Kirk (William Shatner)’s Timeline and Summary

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• Admiral Kirk oversees the training of a new crew for the Enterprise, observing Lt. Saavik as she goes through the supposedly unbeatable Kobayashi Maru scenario.
• He accepts a birthday present from Spock – a copy of A Tale of Two Cities – then heads home.
• McCoy arrives at his pad later that evening, and gives him a pair of glasses as a gift… then wonders why Kirk is depressed about growing older. (McCoy is kind of a jerk sometimes.)
• Kirk heads to the Enterprise to take the kids on a little training crew.
• He gets a garbled message from an old flame, Carol Marcus, who demands to know why he's taking Genesis away from her. Neither he nor his crew know what the heck she's talking about.
• Kirk, Spock and McCoy learn all about the Genesis device, a missile designed to turn dead planets into paradise. Unfortunately, it will turn live planets into paradise too… after killing everything on them.
• Their free-form food-fight style musings on the matter are interrupted by the approach of another Federation ship, the Reliant.
• Kirk is lulled into a false sense of safety, which is why it catches him completely by surprise when the Reliant opens fire and badly damages the Enterprise.
• Surprise: it's Khan, and he's ready to settle accounts with the man who left him stranded lo those many years ago.
• Kirk agrees to beam himself over, along with all data regarding Project Genesis, in exchange for Khan sparing his crew.
• He and Spock stall while pretending to look up the info on Genesis, then type up the Reliant's prefix code, letting them order Reliant remotely to lower its shields.
• They zap the Reliant, and both ships limp off to nurse their wounds. The Enterprise heads towards Carol Marcus's lab, Regula One.
• They arrive and Kirk beams over with McCoy and Saavik. They find a whole lot of dead people, as well as Captain Terrell and his old navigator Chekov, the former commanders of the Reliant. They tell Kirk that Khan took control of their ship when they inadvertently arrived on the planet where Kirk had exiled him. Khan put space eels in their ears to control their minds.
• They find transporter coordinates in the middle of the nearby dead planet, Regula, and beam down to check it out.
• They find the Genesis Device, along with Dr. Marcus, her son David, and another doctor. They beamed down there to keep the Genesis Device away from Khan.
• The space eels are still in charge, and Terrell and Chekov turn their phasers on the team. Khan has been listening the whole time and used his puppets to spring a trap.
• The tables turn when Khan orders Terrell and Chekov to kill Kirk. Terrell shoots himself, while Chekov collapses as the eel slurps out of his ear. Kirk phasers the eel with extreme prejudice.
• Khan beams away the Genesis Device and intends to leave Kirk and the others stranded inside the planet…thus prompting the most famous line delivery in the history of everything: "Khaaaaaaan!"
• Kirk and Dr. Marcus hash out the status of David, their son, then ooh and aah over all the pretty trees grown in a day by the Genesis Project.
• Spock calls, and the team is beamed back to the Enterprise, contrary to a previous coded message which implied that the ship was more damaged than it was.
• Kirk and the Enterprise head for the nearby Mutara Nebula, where the Reliant's shields will be useless, evening the odds.
• The two ships stalk each other before Kirk's superior knowledge of starship warfare lets him catch the Reliant unawares.
• Before they can board the enemy vessel, though, Khan sets the Genesis Device in motion. The Enterprise starts to flee, but without warp speed they'll never escape.
• Just before the device detonates, warp power is restored. Kirk orders Sulu to speed them to safety just in time.
• He calls Scotty to tell him well done on the whole engine thing…but is surprised to hear McCoy telling him to get his butt down there. By an amazing coincidence, Spock's chair is unoccupied.
• Kirk rushes to the engine room to find Spock dying in the warp core: he went in there and fixed the engine, at the cost of absorbing a lethal amount of radiation.
• Kirk and Spock give each other the king of Bro Farewells before Spock finally succumbs.
• Kirk delivers a eulogy for his friend, placed in a photon torpedo and fired at the formerly dead Regula, which has bloomed into a paradise thanks to the Genesis Device.
• Kirk tries to read A Tale of Two Cities, but he's troubled.
• David visits him and reminds him what a wise man Spock was, and how this harsh loss brings wisdom. Also that he's really proud to call Kirk "daddy."
• The two hug, and Kirk returns to the bridge, watching the sunrise of a new world and feeling young again for the first time in a long while.