Is Kirk really to blame for the events in 'The Wrath of Khan'?

It seems like, a strong element of the story is the notion of unintended consequences. We're placed in the almost unique position of seeing the aftermath of one of those end-of-episode morality scenes from TOS: you know the sort, Kirk makes some determination, it wraps up the plot neatly, and the Enterprise and her crew fly off to their next mission, never to look back. This time, Kirk's decsion to leave Khan on Ceti Alpha V comes back to bite him in the ass, and has major personal consequences.

But.... to be fair to Kirk's original decision, he was faced with a problem of how do you punish a nign indestructible, super-human whose very instincts are to rule and conquer? He solved that by engaging Khan's very nature, giving him a planet to cultivate and rule over in exchange for going away quietly and not (for example) escaping to try and take over the Federation, or worse. Something that Khan and his followers would almost certainly have tried to do if he'd simply handed them over to authorities for a conventional sentence and imprisonment. Kirk's solution is genius: it appeals to Khan's pride to "rule in hell" rather than "serving in heaven". The fate of Ceti Alpha was unfortunate, and perhaps Kirk has some responsibility for not having followed up on and checked that Khan's people were ok, but it was meant to be a punishment after all -- like the original convicts sent to Botany Bay, there in chains, but with an opportunity to build themselves a better life, if they were to survive and prosper in a harsh, dangerous enviroment. It was a relatively humane solution, as well as nullifying any possibility that Khan could become a threat to the wider Alpha Quadrant.

Yes, Kirk's actions led to the events of The Wrath Of Khan. But to "blame" him, or ascribe fault, is as simplistic as Khan's bitter recollections of the original episode, when Kirk had actually offered him hospitality and a chance to atone for his past, Khan threw it in his face, and more than that, now spins it as Kirk having treated him badly. Khan holds some responsibility. Kirk holds some responsibility. And simple bad luck / fate, in what happened to Ceti Alpha, holds some responsibility. But Kirk's choice to give Khan a world to 'conquer' was made in good faith, and accepted by Khan as such.

But what say you?

 

Well checkov thinking it was ceti alpha 6 .. Kirk may have checked on the planet, and it comes up as "destroyed" and he says owell and moves on with his life..
And him poping up on the reliant was a big surprise..
Khan going all capt Ahab oh Kirk is understandable because he blamed him for being left to die on a dead planet.

 

Instead of jailing Khan or taking him to a starbase, he decided to reward the attempted mutiny and murder with a nice planet to call home. Kirk is to definitely to blame.

"I take full responsibility..." -- James T. Kirk, "Space Seed".

 

Reward? Nice planet? Did you see the Ceti Eel? Who knows what other vicious predators were there. Maybe Kirk knew about the ecosystem, and figure Khan would be f*cked within a few months. The explosion of Ceti Alpha VI was icing on the cake...

... Maybe it was purposefully caused by Section 31!!!?!?!?! (just to bring this thread in line with those in Picard and Discovery...).

 

Didn't the explosion of CA6 turn CA5 into a harsh desert world? Might have been more hospitable before.

 

Yes, that is the script.

The earwigs would have been there on Ceti Alpha 5 before the explosion.

Did the ear wigs kill Marla before or after Ceti Alpha 6 exploded?

To get the planets wrong, Reliant would have had to have counted the pre-known number of planets outside in, rather than using some other type of marker to differentiate worlds.

Inside out has to be much easier?

 

Math was not Chekov's strong point.

"Mathemateecs? No, I don't do the math, because math vasn't inwented in Russia."

 

If that was so, it would still be Kirk's blame to bear.

 

Inside out is how it's done, they just screwed it up.

 

Some unfounded assumptions classically made:

1) Kirk would check on Khan. Nope, he was never going to do that. Spock idly speculated what one might find if checking on the castaways a century later, but even that was unlikely to ever happen. After all, the action began at a location where no modern spacecraft had any right to be, and never moved anywhere else as far as we know, so somebody stumbling onto Khan would be unlikely to happen.

2) Kirk would give Khan what he wanted all along. Nope, we never get any suggestion that Khan would have wanted to colonize a planet originally; Kirk came up with that idea in the trial, and Khan lit up with the unforeseen possibilities there and then.

3) Khan would be predictably doomed to die / destined to flourish. Neither - Ceti Alpha V was stated to be "harsh", probably equally likely to kill or feed the castaways, and thus a much gloomier prospect than the real-world Alex Selkirk banishment to the lush Juan Fernandez islands.

4) The Reliant would be counting planets. Nope, that was never their mission nor standard practice for starships. Ships don't count planets: they just home in on the one they want, the one that looks right. The other rocks possibly in the star system can do whatever they want to, being of no interest to the starship in any way; it would make no difference whether there were four, five, zero or a zillion planets inward of the one identified as Ceti Alpha VI by her looks.

5) Kirk pardoned Khan for his evil past. That wasn't mentioned in "Space Seed" at all - Kirk merely dropped the charges on the failed attempts at takeover of his ship and snuffing out of his life. Whether Kirk believed Khan to have been a war criminal or not was never brought up; probably the charges would be inapplicable anyway, having been made by barbaric foreigners from the distant past.

6) Kirk was out of the line for doing what he did. He referred to the authority vested in him by SF Command, in an official recording of the events.

7) Starfleet would be open about Kirk doing what he did. Somebody made sure no flags would pop up when a starship decided to enter the Ceti Alpha system. No wonder since the ambitious supermen were such a hot potato, likened to a shipload of Napoleons on the loose by our heroes. Not advertising their survival seems like a good idea, in the atmosphere later established for the Trek era. Yet there was lingering sympathy for the Augments, in Kirk's crew at least, so there we have another incentive for keeping their survival secret.

8) Khan should not know Chekov. Everybody in the crew apparently got an intimate body part signed by the dashing superman in Space Seed, and Chekov had been part of that crew ever since "Catspaw" at the very least, some 130 stardates earlier.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Khan's original plan was likely to become ruler of Earth, and Kirk probably figured he'd try again with the Enterprise as his weapon. Of course, I doubt he would have made it very far past Starfleet defenses if he tried.

 

CA5 was described in Space Seed as "habitable, although a bit savage, somewhat inhospitable" (as transcribed at chakoteya.net).
So hardly a comfortable vacation spot.

Kor

 

Khan's plan was either to buckrogers it, go into a huge orbit and return to earth 500 years later to conquer it... Or to find a world where he is not the hunted public enemy number one, and grow corn.

1. They had to go back to get more genetic diversity.
2. They had a clone farm hidden in a lunch box somewhere on the ship, and they would never get into a cousin f###ing situation too quickly.
3. There's a shot. It randomizes your DNA so that you can have healthy babies despite mating with a parent or sibling.
4. Khan guessed that FTL travel was around the corner, so that by the time he found a virgin world, and he turned it into a paradise, 5 hundred years later, that all the genetic diversity required for a healthy civilization would come to him.

 

"And I've gotten something else I wanted. A world to win, an empire to build."
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

 

Yes, Kirk was to blame for Khan's Reliant attack.
Kirk was to blame for not putting up the shields and damaging Enterprise thus not eliminating the new Khan threat (including Spock's demise and Scotty's nephew death) with a quick Enterprise vs. Reliant battle. Albeit, WOK would have been a short film.


This might have happened instead:

 

Yes and no. Kirk made the original decision to maroon Khan, so there's no doubt he shares some of the blame. Starfleet also shares some of the blame, as they had his logs, knew what he did with Khan, did nothing to overrule Kirk's decision, and never checked up on him.

Kirk is one man, and may have never had the resources to return to Ceti Alpha V. Starfleet did have those resources and manpower and never cared to check up on what one of their officers did.

 

I don’t see Kirk informing Starfleet because it doesn’t make sense they wouldn’t cordon off the system and set up monitoring in case someone stumbled onto the colony and was taken advantage of like Kirk’s crew was, or otherwise tried to recruit Khan’s people (with likely the same result).

Kirk pretty much misused his power by gambling on the success of a creative solution, but then his TOS-grade character shield malfunctioned and he got bit by Murphy’s Law.

 

He recorded the events in his Captain's Log, also it would be hard to keep 430 people quiet about what happened no matter how loyal. Then there's the missing ship's historian Kirk would have to account for...

 

A novel I read, claimed that most people who read Kirk's logs mistook him for an imaginative drunk.

 

We got to see the pre disaster surface of Ceti Alpha V in the Enterprise episode "Twilight"
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Twilight_(episode)