The character:	Khan Noonien Singh
The actor:	Ricardo Montalban
The movie:	Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

The most ludicrous thing that happens in The Wrath of Khan is that there’s a secret password in a secret Starfleet database that allows one ship to hack into another. It’s about as likely as the much maligned ability of a ’90s computer to upload a computer virus into an alien ship in Independence Day. Khan’s initial reaction to his shields going down is to order them raised again, but when he figures out that he has been double-crossed, he is confused. “Where’s the override?” he asks, blindly scanning for some anti-deus ex machina button on the bridge of the Reliant. Confusion is not much Khan’s forte. He is a genius, after all. It may well be that he hasn’t been so confused since he was picked up by the Enterprise in the original series. The point of being a genius is that it is hard to surprise you, hard to confuse you, as you are able to see all ends.

Aboard Federation starships, Khan’s genius is limited by his lack of understanding of the finer points of aerospace engineering in the 23rd Century. For all this, I am willing to believe that he does have “the superior intellect” to James T. Kirk. Khan has just enough ignorance for Kirk to return fire. (Kirk knows he got away with it, too: “I did nothing! Besides get caught with my britches down.”) Kirk, however, should have known better than to think that Ceti Alpha V could hold Khan forever, or that Ceti Alpha V would be immune to space cataclysm. Errors in judgment make Khan: eugenics, the suicide mission of Ceti Alpha VI. It is interesting, then, that his villainy is not really based in his totalitarian urges, as distasteful as those might be. The villainy of Khan is a function of his desire for revenge. The enemies of his younger years are long dead. He has only one target left that he can exert his strength against, and that’s Kirk.

In the Phantom of the Paradise post I did earlier in this series, I tacitly made clear that I’m okay with some mixed allusions in my movies as long as the sum of them is appropriately grandiose. Paradise Lost is in Wrath of Khan, and Moby-Dick, of course, which just has chunks of the novel grafted onto the screenplay, mad scientist-style. I’m fond of the Moby-Dick stuff in this movie, because sticking Ahab’s pegleg somewhere beneath Khan’s bare breast (Khan definitely has BPE, the rarely seen but profoundly powerful “big pegleg energy”) helps us to make sense of who Khan is. An even slightly rational man would listen to his protege when he says that there is nothing left for Khan to prove. They have the starship. Khan has proven himself superior. They may go where they like. Why not leave Kirk alone? “He tasks me,” Khan hisses. Joachim is right; they’re on a pretty low floor of the MLM of galactic domination with just one ship, but Khan is brilliant and resourceful and psychotic.

A rational Khan might have some fun with the outlines of Joachim’s plan, but Khan, like so many of the greatest villains, is a fundamentally irrational guy. The flip side of Khan, down to the sci-fi trappings, is Star Wars’ Grand Admiral Thrawn. Thrawn is supposed to be intensely rational, and he is gassed up as a great genius…only for him to lose the majority of the battles he fights. Khan has no such strength as Thrawn, and so he makes so much more sense to us. The man who allows himself to be undone by his hamartia is as old as theater itself.