Why did Kirk let Khan go at the end of Space Seed?

If they wanted to imprison them, the answer is easy: Just do what Into Darkness did and put Khan and Co back into Cryo.

 

Exactly. Better to put them in one place where you know where they are & can keep tabs on them if need be.

True. There's no dialogue to the effect of "We'll check in on you every six months" or five years, or whatever. Maybe Kirk or Starfleet concluded that checking in on Khan directly would just give him another opportunity to escape, and they decided to just probe the system from afar every once in a while.

Well, I think that Kirk did tell Starfleet about it. He had to have, otherwise he'd be severely negligent in his duties for no real reason. I think that Starfleet was the one who dropped the ball, with the bureaucracy losing track of the significance of Ceti Alpha V for one reason or another. Maybe Starfleet's security division didn't share enough info with the scientific division. Maybe Section 31 covered it up for some nefarious reason of their own. Who knows?

Exactly. We just don't see all the stable Admirals because they don't make for very interesting stories. Komack never seemed nutty to me.

BTW, I just had a thought about what might have happened after Ceti Alpha VI exploded, but since it's a bit off-topic, I started my own thread over in the Movies forum:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/a-thought-about-ceti-alpha-vi.286431/

 

Decker died heroically and provided the solution to defeating the planet killer, so I believe his log report would be fair, rather than romantic in nature.

Well, in Mitchell's case, Kirk was correct--Mitchell did not ask for what happened to him, so Kirk would not file a negative report (how would he truthfully pin blame on Mitchell?). I'm not sure Kirk could be considered spinning the various mission reports.

 

Well ... Kirk has gone out of his way to be lenient with his subordinates, like with Marla McGivers and her behaviour on the Botany Bay ... even Scotty, he's been known to cut some slack on. For example in the episode where they meet "Apollo" and in "Trouble with Tribbles." In the latter, Kirk's "discipline" against Scotty was but mere pretense ... Kirk knew Scotty would appreciate being sequestered with his journals. Kirk just has this streak in him ...

 

So if the policeman pulls his service revolver at a crook and says "Don't move, you are under arrest!", it's attempted homicide?

You don't seem to have a working definition for "use of lethal force" here. Khan may have possessed lethal force, but he certainly didn't use it to a lethal end. Nobody died, and nobody was intended to die. Indeed, Khan said "Obey or die", Kirk did not obey, and still nobody died.

Dodge all you want, but the relevant fact here is that a specific set of navigating aids is always used at the complete expense of others. If you have the house number, you don't wave a yardstick or a compass around, or dig out a map. If you know what the house is supposed to look like, you ignore the number. Etc. Terrell knew his target house looked like a big desert, so he had zero reason to unfold his map and no chance to notice that the house happened to lie twenty-two feet to the left of what was indicated in a city plan he never had seen.

Yes, known or desired. Terrell would be looking for desired.

How so? Even a black hole in the system would be irrelevant to the issue of navigating to the local desert world.

Why should they mind? It was what they expected to see, and they had no need for anything better. They were there to see whether Ceti Alpha VI was right for Genesis, so they did not know in advance what the planet was like, exactly. They would take measurements, and if those disagreed with putative previous data, then the previous data would be ignored as faulty.

Was Kirk a war criminal? Hell, yes - ask any Klingon!

Objectively speaking, though, Khan was as close to a good guy as TOS villains come, to the specific end of allowing for the conclusion.

Which is why we love neo-Nazis so much.

Decker got his entire crew killed, including himself, supposedly through piss-poor command decisions, and failed to stop the DDM. Whitewashing that is going to require a bit more than "his final criminal activities gave me an idea".

Mitchell got great powers and used them for evil. Why would this not be a negative thing? It would be the day if any murderer could claim "I didn't ask for Samuel Colt to invent the means by which I dealt with my domestic and/or financial problems, your honor"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

No. What you're describing is not lethal force. At most, it's a threat. If a crook pulls out a gun, fires it at the officer, and misses, that's attempted homicide. He doesn't get extra points or the benefit of the doubt because his attempt was unsuccessful.

Again, he cut off life support to the bridge and put Kirk into McCoy's decompression chamber. Both are attempts at murder. The only reason he was leaving anyone alive is because he thought he might be able to get something out of them.

Khan was clearly intending to kill people. When he thought that Kirk was dead in the decompression chamber, he didn't show a bit or remorse, regret, or hesitation. He simply told his henchman to take Spock to the chamber next.

That's because Captain Kirk is really good at what he does, not because Khan is honorable.

I'm done debating this with you. You're being willfully obtuse at this point, and continuing this any further will be a waste of time.

 

Poor? Any captain would have tried to fight the DDM if attacked, and beaming his crew down to a planet for safety was the proper decision. With no knowledge (initially) of what the DDM's functions were ,there was no perfect response until his suicide run. At least that was instrumental in destroying the weapon. Without Decker's idea/sacrifice, the 1701 & its crew would be just as dead as the Constellation's. Who would damn the man in a mission report after his self-sacrificing contribution?

Because that was not his true nature. He was altered by a power he did not fully comprehend, so he was driven not by his real self, but by the base desires of one incapable (as all humans would be) of having a mind match the rapid changes. As Kirk accurately pointed out--

Mitchell was overwhelmed by human weaknesses / vanity, which suppressed that true self (a true self that momentarily returned in the cell at the cracking station). A gun--as in your Colt analogy--has no influence over its user; one can choose to kill or not. Far different than the effects of an energy barrier essentially rewriting a species never meant for that kind of transformation.

 

Exactly. Khan never fired his gun - he threatened with doing so. And he never missed - he was 100% successful in what he intended, gaining control of the ship without killing anybody. So by the above, agreed-upon standards, Khan didn't use lethal force, despite possessing the capability for doing so. He used sufficient and, given the cleverness and stubbornness of the heroes, no doubt necessary force.

Whether he was the crook or the guy in uniform depends on one's viewpoint. Although certainly he was in uniform at the time!

Only in the eyes of a biased prosecutor. The first act would not meet the criteria for murder in any court today, those including first and foremost the intent to kill, which Khan clearly did not have. The second would meet all the criteria, and more to boot.

If somebody died in the first act, against Khan's wishes, then Khan would be facing charges on what some courts might call involuntary manslaughter. But Kirk put in the same position would not - and that is solely because his profession grants him the right to commit both involuntary manslaughter and murder without negative consequences (he might get positive ones, such as medals, out of them, though).

Yet Khan is a soldier, too. He just happens to be an enemy soldier. And "being enemy" is always illegal (no country has laws allowing for it to be invaded, say).

Since he left everybody alive, the prosecution really wouldn't have a case. Getting something out of people is not a crime in itself, after all.

People who failed to cooperate, yes. That's not particularly bad as far as villains go. And the most interesting point of all this is that this is in sharp contrast with the raving lunatic of the second original-cast movie and the second new-cast movie both - movies where the common theme is that Khan has been wronged (by his perverse standards). Kirk hasn't wronged him in "Space Seed" yet (even by his perverse standards).

Kirk is really good at suffocating?

Nice of you to grant me the last word, and all that. But it doesn't change much.

Timo Saloniemi

 

A skipper who has just witnessed a planet-destroying beast in action beams his crew to a planet? The report would praise Decker's eventual suicide as the decent thing to do, certainly!

Decker can't plead ignorance. He has hunted the creature from system to system, just like Kirk. And he has even more evidence of what is happening than Kirk does, as his ship has f(rom a distance) witnessed one planet in the very act of breaking up.

It's not as if Kirk gets high marks for his actions, either. Both skippers sail into a communications-blocking phenomenon, and never try to defeat that phenomenon by, saying, warping out to send a report or a call for help. Another reason to praise Decker's willingness to commit suicide - it's apparently a desired quality in starship captains!

We know that the most ridiculous defenses work in Starfleet courts: "I was possessed"; "My evil twin did it". But trying to claim that Mitchell was under the influence of something other than his own free will would be a ridiculous defense to outmatch all ridiculous defenses. Kirk has no objective basis for his claims, other than his personal knowledge that Mitchell had not been a murderous madman/madgod previously, as far as he could tell.

Timo Saloniemi

 

...so what were his options? Have the crew remain on a wrecked ship with limited life support and might be subject to another attack?

Decker provided the answer. If he remained on 1701, the ship is lost, and the DDM continues on its journey to the Rigel colony, where there would no defense / offense. I'm sure Starfleet Command saw Decker's actions as the fuse for the "bomb" that ended a threat beyond their comprehension.

Evidence flies in the face of your post. One, one can conclude that there was sufficient Starfleet (or the WNMHGB equivalent) evidence that Mitchell was not a megalomaniacal personality pre-barrier (yeah, its a good guess Starfleet does not assign megalomaniacs to ships). Two, in acknowledgement of the first point, one can also conclude that the barrier was rewriting his body and abilities, but did not remove human weaknesses (vanity, hubris, etc.), instead,intensifying the scope of said weaknesses, which were stronger than whatever good remained in his personality. There's no screen evidence selling the idea that the post-barrier Mitchell was born from natural personality traits of the former, normal man. Kirk's log entry was correct.

 

Yup. And that was his only option - beaming down to a planet soon to be eaten should not have been an option available to him or any sane person.

By staying with the ship, the sidekicks might well have remained alive. Decker did, after all. Nothing else would have gone differently. So Decker chose very poorly. The surprising thing here is that his crew appears to have agreed (because it would be impossible to get a crew of 430 out in whole if there were dissenters)...

Nothing much wrong with staying, considering that starship crews are supposed to, well, crew a starship. It's basic starship commanding 101 to deal with combat damage, including the severe sort, and if ramming is not what you had in mind for the day, withdrawing is another course to pursue (literally). Failing that, just keep afloat and wait for help: Starfleet had two ships in the area, possibly more (since Kirk didn't appear 100% sure it was the Constellation SOS he was hearing). That Decker chose to have his crew desert is quite unexpected when there was a fight to be fought and a lot at stake.

(Which is why I'd like to think that Decker intended to ram the Constellation down the throat of the DDM in the first place, thereby saving both his crew and the planet they were on, but the continuing fire from the beast deprived the starship of mobility at a key moment. But he never brought up such a scheme later on, which is a pity.)

Rigel would always have the very same defenses as L-374 did - nothing stopped the starship from tagging along the beast and confronting it wherever it went. At most, the ship would need to maintain sufficient distance so that the damping effect would not shut down the engines. Say, by flying well ahead of the beast.

Indeed, it's very difficult to see any reason for hurry in the episode. The beast was devouring systems slowly and systematically, and wasn't given credit for high speed at any point. OTOH, something had made it leave L-374 without eating all the planets; the only thing different from L-373, L-372 and so forth was a starship tickling the beast. So tickling would appear to have been a tactically straightforward way to protect star systems. If not, just summon more ships and try out more tricks, but not at L-374 where nothing learned could be broadcast forth; do it where any ship could observe the failures of her predecessors.

But there is no evidence. "Intensifying weaknesses" is speculative gobbledigook that would never stand in court. If Mitchell couldn't keep himself from becoming a murderer, he should fry for it, just like any murderer who can't control his or her urges. And that such urges would have been absent before they manifested is neither here nor there - what matters is that Mitchell eventually had them and acted upon them.

Now, if a murderer today established that he had been given mind-altering drugs without his consent and knowledge, he could quite possibly benefit from it. Such defenses have so far hinged on experts testifying that said drugs would specifically have the claimed effect of either creating the murderous state of mind or then removing the inhibitions in the way of until then controllable murderous urges, though, and there are no experts on the Galactic Barrier effect. The case of Mitchell becoming a murderer could certainly not be used for overturning the case of Mitchell becoming a murderer!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Maybe they didn't want him breaking loose on the the Federation space when he stood trial?

 

Incorrect. The bridge was destroyed. Engineering was so wrecked that it strongly suggests that anyone remaining there during the attacks would have been killed. It is clear Decker--and the crew--believed staying on the Constellation would be signing their own death warrants.

There was no fight to be fought on a dying ship. At the start of it all, they tried and failed miserably.

Confronting it? What part of "they tried that and failed" did you miss? It matters not what strategy Decker employed--Phasers were utterly ineffective against the DDM, so at worst, all the ship would do is exactly what occurred: attract the attention of the DDM and suffer from its attacks. Until Decker's inspired run, facing off against the DDM was guaranteed to fail.

Then you did not understand what Kirk plainly said in the episode. As Mitchell grew in power, the worst of his human weaknesses grew with that, hence the megalomania. He did not grow in wisdom or common sense. That is incontestable.

"Keep himself?" Nonsense. No rational mind would expect a human being to have complete control over an effect that radically, rapidly altered his human essence with abilities no one had even the slightest clue about understanding / handling. This is not some random criminal--convicted with evidence that usually includes arguments of pre-meditation, history and other relevant psychological factors. There is none to be found with Mitchell (pre-barrier) no matter how much you want to hang some imagined "guilt" on him. If it was there, please provide the evidence.

 

Not sure what I think of it either. But the second season was surely the bloodiest the Federation had known in ages and it never occurred to me before that Ceti Alpha VI blew up during that same terrible year.

Attributing Ceti Alpha VI to the known planet-wreckers of that year is a bit Small Universe certainly. But then another planet-wrecker in Federation space in that year? That's a slightly more exotic sort of Small Universe.

 

Galactus

 

So they should be condemned for their idiocy, not praised for it. Their odds aboard the ship were demonstrably infinitely better than on the planet, after all.

A soldier isn't to be praised for calling it quits. And see below:

Which is demonstrably the opposite of truth - using a starship for ramming finished off the beast, while using a shuttlecraft achieved nothing at all. The Constellation or the Enterprise could have performed the ramming if nothing else worked.

Which is besides the point anyway: if the DDM cannot be defeated, then it doesn't matter whether Starfleet even tries. But tagging along and trying is the way to go if Starfleet doesn't specifically want to wuss it out and let the UFP die.

He lied to make the death of his monstrous friend look more heroic. That's simple enough, and perfectly in character.

To pretend that he believed in what he wrote would mean stating that Kirk is stupid. Not my preference here.

I don't have to. No court on Earth would even allow for you to ask the question in the first place. If a murder takes place, "he didn't show signs of it beforehand" is not an accepted argument and no defense.

"He was mostly quiet and kept to himself" and all...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Constellation never rammed the DDM. It was used as a timed/proximity fuse torpedo and detonated before it actually hit. This was a good thing, as hitting/ramming would likely have prevented the explosion.

 

I would say it doesn't matter if he really intended to kill them or not, unless one thinks that kind of thing is lawful under the Federation. Threatening death as a form of coercion qualifies as torture under US law and UN convention.

No, multiple methods are used in conjunction all the time. Road maps and mileposts. GPS and house numbers. Celestial fix and dead reckoning. Compass heading and landmarks.

The scale is way off. Even for celestial bodies as close as the earth and moon, the comparable scale would be more like different continents than city blocks.

But the way you posit it, planets move around with such regularity that previous information is useless. If things are so uncertain, all of the planets could be wrong, how would they know? How are they ever supposed to get to the right planet if their navigation data can never be trusted?

Of course this chaotic universe of wandering planets negating all known navigation systems is never even hinted at in Star Trek. It is such a silly, grasping explanation that it reinforces the only point I care to make: It was a silly plot point, thrown out casually in a somewhat over-the-top and silly but enjoyable movie. If it had been solidly addressed in the movie we wouldn't be talking about it over and over all these years.

You can provide examples, I suppose? If the Federation and Klingon Empire have international agreements on laws of war, Kirk would have rights as a lawful combatant of a belligerent power. Khan would have no such rights. He would come under Federation legal jurisdiction when he was rescued in open space. He acted against those laws to violently interfere with the operation of the vessel and deny its use to its lawful owners, and committed assaults against the persons aboard.