Watched some of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- the boys love the starship fights in that one...
Enterprise v. Reliant
Anyway, watching Khan deploy the Genesis Device, it occurred to me that Kirk need only to have beamed a few people aboard the crippled Reliant (since he had declared to Khan to "prepare to be boarded.") and then just fire a phaser or two at the Genesis Device, disintegrating it -- since it's already been well-established that phasers can disintegrate any number of things, it seems logical that a phaser could simply eradicate the Genesis Device in a nimbus of plasma or whatever it is that phasers turn matter into.
And if even that's not good enough for you, how about another old standby: the Genesis Device is sitting in the transporter bay of the Reliant, and Khan is busy dying on the bridge, all of his crew slain. So, Kirk et al. need only beam the Genesis Device up and keep it in suspension -- as Chekhov puts it in "Day of the Dove" -- "Nonexistence; that's exactly what they deserve."
No Genesis Device detonation, no death of Spock, no problem. Of course, since the plot points in "...Khan" were milked for two other Trek movies, that might pose problems for them, too, and lacks the dramatic, Ahabesque finale for Khan, and the drama of Spock's (temporary) death in the service of the Enterprise.
Just the same, though, it bugs me that two simple methods of dealing with the Genesis Device weren't considered, and, instead, Kirk just defaulted to getting the hell out of there.
It's like one of my frustrations in "The Empire Strikes Back" (certainly the best of the actually good "Star Wars" movies) where the snowspeeders repeatedly try frontal assaults on the AT-ATs (the Imperial Walkers), even though it's clear that their primary weapons are on the front. Luke et al. continue to charge the AT-ATs head-on, and (big shock) take heavy casualties because of it. Why not lateral attacks, back and forth, from side-to-side, avoiding those big guns? Next you're going to tell me the Rebels are going to use trench warfare against the AT-ATs. Oh, wait....
Marginally related to the above...
Star Trek: The Sexed Generation
This is a masterpiece of editing! Given that the piece is nearly 10 minutes long, they had to have worked for a very long time to compile this.
