Wrath of Khan Genesis Planet

[los2188]

I don't know if this has ever been asked, but in Wrath of Khan, which planet is actually the Genesis Planet?? We know it's not Ceti Alpha 5, and we know it's not Regula, so which is it?? Also, should Saavik having been revealed as half Romulan in a deleted scene, been pushed as an important part of the Saavik character??

 

[Deranged Nasat]

It was the nebula itself that was reconfigured into the planet by the Genesis effect. Well, the nebula was transformed into both the star and the planet, I guess.

 

[Mr Silver]

This is sure to start another debate about a very common question!

FWIW, its never specifically stated what created the Genesis planet. We can assume that because the explosion dissipated the nebula in a sense that it had something to do with the formation. Asides from that I would speculate that the wave travelled until it reached the nearest planet or planetoid and then caused the effect. It just so happened this planet was in orbit of a star too.

 

[Christopher]

The effects certainly seemed to indicate that the planet was accreting out of the nebula. When we first see it on the viewscreen, it's surrounded by nebulosity and ejecta that provide a visual throughline with the shots of the Genesis explosion itself, conveying that the planet is forming in the same place where the explosion occurred.

As for the presence of a star, some have proposed the Genesis wave somehow created a star too, but the best fan explanation I've heard is that the Mutara Nebula surrounded a pre-existing star. It didn't look like a planetary nebula like the Ring Nebula, but more like an HII region (ionized hydrogen); so maybe it could've been a small stellar nursery with a smattering of baby stars within it.

Also, should Saavik having been revealed as half Romulan in a deleted scene, been pushed as an important part of the Saavik character??

That depends on what would've been done with it. In the original script, it served as nothing more than an "explanation" for her somewhat more emotional behavior than a typical Vulcan -- but that's kinda stupid, since it implies that Vulcan logic is genetic rather than cultural. Vulcans and Romulans are the same species anyway, so having "Romulan blood" wouldn't make Saavik emotional if she'd been raised as a Vulcan. This is why they cut it from the movie -- because it just didn't make sense as presented. In her novelization of the film, though, Vonda N. McIntyre concocted a better explanation for Saavik's emotionalism -- that she'd been raised from infancy on a hellish planet as part of an abandoned Romulan experiment, and hadn't been rescued and taught Vulcan ways until she was older. And that backstory has been an important part of her character in most of the novels and comics about her ever since.

 

[los2188]

This is sure to start another debate about a very common question!

FWIW, its never specifically stated what created the Genesis planet. We can assume that because the explosion dissipated the nebula in a sense that it had something to do with the formation. Asides from that I would speculate that the wave travelled until it reached the nearest planet or planetoid and then caused the effect. It just so happened this planet was in orbit of a star too.

Hmmmmm......I had always wondered about that. And how couldn't Starfleet know that Ceta Alpha 6 was destroyed?

 

[UssGlenn]

The shot of the Reliant with the blindingly bright light behind it looks like it shows the star in the nebula to me.
pictures 975 and 976
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=42&page=2

 

[Unicron]

^^ The TWOK novelization has what I consider a reasonable explanation: the Ceti Alpha system was relatively unexplored and uncharted, and that's one reason Kirk chose to leave Khan there at the time of "Space Seed." Ceti Alpha 6 is described as being a moon or small planetoid orbiting Ceti Alpha 5, rather than a whole planet in the same system. The naming seems less logical then but I think it fits better with Khan's explanation of how CA5 was wrecked.

 

[Mark 2000]

This is a pet peeve of mine along with a lot of other logic holes in TWOK. It drives me nuts, from a lazy writing stand point, that they said the device - the McGuffin of the film - did one thing in one scene and then it does something completely different in practice and no one says a word.

It's also one of the missed opportunities in Star Trek III. Obviously there's no real explaining the perfect star at the perfect distance, but Genesis's instability could have been blamed on the fact that the device created a planet from dust rather than terraforming something already there.

The TWOK novelization has what I consider a reasonable explanation: the Ceti Alpha system was relatively unexplored and uncharted, and that's one reason Kirk chose to leave Khan there at the time of "Space Seed."

It shouldn't have mattered how many times the system was encountered, it should have been accurately mapped if they knew there was a class M planet there - one known to be wild at that. And they had enough info to know there was another planet in the system that was a candidate for experimentation.

 

[Maurice]

The shot of the Reliant with the blindingly bright light behind it looks like it shows the star in the nebula to me.
pictures 975 and 976
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=42&page=2

Ah, but that light quickly fades out as soon as it is dramatically expedient. You literally see if fade away behind the Reliant.

 

[Christopher]

It shouldn't have mattered how many times the system was encountered, it should have been accurately mapped if they knew there was a class M planet there - one known to be wild at that. And they had enough info to know there was another planet in the system that was a candidate for experimentation.

Right. One thing that TV/movie sci-fi writers often forget is that there are no horizons in space. You don't have to get close to a place to map it. Right now, in real life, we're discovering hundreds of exoplanets around other stars dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of light-years away. With a sensitive enough telescope, you can see anything in space at any distance, so long as there isn't a nebula or something blocking your line of sight. So by all rights, the Federation should've had accurate charts of the planets of the Ceti Alpha system even if they'd never been there.

 

[Therin of Andor]

It drives me nuts, from a lazy writing stand point, that they said the device - the McGuffin of the film - did one thing in one scene and then it does something completely different in practice and no one says a word.

I think the reactions we get from Kirk, McCoy and Carol ("Can I cook...?") tells us that even they are amazed by what they see at the end of the movie. Kirk and McCoy have already viewed the simulation tape. Carol has lived through creating the Genesis Cave on Regula. But this is something beyond their imaginings.

The torpedo was meant to transform the surface of a totally lifeless planet, and we were shown its power early in the movie but... Khan detonated it inside a nebula instead. So it's not going to react in the standard way the demo tape showed us. Perhaps boosted by the warp drive explosion of Reliant (and David's protomatter, as we discover in ST III), the device draws in particles from the nebula itself and creates a whole planet instead. This was an unexpected event, and the device works better than its creators had a right to imagine. But we do see their reactions.

How is that "lazy writing"? The script throws us a curve ball during the climax.

Were you expecting the torpedo to travel to the surface of a planet instead, and simply repeat what we saw on the demo tape? Or just transform the inside of Reliant? Or someone to stamp out the fuse at the last moment?

 

[Christopher]

It just doesn't make any sense that a piece of technology specifically programmed to transform an existing planet surface would be able to do something totally different like assembling a whole new planet out of space dust. That's like expecting a word processor program to be capable of computer animation. It's asking it to do something fundamentally different from what it was programmed to do. It's more magic than science.

More realistically, the Genesis torpedo would've just tried to run its preset programs for transforming existing planetary matter and simply fizzled out because it didn't have enough matter in range to draw upon. A program receiving the wrong input will simply not give a viable output. It won't spontaneously rewrite itself to cope with an unanticipated input.

Were you expecting the torpedo to travel to the surface of a planet instead, and simply repeat what we saw on the demo tape? Or just transform the inside of Reliant? Or someone to stamp out the fuse at the last moment?

What I was expecting, having read the novelization before seeing the movie, was that the Genesis torpedo would be a massive, missile-sized device, something big enough that it could plausibly contain sufficient power to transform matter on a planetary scale. When I finally saw the film and discovered that it was this dinky little thing, I found it ridiculous.

 

[Maurice]

Torpedo explodes/detonated and sends out shockwave...converts all matter in nebula into Genesis-stuff, then it all has to magically get sucked back to a central point...the opposite direction of aforementioned shockwave.

Ah, hurm...










Bullshit.

 

[Mark 2000]

Were you expecting the torpedo to travel to the surface of a planet instead, and simply repeat what we saw on the demo tape? Or just transform the inside of Reliant? Or someone to stamp out the fuse at the last moment?

Eh, I guess you've convinced me. A magic bullet is a magic bullet, so who's to say what it can do. Except that they did say what it could do and then they pushed it way passed its limits. I'm assuming that a device like that needs to be programmed to do specific things like convert what is there and turn it into something else. I have a hard time believing the programming of this device would know how to turn dust into a condensed molten ball with a crust and atmosphere that it was expecting to be there already.

So I'll give you that it's a good dramatic twist, but it falls in with so many other logic holes - Spock having to fix the engines, the Reliant finding the wrong planet, the eel selectively not killing Chekov - in the movie that I can't give it a chance anymore. It's a "fool me once" kind of thing.

 

[Mr Silver]

So I'll give you that it's a good dramatic twist, but it falls in with so many other logic holes - Spock having to fix the engines,

Well it seemed that Spock was the only person onboard who knew how to jury rig the engines and who could survive in that environment long enough to do so.

the Reliant finding the wrong planet,

Khan did say that Ceti Alpha VI's explosion caused a shift in orbit, it could be that each planet realigned in the order of the last to compensate. Maybe a dwarf planet also became entangled in the Orbit and Reliant, carrying outdated star charts couldn't tell the difference?

the eel selectively not killing Chekov

Who says that the Ceti Eel had to be fatal in all cases? Khan said it killed some of his people, some could still be alive. Maybe the Eel didn't like Chekov's body and left to find another host? Its not unheard of for parasitic creatures to leave the body because the host "isn't for them". Besides McCoy was on hand to deliver medical treatment once the Eel had left, that can't be said for Khan and his followers.

 

[Mark 2000]

Well it seemed that Spock was the only person onboard who knew how to jury rig the engines and who could survive in that environment long enough to do so.

No, it seemed like Spock was the only one willing the fix the engines. That's the way the movie presents it. Scotty is literally pretending to be passed out on the floor. Everyone else is standing around with their thumbs up their asses. When Spock goes in everybody is screaming at him to get out. It's like risking one guy to go in to do an obvious job in a room that serves no logical purpose and dying is worse than the whole ship going boom. You know those suits those guys are all wearing? Put a helmet on them and they're radiation proof. That's why Spock puts the the Stay-Puff marshmellow gloves on.

And then, as a final screw you, all the dangerous radiation filling up all of engineering and making Scotty "pass out" disappears except in the room Spock is in.

Khan did say that Ceti Alpha VI's explosion caused a shift in orbit, it could be that each planet realigned in the order of the last to compensate. Maybe a dwarf planet also became entangled in the Orbit and Reliant, carrying outdated star charts couldn't tell the difference?

Discussed this above. No way a star ship's long range scanners would not recognize a change in a system that's this well charted as to have two of its planet's environments well known.

Who says that the Ceti Eel had to be fatal in all cases? Khan said it killed some of his people, some could still be alive.

I have a problem believing McCoy was able to do on the spot brain repair on Chekov considering the thing was crushing his cerebral cortex.

 

[Mr Silver]

It isn't shown on screen, but I assume that Scotty went into the reactor room in order to "take the mains offline". What killed Spock was likely the massive buildup of ionized radiation that was released when he opened the access tube. Even if the suits could protect against the levels of radiation that Spock was exposed to, its not like he had time to put one on. Most of the engineering personnel were killed or injured in the earlier attacks and the remainder was made up predominantly of cadets. Scotty was sick from radiation exposure and therefore Spock was the only person around with knowledge about how to fix the problem. Despite the fact Scotty recovered, he probably realised that putting a helmet and gloves on and entering the chamber to pull Spock out and finish the job himself wouldn't matter, he'd still be exposing himself to a lethal amount of radiation (and flooding engineering).

Well the Ceti Alpha thing is pretty much a confirmed plot error (along with Khan recognising Chekov). You've just got to assume that whatever happened to Ceti Alpha VI, screwed things up for the rest of the system. Failing that, the Reliant could have just been experiencing some technical difficulties.

As for Chekov. I'm not saying McCoy performer "on the spot brain repair". I'm saying that he had a surgeon with him to monitor his condition. When they returned to the Enterprise, Chekov went straight to sickbay and was likely sorted out there, before he returned to duty.

 

[Christopher]

Well it seemed that Spock was the only person onboard who knew how to jury rig the engines and who could survive in that environment long enough to do so.

And how does it make sense that he was the only person on board with engineering knowledge, when there were dozens of engineers onboard? Okay, granted, most of them aside from Scotty were cadets, but even so, it's unlikely that the only qualified engineer on the ship other than Scotty was the science officer up on the bridge. And why couldn't an engineer get into a radiation suit in the same amount of time it took Spock to climb down 13 decks' worth of gangways? I mean, once Spock got to engineering, we saw that Scotty and various extras were already wearing radiation suits, just without helmets. It should've taken very little time to don a helmet and go in to make the necessary repairs. (EDIT: Okay, Captain M posted a decent analysis in the post above while I was writing this, but it's still a very contrived situation.)

Khan did say that Ceti Alpha VI's explosion caused a shift in orbit, it could be that each planet realigned in the order of the last to compensate.

That would be a complete physical impossibility. There's simply no way it could happen like that; orbital dynamics just don't work that way. You can't just "push" one planet into another planet's orbit with a single explosion; it would require extensive and complex maneuvering to decelerate a body out of one orbit and then adjust its course to match a lower orbit. A single push would just knock it into a more eccentric orbit. And of course the different planets in a system would be arranged all around the star in various directions, and would be affected in different ways by any gravitational perturbations, with the more distant or more massive ones feeling very little effect.

And of course the planets wouldn't be identical so it should be easy to tell which planet is which regardless of orbit. Not to mention that, again, there are no horizons in space, so astronomers in other star systems should've been able to detect the cataclysm in the Ceti Alpha system. The Federation should've already known about the change.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Maybe the Eel didn't like Chekov's body and left to find another host?

On opening night, when Chekov's eel oozed out, a friend said, too loudly, "Couldn't find his brain."

 

[Unicron]