Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

== Synopsis ==

Overall, this movie was...not very good. I was struggling to finish it, but I powered through just so I could do a write up. You’re welcome.

So, we pick up where Star Trek II left off, with a long replay of Spock’s dying scene where he and Kirk share a bro moment and then they torpedo his dead body off to the new Genesis planet. Kirk is still devastated, he’s crazy missing his Vulcan brother from a human mother, but he brings the Enterprise back to home base for repairs post-Khan battle.

As the Enterprise pulls into home base, they pass a humongous new ship with the latest in starfleet technology (which hopefully means technology that prevents others from taking over the ship just by using a simple code, amiright?) So you get this scene of the war-worn Enterprise next to the shiny new vessel, and you’re like damn, son. kinda like a G1 brick sitting next to an HTC One.

This is all setting up for the moment when they tell Kirk and team the Enterprise is being retired. Kirk’s all like, hell no, we just need some repairs, and they’re like

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...and this is where I left off on June 5th at 9:57pm (according to my draft revision history). I can’t remember enough about the movie to finish the write up, but I do remember that I was NOT a fan of ST3. Bits and pieces are starting to come back to me and dear god, I can’t watch it again. Not even for the integrity of this blog. I just can’t.

but like a diligent, responsible blogger, I took notes during the movie:

- recap blue box
- kirk sad. miss you dude.
- valkris bad eyebrow shaping
- doc from BTTF green ship
- damn look at that other ship
- Japanese crackers
- tarantula face

unfortunately, unlike a diligent, responsible blogger, my notes make no sense. I literally have no idea what they could mean. zero. japanese crackers and tarantula face?? wtf.

so that’s it, I’m calling it for this post. I just needed to purge myself of the Star Trek III guilt so I can get to the whales. yesss.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

== Synopsis ==

The movie opens and Rebecca from Cheers is in the captain’s seat, facing certain death and emotional trauma via the Kobayashi (sp?) test. [side note: is it “Kobayashi”? or am I thinking of the hot dog eating champion?] Kirk’s running the training - he’s semi-retired from action, reliving his glory days by being a living reminder to all that he’s the only one that has ever passed the Kobayashi test. By cheating, but I guess that’s a technicality.

Then the movie drags on...for a while. I was a little bored and distracted so I missed most of the details in the first half. But from what I can gather, Kirk’s living a comfortable life but people are pressuring him to get back into action. But he’s like dude, let me live in this very beige house with random guns on the wall.

[side note: none of his furniture is facing the floor to ceiling windows and the view. what’s up with that?]

Anyways, he and other folks from the original crew head out to the Enterprise to check up on the training class. Other stuff may have happened, but this is when I started tuning in again. As they were heading out, the OG were like, hey we should just stay, and Kirk was like, let it go.

In the meantime, two starfleet guys are out doing something, somewhere. While they’re out doing that thing in that place, they run into Khan. A man with distinct bangs and very prominent cleavage.

There’s this very drawn out scene when Khan takes off his gloves and his head scarf to reveal his glorious bangs and pectoral area. I think they were going for scary and menacing but all I could think was BANGS and BOOBS. total glamour shot.

So Kahn is clearly someone to be feared. One of the dudes that was captured has an accent is terrified of him, despite the fact Khan comes with a very Conan-esque posse. Kahn puts bugs into both dudes’ ears which allows him to control them. He makes them reach out to a research ship and tells them they have orders to pick up their super secret project. Basically “we’re going to swing by, could you have it ready, kthxbai.” 

This angers and confuses the research group, which is headed up by a middle-aged blonde lady and her twenty-something son. They’ve been working on this thing forever and don’t want to give it up so they challenge the request. After learning that James T. Kirk issued the orders, the son is outraged. Clearly he has some issues with Kirk. Or with life in general.

So, the researches reach out to Enterprise and are like wtf, what are you doing. But they run into video conference errors and they can’t hear what Kirk is saying. #shouldhaveusedhangouts

This write up is taking forever, so I’m going to try to speed this up. Basically the thing Khan wants is Genesis, some sort of tool that creates life out of non-living things. Or grows things from nothing. I can’t really tell. I just know that Khan wants it bad. The woman researcher devoted her life to this thing and is like, hell no, but she can’t really do anything about it. Kirk swings by in the Enterprise to help her but in the process of boarding the research ship, Khan beams the Genesis away and is like psych, muahahaa. The two dudes that Khan controlled are on the research ship too - one of them kills himself so he doesn’t murder Kirk and the other one with the accent sort of ejected the bug from his ear.

Oh and I’m skipping over the sub-storyline of how the researcher’s son was apparently Kirk’s son. There were clear father-son issues going on but I don’t think it was too important to the rest of the movie.

Anyways, Spock and Kirk use special secret code words to tell each other when the Enterprise would be able to pick the group from the research ship. Once they’re back on the Enterprise, a battle starts with the Khan’s ship. Spock punches in a code that gives him control of Khan’s ship. He then lowers Khan’s shield and fires torpedoes at all the right places. Khan’s injured and defeated, except you can’t keep a man with blonde bangs down for long. He crawls over and turns on Genesis.

Kirk is like oh dudes, we be out, and tells everyone to get the Enterprise out of there. However, they can’t turn on warp speed since the Enterprise is damaged from the battle. So they start to slowly lumber off and Khan is like, the fools. Spock decides to enter the radiation room to fix the thing that allows them to go into warp drive. Since everything in Star Trek seems to have a countdown coded into it, the Genesis’s timer is closer and closer to hitting zero as you watch Spock struggle to fix the warp speed thing. Then boom, the warp thing is fixed, and the Enterprise makes its escape just as the Genesis becomes a glorious explosion.

Kirk runs to the radiation room only to find Spock’s face melting off - they share a moment holding their hands up to each other via a glass wall. Then Spock dies. At this point I’m like, no he’s not dead. But you guys, he was dead.

They pack dead Spock in a torpedo and send him off into space where he conveniently lands on the lush green planet that was created post-Genesis explosion.

The End. 

== Questions ==

1) Why was it so easy to beam the Genesis away? Couldn’t anybody just do that at any time, from anywhere? If it was so secret and valuable, why was it just sitting there, beamable?

2) Why did they take Rebecca from Cheers down with them when they had a choice of all the other experienced OG Enterprise people? Wasn’t she just in training?

3) Why do the guys wear flat boots but the girls still have to wear boots with heels? What’s with that, The Future?

4) How could the dude with the accent just eject the bug from his ear? HOW DID THAT JUST HAPPEN?

5) How did Spock control the other ship just by punching in a code? That seems like...anti-security.

6) So I’m assuming Spock comes to life in a later movie, since he can’t just be dead. So does everything on that planet become a living thing? if so, what does the torpedo casing turn into?

7) Did the son know the whole time that Kirk was his dad? If not, I missed when he was told. Is that why he was so mad when he found out Kirk gave the orders?

8) Why was Khan so full of wrath? I think I missed that part.

* I originally titled this “Star Trek: The Return of Khan” since I thought that was the movie title. Wrath is better.
** Bryce: “I don’t even know when this movie came out, I don’t think I was born yet. Yeah, it was 1982, I wasn’t born yet.”
*** Eff you, Bryce.