One Star Trek Backstory Just Got A Big Retcon
Oh, you thought they were alone there?
After Kirk left Khan on Ceti Alpha V, no other starships visited the planet for 15 years... right? But according to the new podcast series Star Trek: Khan, maybe some aliens landed on the planet and hung out for a while. If you’ve been sleeping on the audio podcast drama that tells the backstory of what happened between “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan, the fifth episode, “Imagination’s Limits,” takes the story in a bold new direction, and in doing so, makes the core story into a very classic Star Trek conflict.
Spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Khan, Episode 5.
Star Trek: Khan’s big swing
The USS Reliant in orbit of Ceti Alpha V in The Wrath of Khan.
In some senses, Star Trek: Khan is a double-flashback. The story is framed in the year 2293, shortly after Captain Kirk was lost on the Enterprise-B, which is roughly a decade after the events of The Wrath of Khan, and almost 30 years after “Space Seed.” In the framing story, an academic named Dr. Lear (Sonya Cassidy) has convinced Starfleet to have Captain Sulu (George Takei) and the USS Excelsior warp over to Ceti Alpha V and retrieve a ton of lost logs. And it’s within those lost logs that the primary story, from 2267 to 2285, is told.
By Episode 5, the neighboring planet, Ceti Alpha VI, explodes, which puts all of Ceti Alpha V in danger. This part we’ve known since 1982. Khan told Chekov that Ceti Alpha VI “exploded six months after we were left here” in The Wrath of Khan. What we didn’t know was that at the exact same time, an alien spacecraft crash-landed on Ceti Alpha V.
Khan vs. the Elboreans
Khan (Ricardo Montalban) at the end of his exile in The Wrath of Khan.
In Khan Episode 5, “Imagination’s Limits,” the exiles of Ceti Alpha V meet a telepathic species of aliens called the Elboreans. The leader of these aliens is Delmonda, who is able to speak to Khan (Naveen Andrews) by directly accessing his mind. The Elboreans are also telekinetic and melt or destroy the various weapons that Khan and his followers are planning to use to attack the Elboreans.
And so, instead of just slaughtering what he considered to be alien invaders, Khan is forced to communicate with Delmonda, who, in a Dune-like telepathic vision, shows Khan where a secret supply of water exists, in massive caverns deep under the planet.
In terms of what we’d assumed about Khan’s exile on Ceti Alpha V, this is a fairly big change. The idea that the Augments encountered marooned telepathic aliens while dealing with the ecological collapse of their planet is a very new retroactive piece of canon.
Khan’s followers in The Wrath of Khan.
This twist also transforms the story of Khan from a hardcore sci-fi survival story into a more classic Star Trek conflict, in which humans and aliens have to set aside their differences to survive in a complex situation. Obviously, what Khan is playing with is the idea that Khan himself isn’t considered a “good guy,” and his followers were all tyrants exiled to Earth, in a time well before the cozy utopia of the Star Trek future.
So, while classic Trek stories have often challenged our Starfleet heroes to get along with aliens, Khan is challenging former criminals and a warlord to find common ground. Will Khan figure out a way to team up with the Elboreans? And, because we know the Elboreans aren’t around 15 years later, are they already doomed? We thought we knew how this story ended, but this this twist, Khan has created a new, uncertain future.
