T.J. Hooker and Mr. Roarke walk into a bar. One is a cop and the other is a fantasy gameshow host. They have history, but don’t know that their greatest faceoff lies ahead of them. So Roarke says to Hooker, “Buried alive,” and Hooker goes, “Khhhhhaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn!” My pop culture fantasy abounds from there. Don’t you dare call it fan fiction. (It is.)

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is my most favorite Star Trek movie of the bunch. Sure, I like the Chris Pine reboot, but ST2 has deep, deep roots in the original series. Space Seed was episode 22 in the first season of the series, premiering in 1967. Khan Noonien Sigh (Ricardo Montalbán) and his followers are discovered by the crew of the starship Enterprise. Khan and his people are augmented humans. They are superior in strength & intelligence to a regular human due to some DNA modifications. Think CRISPR. So they try to take over the ship, but fail. In his short sighted wisdom, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) decides to deposit Khan & company on a fertile planet for them to live and rule themselves. He should have put them in space prison or whatever the Federation calls it. This is an error on his part. Khan himself would have claimed this mistake was one misguided human mistake that a superior race like his would not make. Destroy your enemies. His name does hail from the military strategist Genghis Khan.

Flashforward to ST2. where Khan’s band of supermen & women are discovered on a mysterious barren planet. It’s revealed that this is the planet they were dumped on fifteen years previous, but some celestial event blew it out of it’s orbit. Khan takes the Federation starship which discovered him, vowing revenge on the man that put him there: James Tiberius Kirk. The plot is off and running.

A few random thoughts. Emotions are wild, often uncontrollable motivations. Vengeance is a subset of rage, but it is premeditated. Khan has been planning on getting back at Kirk after he stopped him from taking control of the Enterprise in that Space Seed episode. Just like Kirk, Khan doesn’t like to lose. It’s not in his makeup. When ST2 came out in the summer of 1982, the Fantasy Island and T.J. Hooker series aired during some of the same years as well as both being made by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). I was going to put a Venn diagram together, but I got lazy.