Star Trek: The Motion Picture may have done well at the box office (it still stands as the second most profitable Trek film made), but it hardly became the critical darling that was hoped for. The languid pace, the focus on two new and largely mishandled characters, and prolonged special effects sequences took their toll on the audience.

Despite its success, there was some doubt as to whether a sequel would follow. The new wave of sci-fi was waning, partly due to The Motion Picture, and partly because of the lukewarm critical response to The Empire Strikes Back (no, I’m serious – contemporary reviews weren’t kind at all). But Hollywood loves a dead horse to flog, and with approximately 450,000 hours of special effects footage shot for The Motion Picture, costumes that could be changed with some offcuts of velour and a few pots of dye, 4000 square feet of sets, and the opportunity to cut corners at every turn, there was a chance to recoup some “losses.” If you call making three times the budget “losses.” To put it in perspective, Star Trek Into Darkness earned back nearly triple its budget and was considered a rousing financial success.

Paramount’s first decision was to fire Gene Roddenberry, convinced that his constant script rewrites were the root of all the franchise’s troubles (an argument that reared its head again during the early years of Star Trek: The Next Generation). In his place came Harve Bennett, showrunner of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. His brief was to make a film that cost less than the two protagonists of those shows, which he did, bringing in the budget at just under two Steve Austins. Of course, the low spend was largely due to the excesses of its predecessor – the sets were reused, special effects models already built, and special effects sequences replayed wholesale in an effort to save money. The box should carry the disclaimer “film consists of up to 83% new footage.” Other cuts were made too – most notably in Bennett not actually paying anyone to write a script.

Bennett himself wrote the first treatment, which manages to feature all the plot points from the finished film without resembling it in any way, shape or form. Kirk’s arch enemy Khan has stolen a Federation super weapon and is using it to stage a coup on a distant planet, with the help of Kirk’s son, no less. A few tweaks were made – changing the super weapon to a terraforming device, introducing Spock’s death, ditching Khan entirely, introducing another Vulcan called Saavik – but crucially no one involved was happy with the end product. The writers’ strike of 1981 didn’t help either.