I've alway found that to be a bit of an exaggeration. Something that sounds good as a sound bite or when preaching to the faithful.
Who invented Khan?
- Thread starter Tootai
- Start date
I don't watch the current-era spinoffs, but that photo is confusing. In "Space Seed" Spock specifically says Khan's rule ended in 1996. The photo looks like it wants you to think the scientists conceived him in 1996. Weird. And of course I have no spinoff context for this.He was shown holding a file called "Project Khan."
And IIRC he was involved with some sort of program that experimented on veterans. My head canon (Khanon?) is Soong started Project Khan in the 90s and the experiments on vets were a part of that research. He revived the program later under the guise of the The Noonien-Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement which birthed Khan Noonien Singh and his cohort.
The date is part of the "Aha!" because it sticks in our minds.
Oooh...maybe it was a plan to clone him and see if they could "nature vs nurture" clone Khan into a nice guy.
No, it's true. There was a recently published nonfiction book about it, Inspired Enterprise by Glen E. Swanson. The only previous SFTV series I know of that used scientific consultants at all were Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950), which had science writer Willy Ley as its technical consultant, and Men into Space (1959), which had assistance from the US Air Force. Most of Trek's contemporaries were so scientifically illiterate that they didn't even know what the word "galaxy" meant or that you need FTL to travel between stars. TOS often fell short, but at least it made an effort, which is more than most 20th-century SFTV did. And TNG, at least in its early seasons, did even better. The Trek productions that Gene Roddenberry was most responsible for, also including ST:TMP, consistently had better science than most non-Roddenberry Trek productions.
To a point, but only to a point. Of course, I was being a bit facetious when I used the MST3K quote, and I certainly don't think Star Trek should treat science the way MST3K does.
However, while Trek does try to adhere to much real world science, it certainly does play fast and loose with many things. Ships in space make sounds. Shockwaves can travel through space. "Sonic disruptors" are somehow an effective weapon against the Enterprise in the vacuum of space. And that's all from TOS, where Roddenberry and his consultants were being meticulous about the science. Let's not even talk about TNG, where apparently humans have spiders in their evolutionary history.
My point is, Trek tries to get the science right when it can and you're right that it typically does so more often than other sci-fi franchises. However, it's still just a work of fiction and the writers will not hesitate to throw science out the window when it suits the story. Meyer needed a quick explanation for how the Reliant crew could beam down to the wrong planet, he wrote something that sounded vaguely plausible, and that was it. And there's really no good way to make it make sense. But that doesn't bother me, and TWOK is still a great film.
Birth of the Q
If you're failing to connect with the audience in a medium intended for a large audience like television, what's going on within the universe really ain't gonna matter and is going to be little more than "caviar to the general."
As I have already repeatedly acknowledged, the franchise has often failed to live up to its aspirations. That does not mean we should treat its shortcomings as the baseline of what we should expect from it. It does not mean we should lower our standards and stop asking more from it. What made Star Trek outshine its contemporaries, as I've said, is that its creators tried harder to get it right, and that effort does not lose its value because they didn't always succeed.
There's a fundamental difference between learning the valid science but choosing to disregard it for the sake of drama or budget, as Roddenberry did on TOS, and not even bothering to ask but just making up nonsense, as did too many of his successors (and most other creators of 20th-century SFTV). I respect and understand dramatic license; I don't respect willful ignorance or failure to try.
Do we know that it was Meyer specifically who added that idea, rather than the earlier writers like Harve Bennett, Jack Sowards, and Samuel Peeples?
Granted, it isn't quite as bad as the earlier Bennett-Sowards scripts where the Reliant crew knew that Khan's people had been exiled to Ceti Alpha V but assumed they'd all died. I mean, their goal was to find a planet completely devoid of even microscopic life, so obviously you're not going to pick a planet that used to be inhabited. So it could've been even dumber than it was.
As presented, no, but then, I never liked the overall concept to begin with. I think it was a waste of the potential hinted at by the end (and the title!) of "Space Seed" to just reduce Khan's people to refugees on a dead planet and tell a cliched revenge story. And the whole idea of Genesis was utterly ridiculous fantasy. (My father specifically singled it out at the time as far too fanciful for Star Trek compared to its usual standards.)
I'll never understand why people think TWOK is "a great film" -- I find it achingly stupid on many levels. The inanity of the planet-confusing business is just a symptom of its larger brainlessness.
2 decades.
I was going by 20 years. It gets fuzzy.
An alien spacecraft had a catastrophic failure of its space propulsion system. The resulting explosion destroyed the planet. It was coincidence that Khan and the Augments were marooned on Ceti Alpha V
That's what Reliant was doing.
Khan and the Eugenics War(s) has been retconned to happen some 40+ years later than in TOS.
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While I understand why they did that (to bring Trek history more into line with real history), it creates a problem. Alpha Ceti (as it should properly be called) is currently estimated to be about 250 light-years away (which is further than it was believed to be when "Space Seed" was written). So it's barely conceivable that a sublight sleeper ship could have made it to the general vicinity of that system between 1996 and 2267, but if Khan was a preteen in 2022, then we're talking something like the 2040s-50s for the Eugenics Wars, so there's no longer enough time for a sublight ship to get close to Alpha Ceti. Presumably the reason Kirk chose the system was because it was relatively close at the time, but if the Botany Bay is further from the system when it's found, there's less reason why Kirk would pick that system instead of somewhere closer.
Granted, though, astronomical distances are one thing Trek has always had a problem with from the start, despite its aspirations for credibility. Roddenberry had a penchant for ignoring his technical consultants' recommendations of plausible star candidates in favor of names more familiar to the audience, with total disregard for their relative positions or their likelihood to support life (and indeed, the best-known stars are usually the brightest, hottest ones which are too short-lived to form inhabited planets). So right from the start in "The Cage," we had a case where the Enterprise was heading from the Rigel system to the Vega Colony in order to get medical treatment for its wounded crew, even though Earth is closer to Rigel than Vega is. (Which was hugely compounded when multiple later TOS episodes established friendly civilizations on other planets in the Rigel system, so why didn't the ship just go to one of those?)
So yes, certainly ST was never a bastion of hard science fiction. But its contemporaries in 1960s-80s SFTV were so much more mindless and nonsensical that ST deserves credit for even trying at all to get some things relatively right.
Kellam de Forest might disagree.
Sure, Trek liked to pepper it's stories with science jargon and concepts. And yes it was using real world science better than some contemporaries. But at the end of the day it was a TV show out to entertain and the needs of the plot can and would outweigh the realities of science. After all this was a show that hit ground with Alien-Human hybrids and psychic powers. It's also the show that that kept the answers to questions like "how does it work?" as vague as possible in regard to its "future" technologies.
But long range scans should have been done first for initial study for viability.
Quiet. We have plots that need to happen!!!
Khan artists. That's who.
Entertainment.
And quality.
Kellam de Forest might disagree.
The fact that Kellam de Forest was even consulted at all is what elevates Star Trek above all its contemporaries that didn't even bother to try. When the bar is at floor level, it doesn't take much to surpass it.
And I have already said that there is a fundamental difference between informed poetic license and lazy ignorance.
"Informed poetic license" is a better descriptor of Trek's approach than "adherence to science".
