For the life of me I can’t find any of the threads I know damn well exist that are dedicated to this issue.
I watched the movie today. My opinion is, the yell is genuine anger with a subtext of fear, not because Kirk is sure he is doomed but knows he might be and really wished he could have cinched his escape on this occasion. He doesn’t know for a fact that the Enterprise will be all better. When he pulls out his communicator later on, with a dramatic “I knew it all along” flair, he wasn’t actually fully confident there would be an answer. He took a gamble.
Here’s a question…had Khan blown off Kirk instead of ‘He tasks me. He tasks me.’…and taken off with Reliant and Genesis, what would have been his next move?
Find an uncharted planet with a reasonably high amount of tech and enslaved it? Used Genesis as a threat to keep everyone away?
I mentioned the Khan yell in post 69 of this thread (which was generically about misunderstood plot points. My position was (and is) that it was a yell of genuine fury and I could not understand people who thought otherwise.
Some people who thought otherwise objected. I analyzed the sequence at length in post 123. This discussion got a tad snippy. I admit passive-aggressively contributing to this when I could have been more diplomatic, but I maintain the most obvious interpretation (Kirk was furious) is the correct one.
The matter was also discussed starting at #48 of this thread, which was about Wrath of Khan in general. This time, instead of just analyzing the sequence in the film, I went to the novelization in post 82 (such books are typically based on early versions of the film script and contain elements cut from the film) and there’s no indication whatsoever that Kirk is faking or exaggerating his anger. In lieu of some statement by Shatner or the film’s director or writer that fakery was the intent, I don’t see how it exists in anything other than some fans’ imaginations.
I don’t know why this particular topic annoys me so - possibly because TWOK is one of my favourite films.
By that scene, Reliant’s warp engines were down and it’s not clear that Khan or his gang, “superiority” notwithstanding, had the wherewithal to fix them, so short of rigging up something akin to the sleeper tubes they used on the original Botany Bay, Khan and crew aren’t going anywhere.
In this aspect, the original Space Seed episode made more sense - once seizing the Enterprise, Khan used the threat of slow execution to pressure the Starfleet crew to join his side, in recognition that even though he’d read enough of the technical manuals to stage his overthrow, he and his followers lacked the necessary training to actually operate the ship. Even assuming the more advanced Reliant was a lot more user-friendly (the equivalent of going from DOS to Windows, I guess), you have to fanwank a bit for Khan to be able to captain her effectively.
Though now that I think about it, he doesn’t, really. He disables the Enterprise with a sneak attack, and after that his inexperience bites him in the ass twice (not knowing about prefix codes, not understanding three-dimensional combat) and in neither case does Kirk have to resort to some NextGeneration-ish technobabble about depolarizing the deflector dish or creating a tachyon pulse or some such bullshit. In a normal engagement and even assuming the ships are equally capable, Kirk would have destroyed him handily.
Suck on that, “superior intellect!”
Incidentally, this is related to why Wesley Crusher irritated me, or at least one reason among several - his super-genius wasn’t sufficiently limited by simple lack of experience. I’d’ve liked to see a bit where he comes up with absurdly complicated solution to a problem only be curtly told to stop wasting time and just follow the procedure in Section 51B of the Starfleet Maintenance Manual - and then realizing the Manual’s solution is much better than his own. Right way, wrong way, Starfleet way.
That was one of the main points of the TOS Writer’s Guide: “Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry. Joe Friday doesn’t stop to explain the mechanics of his .38 before he uses it; Kildare never did a monologue about the theory of anaesthetics; Matt Dillon never identifies and discusses the breed of his horse before he rides off on it.”
This is one reason why for fans of TOS the later series suck in comparison.
Anytime I try to picture a moment of TOS techno babble, I picture either Scott crawling in a Jeffries tube or Spock saying “cross circuiting to B” during a problematic transport. In either case, a risky and possibly contraindicated emergency procedure, not just bullshit pseudophysics.
Kirk is supposed to be cool under fire, not lose his shit when what is effectively a minor inconvenience comes up. They aren’t trapped in a cave with no air - they could probably survive for months. And as far as Kirk knows, the Enterprise is proceeding under his plan. It’s not yet time to panic. But if the yell is an attempt to keep Khan from wondering what is actually happening, and using his superior intellect to realize Kirk is up to something, that makes sense.
Now, if Khan has told Kirk the Enterprise was definitely, well and truly destroyed, sent him the youtube video link of its destruction to back it up, then I could see Kirk yelling in frustration/anger.
This is the part of the film that really gets under on my nerves. They comment on how Khan doesn’t understand 3 dimensional combat, and then demonstrate that since the writers themselves don’t understand 3 dimensional combat, it looks like Starfleet doesn’t either. True 3 Dimensional combat would have had the Enterprise, while dropping down below the path of Reliant, simultaneously rotate around her lateral axis to point the photon torpedo tubes straight up. Then as Reliant passed over her, Enterprise could fire a full spread through the underside of her saucer and nacelles, utterly destroying her. But no, Enterprise has to come back up to the same plane to fire. HHHHHAAAAARRRRVVVVEEEEE! (Bennett) the writer.
Afterthought- I don’t recall Kirk ever getting really angry if a foe started gloating and/or taunting Kirk with evidence of his victory, though I’d have to mull it over. Possibly Kirk would suffer silently while hoping for a chance for personal and violent revenge a la Finnegan.
One of the only times we (briefly) see true 3D combat that I can recall is in the TNG finale., though this carries its own problems. In TOS, I can picture budget constraints on space battles such that the ship firing at Enterprise doesn’t even appear: it’s just some speck in the distance so there’s no need to orient the two ships in a pleasing-to-the-eye plane. Spaceships in combat close enough to each other that we can clearly see both at once is unrealistic anyway. Arguably the battle in TWOK called for it, with both ships crippled and limping through the nebula, weapons only accurate at close range, but even then, a ship the size of the Reliant or Enterprise is going to be a mere dot at 50 km. At times, it looks like these two massive ships are closer to each other than fighter jets in a dogfight.
It’s also unfortunately expositional that Spock has to point this out to Kirk in the first place. An experienced officer like Kirk should have already been using 3D tactics, just out of habit.
I still like the movie and the scene, though. The slow skulking was more dramatic than latter-day Trekships swinging around like Spitfires.
That’s one thing Star Trek and Star Wars have in common: their ideas of ship-to-ship combat were basically lifted straight out of old footage of WWII. Should Trek ever return to TV, I would love to see a show that actually put some thought into the mechanics of combat in space. For instance: given how smart self-guided weapons are even today, photon torpedoes should have such sophisticated tracking software that they would virtually never miss, so the only way for the target ship to avoid being hit would be to deploy some kind of countermeasure — either rapid phaser fire to shoot the weapon in flight or some 23rd-century equivalent of chaff to foul its guidance system.
…except when Mr. Spock tells Scotty - calling from the bridge to the transporter room - to “try inverse phasing.”
Of course, that’s just bad writing. The chief engineer, who’s right where the crisis is happening, would know a lot better than the science officer/2nd-in-command who’s not there, what emergency strategies to attempt.
I do not recall which episode has him in command with a Klingon sending fake distress calls. “Let’s see if he has the belly for it.” It is a shame that he was written as comic relief in the later films.