For the sake of best practice, I make a policy of watching a movie immediately prior to reading its respective novelization. Naturally, this causes me to feel an acute apprehension about redundancy. I just watched the movie, I think. Is this really necessary? One of the more surprising benefits and pleasures of running this little website has been not only realizing that that worry is misplaced, but seeing it gleefully dashed against the rocks, and The Search for Spock represents the most thorough obliteration yet.
This week, dear readers, we arrive, at last, at what is unarguably the apotheosis of original-recipe Star Trek: the second film, The Wrath of Khan. To quote Hugh Laurie at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth, “This is, as they say, it.” It is as thrilling as The Motion Picture is boring. It is an ingenious work of deconstruction, the first to upend many deeply entrenched series tropes that were (to that point) taken for granted. Its greatness does not depend to any extent on your opinion of Star Trek, which is the only work under the TOS banner I would make that claim about other than possibly “City on the Edge of Forever”. It is the ne plus ultra of Trek movies, and it is highly unlikely that any that currently exist nor any that may be made in the future will ever surpass it.