I spent most of last week in bed, and finally got round to watching this great example of the Star Trek genre, which I had not seen before (I still haven’t seen the third or fourth films in the series either). Ricardo Montalban as Khan, and Kirstie Alley, years before Cheers, as Vulcan fledgling captain Saavik are both rather more memorable than the returning crew, but that’s OK. The plot and execution are sufficiently close to the better episodes from the 60s, updated for 80s sensibilities, to succeed in what it aims to do.
I was struck especially by the resonances of Spock’s death scene in New Who. RTD has done a couple of scenes which feel to me now as if they are conscious references to it – the Ten/Jack conversation in Utopia (though of course Jack isn’t actually dying, which is partly the point) and Ten’s own self-sacrifice in The End of Time II. Am I imagining this? Are there other famous examples of protagonists being killed by radiation poisoning on the other side of a transparent screen which I have missed?
The latitude maps aren’t really comparable to each other, though; the land one is a percentage of land while the population one is total population, so they scale differently as you approach the poles.
I think the best fix would be to redo them using a sinusoidal projection (though you could also make the population map into a map of population density).