Did you mean to say Kirk’s actions had Khansequences?

RIP Ricardo Montalban, you were awesome as Khan.

"Wrath of Khan" was a chess match, with Kirk and Khan making move after calculating move. And Spock was the sacrificed Queen who won Kirk the game.

All he had to do was raise the fucking shields like Saavik said.

In Kirk's defense, he lived in a time where basically nothing that happens matters later.
Continuity was discovered in the Delta Quadrant and was quickly distributed in the Federation.

Having grown up with Original Trek (in my fifties now), I've seen this movie probably fifteen or so times. The latest was last summer. And I'm not ashamed to say I cry every damned time at Spock's death scene. Shatner went between extremes in his acting, from complete ham to knock it out of the park, but the last few minutes of Wrath is without doubt his best work, at least in emotional terms.

Everyone knew what exactly what The Cage was, and everyone saw 99% of it as part of The Menagerie in 1966, not 25 years later

Nicholas Meyer's contribution to the franchise is hard to overstate. He was one of the first people on the creative team to introduce a sense of realism to the franchise, which we see in Star Trek II and also in Star Trek VI (the only one that rivals it in terms of merit among the original series feature films).

I liked the video, but the breaks for texting broke the flow a bit too much for me.

Spock was, and ever will be, our friend!

DUUUUSSSSSTTTIIIINNNNNNNNN!!!!

This is all summarized by the first battle between Khan and Kirk: Kirk ignores the good advice from regulations and Saavik (more Kirk ignoring Vulcan logic there), fails to properly protect the Enterprise, and thus gets somebody else killed and a few others seriously injured. Had he raised his shields when specifically told to do so, he could have pulled the exact same hacking maneuver that he uses to get out of that mess and blown the Reliant out of the water.

It's wrong to say that Kirk never faced the "no-win" scenario. Spock says that Kirk took the test three times. Kirk faced it; he just didn't think of it as a no-win, but as an opportunity to adjust his thinking and methods. In other words, as a learning opportunity. They make a similar mistake in the next movie when they say that Kirk has never had to deal with the death of a loved one. They completely forget that Kirk's brother was killed in "Operation Annihilate" and that his parents were executed right before his eyes by Kodos the Executioner when he was a kid.

I must say this is one spin I haven't seen anyone tackle on the movie yet, that of Spock's deus ex vulcana being an intentional plot point here. Well done, Steve!  Just when you think there isn't any more to KHAAAAN out of the film, someone always finds an angle.

You're right and wrong at the same time.  It is Kirk's fault  but not for the reasons you say.  Khan's is at fault for all of Khan's actions.  When Kirk offers him Ceti Alpha V it is known as a harsh planet that, as Khan points out, they will "struggle to find food" even before CA VI goes the way of Krypton.  Khan's hatred of Kirk is stupid because there is no way he would have wanted Kirk to come check up on him even if Kirk offered.  Khan is suffering from buyers remorse and irrationally blaming for his own actions.  No, its Kirk's fault because he ignored Star Fleet regulation and didn't raise his shields when the regs and common sense told him he should have. (I'm amazed he didn't get court-martialed for this.)  If he had raised them when he should Khan wouldn't have gotten those cheap shots off disabling the Enterprise.  The Constitution class heavy cruiser would have easily outgunned the Miranda class light cruiser in relatively short order.  Very quickly if they did the prefix code trick at the same time.  Its sad the first Enterprise ended its life facing off against two ships it could easily out class.  That was almost as bad as the Enterprise D!

The Federation also has some blame in all of this. When they went to the Ceti-Alpha system to scan for a suitable planet for testing the planet scale Genesis device, they never bothered to check their records on this system to see what information there was on it, such as Kirk's logs about Khan and him being exiled to this system. They also never bothered to look at their maps of this system otherwise they would have known an entire planet was missing with nothing but debris where it was and that the orbits of nearby planets got fucked up. Keep in mind that the tests were very thorough to the point where there couldn't be as much as one microbe on the planet or it was being called off. If anything, trying to test in such an unstable system would not be ideal and they would have moved on to one of the bajillion uninhabited systems with planets in life sustaining conditions and where no nearby planets are due to explode.  This is more of a case of making the Feds stupid to move the story along, but I think it could have been handled better without the need of making the Feds stupid. Chekhov for one wasn't there in Space Seed, so they could have played up his ignorance rather than retcon him being there to be an exposition dump to the other captain and we the audience when Khan reveals himself. They could have brought up a computer glitch in their system preventing data from the system to show up to again given them a reason for their ignorance of what had happened in this system.

If Kirk hadn't cheated on the Kobayashi Maru scenario, he never would have advanced as he did in his career so he never would have met Khan in the first place.

The point of this video crashes down on Kirk toward the end of TWoK, and he himself acknowledges it: I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity.

Here's a thought, though: what does Kirk do if he DOESN'T plant Khan & Co. on Ceti Alpha V?  Return them to Earth for trial and judgment?  Wouldn't THAT have been a party?  What if, in that whole process, there is "Marcus" or his equivalent from Star Trek: Into Darkness who manages to take control of and exploit Khan for his own purposes in THIS universe?  I wonder if there is ANY scenario that comes out well from the introduction of Khan Noonien Singh?

Of course, as C. S. Lewis says in his Narnia tales, no one is ever told what would have happened.

A really great episode. I do agree that Wrath of Khan was Kirk's fault, as the episode "Space Seed" from the original series showed Kirk giving Khan all the knowledge he would need to takeover a starship. Then, when Khan is defeated in that episode his crew is captured, Kirk sends them all to exile on a planet which is near another unstable planetary body. This meant that Kirk either intentionally wanted to wipe out Khan and his crew without having to get his hands dirty, or that it was unintentional. And, instead of letting the knowledge of Khan be sent throughout the starships of the Federation of Planets as well as neglecting to keep an eye on Khan or sending someone else to do the job, Kirk forgets the whole thing. As such, Khan and his crew are left on a planet which becomes very harsh, loses half their number due to space parasites and a war between the crew, and the death of Khan's wife drives him mad. Thus, when the USS Reliant sends people to Khan's new home, without knowledge of the dangers of this system, Khan takes over the ship and uses it on a mission of revenge which costs many lives.

Correction: Scotty's nephew didn't die because of Kirk. He died because Scotty carried the critically injured kid all the way from engineering to the damn bridge instead of going to sick bay. It would be like if I got hit by a car and instead of the ambulance taking me to the emergency room, they decide to make a detour to City Hall to show my mangled body to the mayor.