You know, I feel like the big thing I've seen people miss in discussions of The Wrath of Khan over the last few years is that the reason it works thematically is because it's a deconstruction of a lot of the assumptions underpinning the original series.
Like, fundamentally TOS is a product of its times in a lot of ways. Because TV was made for syndication, shows usually had to be made so that you can see the episodes in any order. They couldn't do too much serialisation like shows do today because people weren't always going to see every episode in order, and there were usually going to be episodes they just didn't see until they randomly caught a rerun ten or fifteen years after the fact.
That's why for the most part, when the Enterprise leaves a planet behind at warp speed at the end of an episode, that's the last you ever hear about it until you see the episode again. There's a couple of exceptions to this, but that is more or less how TOS works for the most part.
I know that there'll probably be a few people reading this who go, "What about Tarsus IV? What about this from the novels?" and so on, but we're talking about the show here. The show was made as if Kirk could live a largely consequence free life because he'd warp away at the end of the episode, regardless of his actual characterisation and what later installments would add to that to help smooth over some of those rough edges.
So a lot of the thematic underpinning of The Wrath of Khan is that while TOS Kirk could live in this world where nothing he does really matters because he can run off and never think of that planet again at the end of the day, that isn't really how things go for people in real life. There's consequences, and sometimes you don't see the full extent of them until decades after the fact.
Khan specifically is there because while Kirk probably hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about him in the fifteen years since Space Seed, the reverse was true for Khan. It had to be because while for Kirk this had been just another Tuesday, for Khan, it'd been one of the unalterable turning points of his life.
Did it actually need to be Khan filling this role in the story? No, not really. You could have filled it with a few different characters and you could have told a very similar story, thematically speaking. Maybe Kor from Errand of Mercy or the Romulan commander from The Enterprise Incident had had a major fall from grace after their respective episodes and wanted to get back at Kirk for it, for example. Maybe Trelane or Charlie X still had a bone to pick.
But in some ways, that's the point. Kirk just about always had the option of just getting on with it, even if everyone he left behind at the end of an episode didn't. That's how television worked back then.
So the problem becomes how does he deal with having to face the consequences ten or fifteen years after the fact? Can he face it or can he only deal with problems if he's not the one who has to figure out the fallout later?
I mean, to some extent what prompted this post is that Angela Collier video where she makes her case for why she thinks The Wrath of Khan is a bad movie. I don't want to focus too much on her video specifically because this is part of a broader issue I have with some of the discussions on Khan and from what I can tell she is very familiar with the lore, but it is what prompted it.
Really my main issue is that a lot of her issues with the early part of the film serve a thematic purpose. They're not just there as part of the plot; they're also there because even before Khan takes over the Reliant, Kirk's sitting around mulling over whether he likes the consequences of the choices he's made recently, and the answer is no, he doesn't like that he took the promotion.
Still, this is a problem that a lot of people have had with interpreting Khan over the last decade or so. Most of the time when I've seen varying ideas of how to bring Khan back, it's been from people who clearly don't quite recognise the thematic purpose he played in The Wrath of Khan. This has even been a problem with people who'll agree that Into Darkness struggled partially because it brought back Khan in a context where none of the characters would have really known who he was, but also acted like they should have.
I think sometimes the hangup tends to be that people are thinking of Khan as the iconic Star Trek villain, when in reality it's The Wrath of Khan that made him that way, not Space Seed. If they'd put any other character in that lead antagonist role, he'd just be another TOS villain of the week. It's mostly that TWoK deconstructed that episodic nature of the original series so well (according to most people, anyway) that he became iconic.
Really, I feel like we're getting to the point where a really good deconstruction of Star Trek would probably now be going to the other extreme where the villain would be someone we've never heard of before. While the TOS assumption was that we'd probably never see this week's villain again for the most part, nowadays the assumption tends to be more that not only will we see them again, they'll be around for the entire season, even if it'd make more sense for them to be part of a one and done episode. You know, it'd be something like they spend the first couple of acts thinking the villain must be connected to a long time antagonist, only to find out in the final act that they're just some rando who gets off on causing problems.
