring Terrell's death.
• Saavik telling David that "only half of him" would be beamed up with the Genesis device.
• Saavik and David's exchange that Saavik was looking at "the Admiral's son" with David's retort "don't you believe it". It does not have the part of the conversation about Spock.
• Saavik radioing down to engineering about the Genesis planet is here! (Although it's after Spock dies and is to Kirk rather than to Spock.)
• The end of the funeral (as well as Saavik completing the traditional naval burial phrase "We commend the soul of our brother departed. With love we commit his body to the depths of (space)."
• Kirk admitting he was running from David as well as David and Kirk talking about the people they had lost.
• Saavik and David's "dumb bastard" exchange! (And it's a callback to Kirk's line "that was a little joke".)

I'm sure there are more.

I heard someone say that they added the line "did you change your hairstyle?" to cover for the fact that Alley wouldn't do her hair the same way. This is clearly nonsense. It's in this draft of the script. With an additional punchline to wrap it up in the last scene that she's changed her hair again. (I remember from the first time I saw the film what a perfect moment it is that at the funeral you are both moved to tears and laughter to see that Saavik is crying AND that she has, in fact, changed her hair again. I remember an appreciative laugh from the audience. It wasn't distraction, it was release.)

I admit that I mostly read the dialogue. I'm sure there are more goodies in the descriptions. I did see that the child from Ceti Alpha V smiling at the Genesis torpedo is in the script.

But almost all of Saavik's back story and internal monologue is all Vonda. As is her connection with Peter. She deepens Saavik's connection to Spock. She beautifully builds on Saavik and David's relationship even just in Wrath of Khan.

 

[DonIago]

^Reading all of this, and remembering the TWOK novelization in general, just brings back my feelings of frustration over how Saavik was made more full Vulcan for TSFS and then written out of TVH and not even name-checked in future installments. A sad waste of a rich character.

 

[Christopher]

What amazes me (and may be old hat to some here) is how many scenes and ideas from this script made it into the book! I suppose when I get done I can make a list? (I have a fascination with lists.)

That's pretty common, or used to be, since novelizers would work from scripts and would generally need to add material to fill them out to novel length, while the final films would generally cut things out for time and pacing. (These days, studios insist that novelizations be as exactly faithful to the films as possible, which seems to squander the whole point of novelizations.)

• The descriptions of March and Vance are closer to the book than what is on screen. @Christopher noted that the script says Jedda is Deltan.

That wasn't me. That was actually you, citing Memory Alpha.

But almost all of Saavik's back story and internal monologue is all Vonda.

Yes. A lot of people mistakenly attribute it to Carolyn Clowes' The Pandora Principle, but she just elaborated on what McIntyre created in her novelizations.

^Reading all of this, and remembering the TWOK novelization in general, just brings back my feelings of frustration over how Saavik was made more full Vulcan for TSFS and then written out of TVH and not even name-checked in future installments. A sad waste of a rich character.

I gather the original intent behind introducing characters like Saavik and David was to phase out the aging TOS cast in favor of a "next generation" (so to speak) of characters who would take over as the leads in later films. Instead, the later films ended up doubling down on nostalgia and phasing out the new characters to refocus on the original cast.

 

[DonIago]

I gather the original intent behind introducing characters like Saavik and David was to phase out the aging TOS cast in favor of a "next generation" (so to speak) of characters who would take over as the leads in later films. Instead, the later films ended up doubling down on nostalgia and phasing out the new characters to refocus on the original cast.

That's been my understanding as well. I won't say that the final decision was a misstep, as I rather enjoy TUC, but it does make me wonder what might have been.

Then there's the "What if Valeris had been Saavik" question, which I have mixed feelings about.