Daily Dialogue — July 17, 2014
INT. ROCKY CAVERN
KIRK: Khan, you have Genesis, but you don’t have me. You were going to kill me, Khan. You’re going to have to come down. You’re going to have to come here!
INT. RELIANT BRIDGE
KHAN: I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you, as you left me — as you left her: marooned for eternity in the centre of a dead planet — buried alive.
KIRK: Khan — !
— Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (1982), screenplay by Jack B. Sowards, story by Harve Bennett and Jack B. Sowards, television series by Gene Roddenberry
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Revenge. Today’s suggestion by noirdreams1941.
Trivia: Producer Harve Bennett viewed all the original Star Trek (1966) episodes and chose Star Trek: Space Seed (1967) as the best candidate for a sequel. Spock even remarks in the script that it would be interesting to return in a hundred years or so to see what type of civilization had grown there. This is the first time a movie was made as a sequel to a specific television show episode.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by noirdreams1941: “Khan may have been thwarted this time but his response ratchets up his malevolence and commitment to seeking-‘n’-destroying Kirk.
In the TV series Kirk had gone through all manner of moods, in battle, in different dimensions, intoxicated, but the much-lampooned “Khhaaaaan!” burst of rage and frustration is a great emotional punctation at the end of the scene. It ramps up the stakes and showed that our hero, tired, feeling old (we didn’t know then that umpteen sequels would follow), having just met up with his old flame and nearly decked his estranged son, with an intellectually and physically superior ghost from his past hunting him down, was emotionally nearing the ropes at that point. The locations help accentuate this: Kirk and co are subterranean and hunkered down, Khan’s scooting around the planet in control of a pirated spaceship. (And I still like it a whole lot better than the riff/rip-off switcheroo at the end of Into Darkness.)
Khan wants to punish Kirk for marooning him, for marooning Khan’s beloved wife and tribal family. This echoes Kirk’s own ‘marooning’ of his son David and Carol Marcus, David’s mother and how Kirk was feeling marooned from his old post and the Enterprise at the beginning of the film.”
If you have any suggestions for this week’s theme, please post in comments.
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