YMMV / Star Trek S1 E22 "Space Seed"

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Kirk, who earlier had admitted a grudging respect for Khan's methods, respectfully sends Khan and his underlings to live on a nearby planet rather than send them to a "reorientation center" (presumably something like jail). McGivers agrees to go with them. Good to know she and Khan can further their abusive relationship down there! Of course, this is all moot by the time of The Wrath Of Khan.
• Evil Is Cool: Khan, of course. He's one of the most well-remembered villains in the franchise for a reason.
• Fair for Its Day: Khan is played by a Mexican-American actor. But in 1967, the character was fairly revolutionary, despite being a villain, because he wasn't just a villain: he was an incredibly brilliant, charismatic world leader who was genetically bred to be superior to other humans in every conceivable way—all of which was unthinkable for a character of color at the time. He's also the most popular and well-known villain in an exceptionally well-known and popular series. The Sikh community loved the character for those aspects, and were upset when the film producers threw away the chance for a Sikh actor to play him (although Khan's lack of beard and turban means he doesn't actually practice Sikhism).
• Fight Scene Failure: The final fight between Kirk and Khan is clunky even by the standards of Star Trek's subpar choreography. Hilariously, Kirk knocks Khan out with a plastic pipe. William Shatner's stunt double's face is also clearly visible at several points, likely attributable to having been filmed for an era of television with poor resolution.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Spock delivers the ending valedictory: "It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in 100 years and learn what crop had sprung from the seed you planted today." Try only about 15 years to find that Captain Kirk's irregular action of marooning the Botany Bay crew in this episode indirectly causes yours and many other's deaths at the hands of Khan, Spock.
  • The episode ends with Kirk delivering a very optimistic line about the future of Khan's people... He also claims full responsibility when Khan suffocates him and everyone else on the bridge, which won't be the last Khan-related-time that something is his fault.
• Special Effect Failure: The pipe that Kirk hits Khan with is probably supposed to be some dense metal alloy being swung at an appreciable acceleration, given how it makes the superhuman drop like a ton of bricks with a good whack, but is clearly just a piece of plastic being lightly jabbed into Montalban's gut.
• Values Dissonance: Better awareness of abusive relationships means that McGivers being enchanted, then tactlessly manipulated, by Khan, only looks even more disturbing nowadays. As is Khan and the other Augments being Easily Forgiven by Kirk, though at least that comes back to bite them pretty hard in The Wrath Of Khan.
• Values Resonance: Bizarrely, the eugenics system presented in this episode fits. Not that eugenics is good by any means, but the way it's shown to have been practiced doesn’t seem to be race-based, but instead just based on traits like strength, intelligence, etc. Essentially, the episode is saying that even though it’s wrong to breed humans selectively, the traits being sought after can come from anyone regardless of race.

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