Khans line "how little man has changed"

As long as his blood is still magic.

 

Ugh.

 

Well, his lungs and heart were magic from day one: McCoy was pretty adamant that Khan healed himself after the cryosleep.

Whether his blood always was like that, or got modified with 23rd century tech so that he could better conduct his mission of extortion, we don't know and don't need to. It would be a bit of coincidence if blood engineered to cure the Harewood kid had the exact properties needed for curing generically dead tribbles and radiation-poisoned maverick captains, though, so we might want to postulate a broadband stay-alive fluid, which in turn goes well with McCoy's original "Space Seed" assessment.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yeah, but does he have Tiger Blood like Charlie Sheen? No, he doesn't.

 

He's was not talking about mankind "augmenting" themselves, but a direct observation that after the passing of centuries, he did not see much natural growth as a species.

Not really. If you recall from "Space Seed," Spock mentions that at the height of Khan's power:

To be the "absolute ruler" of more than a quarter of earth for a number of years meant he was not some random event, but a historic force who successfully bent one part of the world to his will, while the rest of was on alert due to his reign. The fact that his government fell is not a marker of a downfall, as no ruler stays in power forever, and historically, the more one rules in the way suggested by the script, the more likely they eventually fell. So, there's not so much a "downfall" as it was a condition of being a dictator.

What..?

 

Ricardo Montalban was very believable in the role of Khan and was able to make us feel that he really was such a man two hundred years earlier, even if we as adults knew that he was just an actor of the week in reality! It's a good job Montalban didn't return to Trek as another character, say a Klingon or another Captain as that may have diluted his performance as Khan, in my befuddled eyes anyway!
JB

 

We never saw him die—he seemed to slump, yes—but consider... One of his fellow Augments places him in one of Reliant’s killer bees....

The Gen’ wave revives him, and the shell of the Enterprise after skipping off the Genesis planet’s atmosphere becomes a new base of operations

 

...Which would be a good way to define success. If you create a rule that inevitably results in its own collapse, you're a failure. If you can hand over your great achievements to your democratically elected replacement, your offspring, your worst competitor, or your democratically elected nemesis of a son, you're a success. Hitler: utter failure. Stalin: splendid success.

Taking over a big chunk of the world but not all of it is generally a recipe for disaster, as folks don't like being taken over, and thus should be subdued all, not just in part. Khan's rule probably wasn't built to last, then. Which does not sound like success, when Khan seemed honest and enthusiastic about "offering ORDER!" yet could not have provided that if he always planned on being a kleptocrat and fleeing with the loot.

Timo Saloniemi

 

"From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world. From Asia through the Middle East."

So, GENGHIS KHAN, then.

 

Weirdly, I felt that Khan and Spock had an interesting contrast that deserved to be explored. Spock is Kirk's physical and mental superior to a level that equals or surpasses Khan himself. However, Vulcans do not seek domination over other beings and Spock is happy to serve under Kirk.

Something Khan would find incomprehensible.

 

Great observation! Although there's always a nit to pick: Khan boasts on five times Kirk's strength, while Vulcans are credited with just three times Sisko's strength in the DS9 baseball holodeck romp. (Or is it just that Sisko is so much stronger than Kirk?)

That Spock outsmarts Khan is a bit unfair, too, as Spock bests the Augment in his own game only in those adventures where Khan has already lost his cool. Defeating the stark raving mad character of ST2:TWoK is more Khan's own doing than Spock's, and the stark non-raving mad character of ST:ID is additionally being pelted by hits from his other opponent, the satanic Marcus.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Physical: you don't run a starship with your arms, you run it with your head.

Mental: Spock is superior at doing unassisted math, and at knowing vast amounts of trivia offhand, both of which are largely redundant in the age of computers. Kirk is superior at things a ship captain has to do, like handling people (emotional intelligence), and coming up with creative tactics to outwit opponents.

So Spock is different, but as captain material, hardly superior.

 

Wow man thats harsh!
Saying Spock could be replaced by a calculator and one of the Chasers.
I think of the many times he's saved the day the series, risked his life, come up with the life-saving formula with his super brain and thats all nothing.
Next you'll be saying that Scotty is not a miracle worker...

 

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/...KVmkpqdklDn5yCY_Pcq54B0LKk5ZBDfbSok51lzbfME&s

 

"Space Seed""

So Khan Noonian Singh didn't massacre people. In contrast, Genghis Khan might have massacred more millions of men, women, and children then any other leader in history, though of course there has been intense competition through the ages for the title of the person who massacre the most people.

 

This.
I would have thought that Khan and Marcus would have gotten along.

 

Well, being constitutionally unable to get along, especially with their peers, was sort of the very point of the Supermen.

I wonder why they were created in the first place. An idle scientific experiment? A scheme to take over the world with shock troops (but without precautions against the shock troops refusing to hand over the world to you afterwards)? A scheme to give the world ORDER!, much like the characters in ST:ID insinuate, by building a few Jedi Knights for use as the ultimate peacekeepers?

No honest character ever discusses the Augments from an angle that would help clarify this. Arik Soong's little history lesson in "Cold Station 12" is likely to be a filthy lie, but is it also the objective truth? Is it that nobody really knows who created the Supermen and for what purpose? That they perhaps counted their creators among their first victims, thus forever burying the truth?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Explain yourself, please.