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I guess this is a Star Trek blog nao?
May. 31st, 2013 05:07 pmJ/K
Anyway, gave Space Seed a rewatch--you know, the TOS episode that introduced Khan and thus paved the way for every other Star Trek movie to rip him off. And I gotta say, I'm more disappointed in Star Trek Into Darkness than ever. It's important to note that SS!Khan is a very different character than WOK!Khan. WOK!Khan spent DECADES watching his loved ones die horrible deaths and blaming it on Kirk. What STID tries to do is turn SS!Khan into WOK!Khan in about five minutes, even though he suffered far less (having his 'family' held hostage and forced to work for da bad guys).
And the shame is that SS!Khan is a very rich, nuanced character. In my review, I referred to him as Space Hitler--that was from not having seen SS in years. In the episode, he's treated more as a Julius Caesar or (sigh, nerd alert) Dr. Doom character. More of a benevolent dictator than anything else. There's a great scene where Spock acts as social justice blog, decrying all the bad he did (such as curtailing freedoms), while Kirk and the humans point out that he didn't start any wars and was "the best" of the Augments. They don't approve of him, but they do admire him.
This all makes Kirk's choice at the end of the episode especially poignant. Even though he has no reason to show mercy to Khan, he acts compassionately in stranding Khan on an uninhabited world where he can empire-build to his heart's content. It seems a very fair balance between punishment and rehabilitation, and is one that Khan himself accepts graciously.
Skip forward to STID and Khan is no longer a semi-admirable conqueror-figure. He's a war criminal fleeing a death sentence who is even guilty of ethnic cleansing! The original Khan simply wanted to rule the world because it was such a mess, like Dr. Horrible. Nu!Khan is more like Captain Hammer.
Oh, and all this in service to a post-9/11 story about freedom vs. security. Well, that was the whole damn point of Khan's character. He wanted to completely secure the Earth by destroying freedom, but Abrams totally missed that to make him Osama bin Laden! It's an entirely different character in the movie who values order over everything else, leaving Khan a simple genocidal madman.
Here's your plot--war is brewing between Earth and Klingons. A human border world has gone dark, so Kirk and crew go out to investigate. They find that Khan and his men have taken over, promising to protect the colonists from the Klingons, and are carrying out badass commando raids on the Klingons to sew discord and commandeer weapons of war. Kirk has to stop him and convince the colonists that this kind of war-mongering is a bad thing. Throw in Marcus's nogoodnikness as necessary.
By the way, to note the ethnic angle, here's where the old show was especially canny. I don't believe they were making a statement that Sikh Indians were genetically superior, just that they were presenting a genetically superior character and avoiding any unintentional controversy by making him white. Which was very smart, because imagine this scene.
White Khan: I am better than all other races.
Kirk: No you aren't, white people are no better than any other race.
White Khan: Actually, technically I am.
Kirk: Oh, right. So glad we're decrying racism at the same time we're holding it up as accurate.
What the show did, in effect, was to create an entirely new ethnicity--that of the Augments, who are canonically stated to be comprised of multiple races--and then have them say they were superior to everyone else and should be in charge. Here's the really smart part--the show does this just to tear them down. "Yes," it says, "here's a race that is just like racists claim their own to be. One that's superior to every other race. But guess what? That still doesn't give them the right to push everyone else around."
P.S. Apparently if you go into the Khan tag on tumblr, there are arguments that Singh is a Sikh name and that's a religion, therefore = white guy.
...
EVEN IF THAT WERE THE CASE, THAT WOULD JUST MEAN KHAN WAS MEXICAN INSTEAD OF INDIAN SINCE THAT'S THE ETHNICITY OF THE ORIGINAL ACTOR!!! THINK, MCFLY, THINK!!! If George Takei's character had been named "John Bowler," should they have recast that character with Sylvester Stallone just because he didn't have a explicitly Asian name?
P.P.S. I never got the complaint in TWOK that no one noticed Ceti Alpha 6 exploding and damaging Ceti Alpha 5's ecosystem. It seems clear to me that Kirk made a note in his log, even if it were just something along the lines of "Watch out for this planet, full of crazy but honorable supermen." And then some paperwork snafu had it fall through the cracks, so the usual Starfleet protocol of "an inhabited planet is in danger, let's send some guys to help" didn't happen. To quote another great work of science fiction, "Even in the future nothing works!"
Anyway, gave Space Seed a rewatch--you know, the TOS episode that introduced Khan and thus paved the way for every other Star Trek movie to rip him off. And I gotta say, I'm more disappointed in Star Trek Into Darkness than ever. It's important to note that SS!Khan is a very different character than WOK!Khan. WOK!Khan spent DECADES watching his loved ones die horrible deaths and blaming it on Kirk. What STID tries to do is turn SS!Khan into WOK!Khan in about five minutes, even though he suffered far less (having his 'family' held hostage and forced to work for da bad guys).
And the shame is that SS!Khan is a very rich, nuanced character. In my review, I referred to him as Space Hitler--that was from not having seen SS in years. In the episode, he's treated more as a Julius Caesar or (sigh, nerd alert) Dr. Doom character. More of a benevolent dictator than anything else. There's a great scene where Spock acts as social justice blog, decrying all the bad he did (such as curtailing freedoms), while Kirk and the humans point out that he didn't start any wars and was "the best" of the Augments. They don't approve of him, but they do admire him.
This all makes Kirk's choice at the end of the episode especially poignant. Even though he has no reason to show mercy to Khan, he acts compassionately in stranding Khan on an uninhabited world where he can empire-build to his heart's content. It seems a very fair balance between punishment and rehabilitation, and is one that Khan himself accepts graciously.
Skip forward to STID and Khan is no longer a semi-admirable conqueror-figure. He's a war criminal fleeing a death sentence who is even guilty of ethnic cleansing! The original Khan simply wanted to rule the world because it was such a mess, like Dr. Horrible. Nu!Khan is more like Captain Hammer.
Oh, and all this in service to a post-9/11 story about freedom vs. security. Well, that was the whole damn point of Khan's character. He wanted to completely secure the Earth by destroying freedom, but Abrams totally missed that to make him Osama bin Laden! It's an entirely different character in the movie who values order over everything else, leaving Khan a simple genocidal madman.
Here's your plot--war is brewing between Earth and Klingons. A human border world has gone dark, so Kirk and crew go out to investigate. They find that Khan and his men have taken over, promising to protect the colonists from the Klingons, and are carrying out badass commando raids on the Klingons to sew discord and commandeer weapons of war. Kirk has to stop him and convince the colonists that this kind of war-mongering is a bad thing. Throw in Marcus's nogoodnikness as necessary.
By the way, to note the ethnic angle, here's where the old show was especially canny. I don't believe they were making a statement that Sikh Indians were genetically superior, just that they were presenting a genetically superior character and avoiding any unintentional controversy by making him white. Which was very smart, because imagine this scene.
White Khan: I am better than all other races.
Kirk: No you aren't, white people are no better than any other race.
White Khan: Actually, technically I am.
Kirk: Oh, right. So glad we're decrying racism at the same time we're holding it up as accurate.
What the show did, in effect, was to create an entirely new ethnicity--that of the Augments, who are canonically stated to be comprised of multiple races--and then have them say they were superior to everyone else and should be in charge. Here's the really smart part--the show does this just to tear them down. "Yes," it says, "here's a race that is just like racists claim their own to be. One that's superior to every other race. But guess what? That still doesn't give them the right to push everyone else around."
P.S. Apparently if you go into the Khan tag on tumblr, there are arguments that Singh is a Sikh name and that's a religion, therefore = white guy.
...
EVEN IF THAT WERE THE CASE, THAT WOULD JUST MEAN KHAN WAS MEXICAN INSTEAD OF INDIAN SINCE THAT'S THE ETHNICITY OF THE ORIGINAL ACTOR!!! THINK, MCFLY, THINK!!! If George Takei's character had been named "John Bowler," should they have recast that character with Sylvester Stallone just because he didn't have a explicitly Asian name?
P.P.S. I never got the complaint in TWOK that no one noticed Ceti Alpha 6 exploding and damaging Ceti Alpha 5's ecosystem. It seems clear to me that Kirk made a note in his log, even if it were just something along the lines of "Watch out for this planet, full of crazy but honorable supermen." And then some paperwork snafu had it fall through the cracks, so the usual Starfleet protocol of "an inhabited planet is in danger, let's send some guys to help" didn't happen. To quote another great work of science fiction, "Even in the future nothing works!"
