We're told that the last world war ever was also apparently in the Nineties, which is nice because the one I figured would be along any day now apparently never materializes. It's funny that I don't recall the world war we had in the 1990s, because that's the sort of thing I usually remember. Or maybe I was distracted by all the Lady Di coverage. She was a candle in the wind, you know.
Kirk orders historian Lt. MacGyver to come over to the derelict ship, and she comes over after she builds her own transporter from two rubber bands and a discarded popsicle stick.
The floating ship is called the Botany Bay, and there's a frozen chick onboard wrapped in bubble wrap so that she doesn't get damaged during shipping.
We learn that 2018 was when warp travel will be invented, and this sentence is grammatically correct even though it isn't.
There are other people on the Botany Bay wrapped in bubble wrap, and the landing party finds Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island in one of the giant fish tanks but, sadly, Tattoo isn't in a little fishbowl on the floor next to him.
Ricardo Montalban is Mexican, and historian Lt. MacGyver identifies him as Indian and says that Sikhs were the best warriors of that age, proving in the first five minutes of the show that history isn't really her strong suit. Maybe she'll be better at...oh, I don't know -- just off the top of my head -- mutiny, maybe? We'll just have to wait and see.
Lt. MacGyver, who has cut off her 1980s mullet, says that Ricardo Montalban is "magnificent" and drools all over his fish tank. No, she definitely won't be a problem later on.
Ricardo Montalban actually was magnificent. He sent me a whole bunch of autographs to give to family and friends just before Christmas many years ago. This doesn't have anything to do with this week's episode, he was just a very nice man.
Scotty does a scan and says that 72 of the people are alive and that 30 are women. What the crap difference does that make? Did he count 60 knobs and divide by two?
Ricardo Montalban, who is Mexican, is named Khan and apparently isn't Mexican after all. Boy, is my face is red, which means Lt. MacGyver would probably identify pasty Irish me as an Apache. How, kemosabe.
Khan is brought over to sickbay on the Enterprise where Bones has a whole bunch of butcher knives hanging all over the wall. I'm not sure why, since the only surgery he ever seems to do involves floating a transistor radio over a patient's chest while it goes woobidy-woobidy-woobidy. (The transistor radio, not the patient.) Khan wakes up and grabs one of the convenient knives hanging on the wall and threatens Bones with it. I never saw that coming.
Kirk comes in after Khan doesn't O.J. Bones, but Khan won't answer questions because he says he's too sleepy. So Kirk leaves him to nap, but not before opening up the ship's library to him and letting him read every possible technical manual and yellow schematic cracker he can lay his hands on, including How to Take Over Starships for Megalomaniacal Dummies. Just like with the knives hanging on the wall in sickbay, I see no problems that could possibly come of this.
Bones says that Kirk felt Khan's magnetism. I hope that doesn't mean what I think it means, or hornball Kirk finally has crossed the final frontier.
In Star Trek in 1993, genetically superior supermen seized power in forty nations. In real life in 1993, flabby genetic messes Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and Helmut Kohl were busy seizing interns, booze bottles, loose cash, and everything they could grab from the dessert trolley.
That history dame shows up in sickbay and brings her sexy Lauren Bacall lighting with her. Khan fusses with her hair and says it should be "soft, natural, simple." Then he teases it, sets it and sticks her under the hair dryer for forty minutes while he does her nails and dishes all the latest hot celeb gossip.
An interesting monster should have an interesting hairdo.
Khan makes out with MacGyver then goes to a party where he drinks some blue booze and lets it slip to everybody that he's a maniacal, bloodthirsty dictator from Earth's history. In blue booze, veritas.
Back in his quarters, Khan tosses lady MacGyver around, squeezes her hand and tells her he's going to take over the ship. She says okay, which is exactly why I always say dames should be home in the kitchen baking futuristic pies and not serving in Starfleet. I'm calling my space congressman.
Kirk looks at Khan's yearbook photo, or maybe it's his mugshot from when he was picked up for public urination on West Cow Street in New Delhi after punching that snake charmer in the throat.
Apparently from 1992 to 1994 Khan controlled one-quarter of the Earth. You now, I really swear I'd remember all this. Or maybe I was just too wrapped up in who killed Laura Palmer to have paid enough attention to all these big world events.
There are no clothes on the entire Enterprise other than Starfleet uniforms, so they stick Khan in one even though he came aboard wearing his own clothes. It's just like how in real life the Navy is always picking up those bedraggled guys with the long beards on the homemade rafts that look like they've escaped from a Sergio Aragones comic in Mad magazine and dressing them up like Admiral Nimitz.
They also put only one balding guard outside Hitler's door, so naturally the story ends here because Khan clearly will be stuck inside for the rest of the episode because how on earth could a brilliant genetic superman beat the crap out of Elmer Fudd and escape?
Uhura REALLY should wear pants.
In a shocking plot twist, Khan escapes and takes over the ship. He shuts off all the power to the bridge, and since it didn't occur to Starfleet's genius engineers to install an emergency beamer, spiral staircase or even a rope ladder even though the ship gets taken over and the bridge locked up every third episode, Kirk and everybody else passes out.
Khan tells Spock and all the others to join him, and to prove he means business he sticks Kirk in the washing machine.
Everybody is in a conference room watching Kirk on the rinse cycle on TV, and the history dame says she doesn't like that program and since Khan won't give her the remote control to switch over to a Valerie Bertinelli movie on Lifetime, she says she's going to stay with her mother and leaves. Of course brilliant Khan doesn't suspect that she ran out of the room at that precise moment in order to save Kirk before the spin cycle kicks in, because he implicitly trusts her since it's not like she arbitrarily switched loyalties to anybody else in the past forty-five minutes.
The TV in the conference room mysteriously switches off a minute after history dame MacGyver leaves the room, but no one finds it suspicious because they are so distracted by Uhura's hammy, horribly acted overreaction to Khan's announcement that Kirk is dead, which is probably the absolute worst bit of acting in the entire history of the Star Trek franchise including everything from the guy who played the robot every time he tried to act like anything other than a robot in the New Generation series.
The dame lets Kirk out of the washing machine and he puts a stink bomb in the vents, and everybody passes out except Scotty, Spock and Khan. So with an escaped lunatic running around the ship naturally Scotty announces to Spock over the supermarket intercom that store manager Kirk is on his way to the produce department to grab the Mexican Sikh who's eating all the grapes without paying for them.
In engineering, Khan jumps out and tells Kirk that he has five times Kirk's strength. He takes Kirk's phaser and crushes it in his bare hands, proving how crazy he really is since a genuine Original Series phaser would bring in a fortune on eBay.
Kirk's and Khan's stunt doubles fight, and Kirk's stunt double would surely have lost if not for the fact that engineering consoles in the future have enormous plastic clubs built into them that you can pull out and beat the hell out of people with, so at least Starfleet's engineers got one thing right.
Kirk decides to maroon Khan and his followers, including the mutinous history chick who I'm not sure is that other MacGyver after all, on a planet where they can live in the dust storms and get bugs in their ears, and Khan says that'd be just swell. Also, Scotty's accent briefly disappears. Maybe he was thinking back to the thirty unconscious dames he was fondling as he was counting all sixty of them back at the beginning of the episode.
Spock says it would be interesting to revisit Khan's new planet in another 100 years. Say, this gives me an idea. This was a pretty okay episode. If they ever decide to make Star Trek movies in the way-off distant future of the 1980s, they could make a movie sequel of this one episode and then milk all the various plot elements from that sequel to death from about 1994 to 2013 and probably beyond, but with each subsequent entry making less sense, utilizing increasingly louder explosions and marginalizing Dr. McCoy's character so they can pack in more nuded-up broads. That'd be cool, dude.
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