#god there is so much mcguyvering going on in this guy

[invinciblerodent]

he's finally done :)

bonus progress picture that almost made me cry with laughter under the cut

look at this wretched old man

[seriousfic]

Space Seed

Watching the original Star Trek with my dad, we came to this episode, and it reminded me of how much I really dislike everything about Into Darkness’s portrayal of Khan.

-It’s a nice touch that Kirk’s defeat of Khan here hinges on ‘cheating’--instead of getting beat down by a guy with five times his strength, he brings out a lead pipe and gives him the ol’ Brooklyn Welcome. Fast-forward to TWOK and Kirk similarly ‘changing the rules’ will be a huge theme. 

-Ricardo Montalban sells the hell out of him and Kirk being in a battle of wits, but really, Kirk ferrets out who he is by basically going “those Augments, huh? Weren’t they a bunch of punk-ass bitches?” and Khan goes “No, I heard that Khan Noonian Singh had an eight-pack. That Khan was shredded.” 

-That kind of brings us to Khan’s race. The character is explicitly identified as an Indian, but he’s played by a Hispanic man, in line with the casting standards of the time. I always figured if you wanted to get technical with a Watsonian explanation, we could just say that though he’s literally descended from Sikhs, the genetic engineering that made him used so much Hispanic DNA that he’s effectively mixed-race, though he still identifies as an Indian man. I imagine we could debate all day over whether STID should’ve compounded the ‘error’ by casting another Hispanic man, or ‘corrected’ it by casting an Indian, but either way, I feel like going the colorblind casting route and making him an inoffensive British villain was a huge misstep. There are lots of other problems with STID’s portrayal, but the whole thing there is getting off on the wrong foot.

-As well, Khan is supposed to be a somewhat honorable, antiheroic, benevolent dictator figure. Sort of like the more sympathetic portrayals of Doctor Doom. This all goes out the window with Quinto!Spock stating that Benedict Khanberbatch intends to enact ethnic cleansing on all non-Augmented humans (!). This is basically completely opposite of the character in Space Seed and even TWOK, which means that the makers of a two hundred million dollar movie couldn’t be bothered to keep in continuity with three hours of film. 

-I mean, Kirk and the others specifically mention that Khan enacted “no massacres” and started no wars. The worst you could say of him was that he was apparently a major “security over freedom” type (which you’d think a big 9/11 analogy like STID would do something with). He was apparently quite sincere in trying to recruit the Enterprise crew to follow him, and in taking McGuyvers as his wife--all of them unAugmented. 

-The superstrength in STID I don’t mind so much, since Spock and Khan are both established in TOS to have superhuman strength and I’m sure if they had the production value to display that at the time, they would’ve. 

-The thing of Khan being awoken and him instantly turning into some master starship designer cum weapons developer, despite having been in a freezer for two hundred years, still strikes me as really stupid--the Villain Sue lazy storytelling equivalent of Rey blinking and becoming a Jedi Knight. True, Khan is a quick study in Space Seed, and able to take over the ship, but a key plot point is that he still needs the Enterprise crew to work it--if he were such a Reed Richards genius, and so were all his Augments, you’d think he could just have all of them study up and then crew the Enterprise themselves. (Of course, maybe he’s just softhearted and doesn’t want to eliminate the Starfleet personnel unless he absolutely has to, but then that goes right back to him supposedly being a genocidal maniac in STID.) The impression I got from Khan here, and Bashir in DS9, was that augmentation could make you a really, really good member of your chosen profession, but not some kind of God of Intelligence who could build a time machine out of two balls of yarn and some skis. 

-It must be said that Khan’s sartorial choices are apparently coveralls for all the dudes in his crew and fishnet bodystocking/bikini combos for all the ladies, so maybe he is a superior man after all.

No wonder Kirk admired him so much.