43 Years Later, Star Trek Just Created A Massive New Canon Question

And just like that, there’s another member of the extended dynasty of Khan Noonien Singh in the Star Trek mythos. Two decades after the prequel series Enterprise introduced the genetically-engineered brethren of Khan in 2005, and Strange New Worlds slightly rewrote the origin of the Augments in 2022 and 2023, there’s a new member of the family, beyond just La’an Noonien-Singh.

In the series finale of the audio drama podcast series Star Trek: Khan, the final twist of the series establishes, retroactively, that one character in this series is secretly Khan’s child, and that child could, in one part of the Trek timeline, be still alive. Spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Khan, Episode 9, “Eternity’s Face.”

The Revelation of Khan’s Daughter

Throughout the series, the flashbacks to Khan’s exile on Ceti Alpha V are framed through contemporary research being conducted by Dr. Lear (Sonya Cassidy), with the begrudging assistance of Captain Sulu (George Takei), Ensign Tuvok (Tim Russ), and the USS Excelsior. Throughout these framing moments, Tuvok has wondered why Lear has been so intent on discovering new information about Khan (Naveen Andrews) and his infamous motivations. And in this episode, we learn the truth. Lear is her assumed name. In fact, she is Khan’s daughter, and also the daughter of Marla McGivers (Wrenn Schmidt), whom, before this series, we never knew about.

In the flashbacks that make up the primary story, this child is named Kali by Khan, in honor of the goddess of the same name. After Marla perishes (because canon says she has to), Kali is raised by Khan and the rest of his followers, as well as the telepathic aliens, the Elboreans. The finale also reveals what happened: A split among Khan’s followers led to a revolt, sapping the shared energy of the Elboreans, and allowing for one last stand to let a small escape craft leave the planet. Kali, as a child, was on this craft, and tragically, we learn that Khan believed that the craft exploded.

But it didn’t. Kali lived, and took on a different name, becoming the adult Dr. Lear we meet in the 2293 framing of the story, well after Khan’s wrath was thwarted by the Enterprise crew in 2285. But what does this mean for Trek canon? And does the idea of a child among the Ceti Alpha V survivors have a precedent?

Khan’s Daughter is a Callback to an Unused Wrath Moment

While it’s slightly hard to wrap your head around the fact that Khan never mentioned his daughter in The Wrath of Khan, if you squint, it does make his anger with Kirk even more pronounced. If anything, the entire impact of the podcast series Khan is to double down on the character’s grief. Not only did he lose his wife thanks to the creepy little ear eels, but now we learn that he lost his chummy telepathic alien friends and believed his only child perished in a shoddy spacecraft launch.

It’s a lot of backstory to retroactively insert into Ricardo Montalban’s performance in The Wrath, but Naveen Andrews sells it all fairly well. At this point, the only real shame is that Andrews (and Cassidy and Schmidt) didn’t get to perform some of this juicy material in live action. All three are great in the podcast, but these actors also look like the characters in real life.

Still, for fans who think that Khan’s daughter is something out of left field, consider this: Early cuts of The Wrath of Khan found director Nicholas Meyer including a child among Khan’s followers. In fact, one cut of the film would have even shown a young child right near the Genesis Device, before it detonated on the Reliant. (Fragments of this scene are pretty easy to find online.)

In this much darker version of The Wrath, this child would have been Khan’s son and would have been slain by the explosion of the ship, along with his father. It was a bleak moment, and it’s somewhat obvious why this concept didn’t make it into the final cut of the film.

And yet, the new retcon of Khan’s daughter surviving Ceti Alpha V, and growing up, in secret, feels like an echo of this idea. It’s not quite the restoration of the old deleted scene, obviously, but it does gesture at the transgressive aspects of The Wrath of Khan in general. Today, we think of that film as the standard bearer for the Trek film franchise, but at the time, it was a gritty, hard-edged, and personal story, which dealt with mortality, defeat, and regret.

The finale of the podcast series Khan can’t top The Wrath, but that wasn’t its goal. Instead, it exposed more meaning behind Khan’s fury and added a new dimension to the larger saga. The only question is: Will we ever see Kali Noonien Singh again?

Star Trek: Khan is available on all podcast platforms.