If it was the citizens of the countries under Khan's rule, then no. They chased him out by waving their torches and pitch forks.
Never stated. For all we know, those who deposed Khan slaughtered half of his former loyal subjects and enslaved the rest, then called it "liberation".
And to think, the Reliant escape might have been averted if they sent down a Survey Team instead of the Captain and First Officer...
Why would the nature of the landing party make a difference? Khan would capture them in any case, turn them into double agents, and infiltrate the ship with their help. Sure, starting out with the Captain and the... Well, some sort of an officer meant a shortcut for him, but starting out with a survey team (since when were those
not led by the top officers?!) would only have introduced one additional step.
Starting from a small base, and growing stronger, gaining ground, until the rest of the world could simply not ignore them any longer and eventually sent forces to beat them down.
Quite possible - yet with the odd distinction that Khan
never launched any wars. His expansion would have been of some other sort, perhaps involving assassinations, palace coups, top-level blackmail or rigged elections, perhaps merely introducing the superior candidate to every election...
Let's assume Khan recognized then-Ensign Chekov aboard the Starship Enterprise at the time of "Space Seed". (Walter Koenig wasn't even selected for the TOS cast yet, but let's assume, for sake of argument, the Chekov was already aboard the Enterprise.)
Well, the stardates bear this out: "Space Seed" comes after "Catspaw", Chekov's introductory episode (the one where he's considered the new kid, in-universe).
There is no reason to believe that Capt. Kirk told his crew any details about what was happening to the Botany Bay crew after having restored security aboard the Enterprise.
There might be all sorts of reasons - what we lack is proof. We extremely seldom hear Kirk tell his crew what is going on, but it's possible that Uhura gives a running narration over the PA system even though none of this is heard on the bridge where the camera resides. Going by what we actually see and hear, though, it might be that Kirk's crew is basically never aware of where the ship is, where she is sailing and what the mission is. Theirs is just to do and die.
We do not even know for certain how Kirk and company retrieved the Botany Bay and how the Botany Bay's crew got transported to the surface of Alpha Ceti V.
I doubt they retrieved the ship. Khan opted to discard the old tub - and was in no hurry to do so. Possibly, then, he took his time to move over some items he valued, such as his book collection, wrapped in a
Botany Bay cargo belt.
What we see on the planet are cargo containers shaped like those seen in ST:TMP, and carrying Starfleet and Federation logos in places (but admittedly those are difficult to see - the ones stenciled on the exterior cannot be discerned at all, and the interior ones could be argued to be on separate, later added sheets of metal). Odds are (but proof is lacking) that Kirk just gave Khan a few of his Federation Standard Cargo Containers to live in.
As for the delivery method, another thing we cannot see on the screen but is evident from the sets themselves is that the containers are attached to a cargo rig identical to the ones seen in ST:TMP, up to and including a workbee cradle at one end. But the rig is broken so that two containers are out of alignment with the rest. Did this happen when the rig was gravidropped or paradropped to the surface? Or did Kirk beam the whole kit and caboodle down in an orderly fashion, and local conditions later damaged the settlement?
In the end, though, the artistic and dramatic intent was that no element of the
Botany Bay herself reached the planet, or at least that none survived. Only select few interior items did.
We don't know if Khan had any colonization gear aboard. Khan's plan, if he even had any, is not revealed to us; perhaps the
Botany Bay was loaded with nuclear weapons for bombardment of Mars so that Khan could conquer that planet's human settlements? In contrast, Kirk certainly would have had that sort of gear aboard - he had
everything, as evidenced by many an episode!
All Kirk has to tell the crew is that "our guests" have been dispatched to a new isolated colony where they will never have access to spaceflight again.
True for any scenario. It's just that Kirk would need to tell his navigator to make a stop at CA V, or (if he wanted to be secretive) to take five while Spock piloted the ship to a secret destination that the navigator could no doubt guess based on what he knew - but Chekov wasn't his navigator that day, so this changes nothing.
Whole planets do not spontaneously explode without reason, and destroy the climate of a neighboring planet.
In Star Trek, they do. Why wouldn't they? Much stranger things happened in TOS, defining what Star Trek is all about.
And it seems weird for Starfleet to send out a starship-of-the-line like Reliant to seek out a lifeless planet; a robot probe would do for that.
Why
not send a starship? She's assigned to the mission in any case, with apparent multiple tasks: scouting out for Genesis, delivering Genesis to the test site and, apparently, guarding the lab and the test site in great secrecy (remember, Kirk was in the mistaken belief that his was the starship closest to Regula!).
And given Khan's past defeat, it would seem more likely he would steal the Reliant and abscond with his band of followers to someplace well outside of Federation space, to rebuild and fortify his position.
You mean Khan shouldn't have been allowed any wrath? Then we'd just have a rerun of "Space Seed" and nothing more. But this movie is different: Kirk has grown old, and Khan has gone mad. Sometimes it may be that old and/or mad characters are uninteresting. IMHO, not here...
Timo Saloniemi
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