A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I’m sitting listening to Star Trek: Khan, and I get to a bit where Khan and one of his followers are opening a bottle of Barolo, a red wine from Italy, which they’ve been saving for a special occasion. I immediately emailed co-writer David Mack, who is one of my best friends and also a major oenophile. In fact, Dave and I are part of a group of people who do regular wine tastings and have even made our own wine a few times. I said in my email, “Well, I know who wrote that bit.”
And then Dave emailed me back and told me that no, his collaborator, Kirsten Beyer, also a friend, wrote that particular sequence.
Oops.
This is a very long way of providing full disclosure and saying that the co-scripters of the Star Trek: Khan audio drama are friends of mine.
Please don’t let that get in the way of me telling you that this audio drama is very good. Also, there are some SPOILERS here, so you’ve been warned.
Khan’s time on Ceti Alpha V is one of the great storytelling gaps in Star Trek’s fictional history, as it is the transition between two very popular pieces of on-screen Trek, the first-season episode “Space Seed” in 1967 and the franchise’s second feature film The Wrath of Khan in 1982 (which was co-written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, who provided the story outline for Khan). The latter also provided several unanswered questions.
Interestingly enough, Khan only provides answers to some of those questions. But it also ends its flashback portion with several years still to go in Khan’s exile on CA5, presumably leaving things open for a potential second season.
But even if there isn’t one, this storyline does a nice job of filling in most of the gaps.
One of the best things about the audio is that it shows the process by which Khan and the gang assimilate to CA5, which is a very difficult and complicated process. We know about the Ceti eels, which were used to nasty effect in Wrath of Khan. The discovery of them and what they can do is brutal and nasty in the best possible way,
I really like the fact that it was established back in the very first episode, “Paradise,” that there were a bunch of young Augments on the Botany Bay whom Khan did not revive initially in “Space Seed,” but who were revived when they were exiled to CA5. This goes a long way toward explaining how Khan went from his followers being a multicultural group of contemporaries in the 1967 TV show to his followers being a bunch of young people in the 1982 film.
But Meyer, Beyer, and Mack subvert expectations there, too, because you figure that the adults will all die off and the young ones will have plot armor because we saw them in the movie. Not so much—the first two victims of the Ceti eels (one directly, one indirectly) are among the young’uns. One of them, Richter, is “possessed” by a Ceti eel, with nobody understanding what’s going on with him yet. Because Khan told him to fight what was happening to him, and because the eel made him suggestible, when he unexpectedly awakens from being sedated and sees his girlfriend Sylvana, who is sitting with him, he follows the instruction to fight and beats her to death.
This is one case where this being audio is devastatingly effective, because the imagination does a pretty good job of filling in the visuals. And the added bonus is that if you don’t want to imagine the bloody brutality of it, you don’t have to. On top of that, Khan has to kill Richter, because the only way to study this thing is via autopsy, and he’s already committed one murder, even if he doesn’t realize it. It’s a haunting scene, beautifully performed by Naveen Andrews as Khan and the voice actor who played Richter (I’ve been unable to determine which of the credited additional voices was him).
Indeed, one of the impressive things the audio accomplishes is making you care about the people who die, even though you know from Wrath of Khan that most of them are toast anyhow. The first casualty is the only other Augment who had a speaking part in “Space Seed,” Joaquin. (We also get to follow the journey of his son Joachim, played by Judson Scott in the movie, voiced by Paul Castro Jr. here, whom Khan takes under his wing, thus setting up his role in the film.) In particular, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper does a superb job of giving Paolo a distinctive personality with only a few lines of dialogue over several episodes just by his tone, which is a kind of laconic enthusiasm. So when he’s killed—which is quick and brutal—it’s a punch to the gut.
Probably the most effective is the death of Marla McGivers, another death we know is coming from Wrath of Khan. McGivers’ journey is the most interesting, mostly because the biggest challenge faced by Meyer, Beyer, and Mack in this audio is to elevate the character of McGivers from the horrifically sexist portrayal of her by Carey Wilbur and Gene L. Coon 58 years ago. The script and Wrenn Schmidt’s performance do excellent work to accomplish that goal, giving us more of a reason than “Space Seed” did for why McGivers fell for Khan so hard that she committed mutiny, and why Khan thought a non-Augment woman would even be worth his time.
We also know from Wrath how McGivers died: from one of the Ceti eels. Here the script nicely sets things up, because the eels are discovered early on, and Khan and his Khanettes are able to defend their encampment against them, so after the initial problems, they have them at bay by the end of the fourth episode. And then in the seventh episode, foreshadowingly titled “I am Marla,” we see the pregnant McGivers get into a hot spring that they’ve found in the underground caves where they intend to live once the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI starts to affect the surface of their world—
—and an eel shows up. It’s been three episodes since they’ve even been an issue, so both characters and listeners have all but forgotten about that particular threat. Especially since there have been much bigger fish to fry, like the destruction of the next planet and the new arrivals (more on them in a minute).
McGivers and Khan have developed into a fascinating couple. I particularly like their arguments about Romantic poets, as McGivers likes Coleridge, and Khan assumed she’d be more of a Wordsworth person. (Beyer and Mack avoid the obvious use of Oxymandias by Percy Shelley, which is a little too on the nose for Khan…) McGivers has also spent the entirety of the audio to that point working very hard to earn the trust of the other Augments, who don’t like her, don’t see what Khan sees in her, and don’t want her there.
Andrews does fantastic work here, showing the transition between the calm charisma of 1967 Richardo Montalban to the pissed-off vengeance-fueled anger of 1982 Montalban. And it’s a slow but inevitable process. At one point, in the third episode, “Do Your Worst,” Ursula mentions that she’s seen Khan up against terrible odds, and he just changed the plan, refusing to accept defeat.
And that’s probably the most telling thing: until he woke up on the Enterprise, Khan has never lost. Even the exile on the Botany Bay was something he saw as a victory, a chance to conquer a new world the way he was denied the ability to conquer the old one.
But CA5 continues to absolutely kick his ass. Every single plan he makes for how to survive winds up only being a stopgap, when it doesn’t fail completely. And his changing the plan last-minute, which Ursula said served him so well on Earth, fails miserably on CA5. Ursula and her love Madot are able to get past the enforced sterilization of the Augments and get Madot pregnant, but then the baby is lost in an accident while they are setting up the underground caves to protect them from the devastation that CA6’s destruction will wreak. When told by Khan that they can try again, Urusla angrily points out that she has absolutely no desire to bring a child into the world that CA5 has become.
One of the biggest unanswered questions created by Wrath of Khan was how and why CA6 blew up and why the Enterprise didn’t even notice that the planet was unstable, as that was something that should’ve been predicted. Indeed, in the framing sequence on the U.S.S. Excelsior, the historian who is going over the log tapes from CA5, Dr. Rosalind Lear, is convinced that Captain Kirk deliberately stranded Khan on CA5 knowing that CA6 would go boom. However, Captain Sulu makes the sensor logs from the Enterprise available to her, and it shows that CA6 had some magnetic weirdness, but was stable and shouldn’t have blown up.
Shortly after CA6’s destruction, a ship crash lands on the planet containing a group of aliens called Elboreans. The Elboreans are delightfully alien. They’re telepathic, telekinetic, cooperative, and do everything by consensus. It’s pretty much the diametric opposite of the single-person charisma-focused rule of Khan over his people. And their arrival exposes one of the biggest cracks in Khan’s rule, as the destruction of CA6 means that he needs to cooperate with the aliens so that they can all survive, while many of his followers—notably Ivan, voiced with gleeful brutality by Maury Sterling—think that they should kill the Elboreans. Credit to Olli Haaskivi, who voices Delmonda, the spokesperson for the Elboreans, whose calm rationality is a sharp contrast to the anger and frustration of the Augments.
Eventually, Khan learns that the Elboreans were responsible for the destruction of CA6. In return, they put together a new ship from the wreckage of theirs that can carry a complement of four, with the idea that they can find help to get them off the deteriorating world. Doing so results in most of the Elboreans—who have already been weakened by the awfulness of life on CA5—sacrificing themselves to try to get the ship offworld (necessary to explain why there were no Elboreans around by the time of Wrath of Khan). In the end, though, Khan believes that the ship is destroyed, eliminating one of his last shots at hope.
The storyline has a few head-scratchers. While having the Elboreans be responsible for CA6’s destruction goes a long way toward explaining how it happened so unexpectedly, it causes another problem: Khan’s animus toward Kirk, which drives the plot of the 1982 movie, is cut off at the knees. On top of that, the one part of that that could explain it—Khan’s anger that Kirk never came back to check up on him—is also cut off by Khan himself saying that Kirk would be an absolute fool to come back here. Indeed, he thinks Kirk should have set up a quarantine of the world to keep everyone away.
There’s a revelation that, despite my warning above, I won’t spoil, about one particular character’s true identity, as I think that is a genuine spoiler that should be experienced while listening. Having said that, I predicted it way before it actually was revealed, and I’m curious as to how other folks responded to it…
If this isn’t picked up for a second season, there’s plenty of story here to satisfy folks who want to know what happened to the Augments on CA5 after “Space Seed.” If it is picked up, there’s plenty more story to tell as there’s about a decade of time on CA5 left untold. What we have here is a fascinating tale, one that has action, adventure, pathos, character development (not just of the folks on CA5, but also of Captain Sulu and Ensign Tuvok; the familiar voices of George Takei and Tim Russ help ground this very firmly in the Trek universe), the redemption of a female character badly served by 1960s male writers, and some absolutely delightful discussions of literature—not just the Romantics, but also Shakespeare.
I don’t think we need a second season of Khan, but I definitely hope there are more Trek audio dramas (and that I get the chance to write for them — I do have audio writing experience, if anyone’s listening). That said, though this was an effective story, it had some growing pains for the format, I think. The actresses playing Marla and Ursula sounded virtually identical, making it hard to tell them apart except from context and the things they said. Also, it was occasionally hard to tell what was happening in the action scenes due to the lack of narration. I feel that framing the story through Marla’s and Khan’s journal entries could have been used effectively as a means of supplying narration to fill in the gaps, which isn’t so different from how captain’s logs were conceived to be used in TOS.
Quibbles aside, though, there were some interesting ideas here, some surprises that made this a very different take on the subject than the two previous versions we’ve had in novels and comics. Bringing in alien characters never hinted at in TWOK does feel a bit contrived, but it’s a good way to explain Ceti Alpha VI exploding, and it works well at showing the facets of Khan’s character. I’ve seen people say he seemed too benevolent and kindly here, and I think that only makes sense; like Alexander and Genghis Khan, he’s ruthless to his enemies but benevolent to his loyal subjects, and for the first few episodes we only saw him with his loyal subjects, so we saw his more benevolent side. The Elboreans gave him someone to see as enemies, then to have to struggle to learn to coexist with, so it let us see his more ruthless side and his difficulty moving beyond it, which gives us a taste of what it must’ve been like during the Eugenics Wars.
As for why Khan still blames Kirk, I think it’s connected to what he said about expecting Starfleet to have deliberately quarantined them and to have standing orders to kill them on sight. It’s Starfleet that he blames for (supposedly) trapping them in that hell, for leaving them there even after all that went wrong, and Kirk was the only face of Starfleet authority that he knew, so over the long years, his hatred crystallized. Sure, it doesn’t logically hold together, but as we’ve seen too much in real life, cultivated hatred can overwhelm reason, as people ignore the facts in favor of constructions of reality that feed and justify their hate.
I’ll second the not so minor quibble that some of the VA’s performances sounded too alike to easily tell who was speaking in some scenes: not a dealbreaker but just noticeable enough that it pulled me out of listening a bit in spots. Not – and let me be clear – that the performances weren’t almost universally good (many, MANY props to Naveen Andrews for pulling off the near impossible and making me forget Ricardo Montalban’s performance while I was listening) but it was a noticeable lapse amidst the otherwise great production values for the series.
I’ll also second that I don’t know we need more Khan but I would happily get behind more Star Trek audio-narratives. Seems like some of the old short-fiction lines (Starfleet Corps of Engineers, etc.) would be great for this sort of treatment.
We know from Strange New Worlds that there are still augments among the human population of the Federation, there’s even Noonien-Singhs serving in Starfleet. Could it be Kahn recognises McGivers as one of them?
I need to watch Space Seed again sometime because it niggles that Kirk knows La’an in SNW, and the Pike era crew seem to bewell aware of her ancestry, but the passengers of the Botany Bay get welcomed aboard Enterprise a few years later.
We know there are descendants of Augments. After more than two centuries, maybe 8-10 generations, any actual Augment DNA would be diluted to a homeopathic degree. Eight generations is about the point where the probability of inheriting zero gene blocks from a given genealogical ancestor begins to shoot upward, and at ten generations the probability is about 50%.
https://gcbias.org/2013/11/04/how-much-of-your-genome-do-you-inherit-from-a-particular-ancestor/
As for “Space Seed,” remember that Khan only identified himself as Khan, a very common name, and he kept the “Noonien Singh” part secret until Spock figured it out and Kirk confronted him with it.
That’s why I need the Space Seed rewatch…
Thinking about it, La’an must have diluted augment genetics or she’d have been barred from Starfleet by the rules against genetic manipulation. Though I can also imagine there being a group of the left behind augments inter-marrying with the youngsters not being aware of why the elderly aunties keep introducing them to distant cousins.
Thoroughly loved the series and though I am not expecting a second season I hope that more audio dramas are on the horizon. May David Mack and Kirsten Beyer (and also Keith and Christopher) have a future in this.
I completely agree with Krad about the characters, I really cared for them hence why I could not fathom (warning spoliers) why the crew of Venture didn’t try and tell others of CA5 – not being able to make contact after reaching orbit led to such an extreme conclusion when so many potentials existed. I know that the Federation is anti-augment but surely a secret message to someone to say, ‘maybe check out Ceti Alpha 5 as there were people living there’ could have been attempted…. maybe it was but can only go with what was said.
Krad, I really wish you had done a review per episode, but nonetheless I shall be watching Space Speed and STII WOK and then re-read your reviews of them. Maybe generate a few more comments.
Just finished it. Almost everything worked beautifully. Both the memorable soundtrack and the performances from everyone involved, especially Andrews and Schmidt, made this a truly effective piece of Trek history. I’m surprised just how well the audio was able to convey everything that transpired without needing to rely on scene descriptions. The audiowork was superlative.
That final episode really hits the emotional beats in a way even the recent live-action shows haven’t always connected. For a moment there, it seemed as if Khan’s hatred of Kirk had fallen by the wayside, but I think they’ve managed to reconnect his old resentment enough at the very end to justify his eventual transition to pure vengeance.
I welcomed the addition of the Elboreans. Not only it provided a vehicle for Khan to direct his frustration and suspicion, but at the same time forced them to a classic Trekkian scenario of mutual understanding and cooperation. Delmonda really made a good impression.
I did have one major issue with the show though: Ivan.
Despite the excellent voiceover performance from Sterling, I thought the character was quite the disappointment. A bog-standard one-note sniveling irredeemable sociopath whose only function is to give Khan a redemption arc. They could have still made Ivan both sympathetic and his motives understandable, while still keeping him as a credible antagonist to Khan. There was enough divide in their ranks for it to be believable – Ursula being the best example. And their already precarious situation on Ceti Alpha V was enough of a motivator. Besides, Khan was humanized enough both through his relationship to McGivers and his commitment to protecting his people.
I’d also argue the story is pretty close to complete as it is – and I don’t see much of a need for another season, if there is in fact one in the works.
Hey! Thanks for such a thoughtful response to the series here, glad you enjoyed it. It was an honor and pleasure bringing Kirsten and David’s scripts to life (this is Fred, the director). To solve one mystery – Richter is played by Adriel Jovian Nerys Rivera.
!!
It’s poetically appropriate to see that Ms. Rivera is named in part after a DS9 character….
That’s Mr. Rivera; the actor and character are both male (or at least Rivera uses he/him pronouns on his Facebook page). “Nerys” is actually a Welsh given name (accented on the first syllable and rhyming with “Harris”), though usually a feminine one.
Ouch. That will teach me to comment on a work before I’ve actually listened to it (and clearly I should listen to it, based on this review).
OTOH, Welsh origins notwithstanding, that performer’s cluster of names is remarkable as an illustration of gender ambiguity….
To answer that curiosity I also predicted that character reveal several episodes beforehand. (And also found Marla’s fate something visible from a mile away).
Personally, I felt that the character of Marla wasn’t redeemed- she was simply replaced by a character who shared none of her traits. I found it disappointing, because the character *could* have been redeemed by starting her at the actual point she was in Space Seed and then gradually changing her- but instead of, the character was simply replaced with a 21st-century-compliant doppelganger that shared the same name, from the get-go. That was my take, anyway.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing if the audience is able to deduce a character revelation in advance; it just means the story is playing fair and holds together logically. Surprise is not the exclusive priority of all fiction. Even in a mystery, where the goal is to conceal the answer from the characters until the end, it’s still important to plot the story fairly and coherently enough that the observant reader/viewer/listener can deduce the correct answer ahead of time. You don’t want to make it too obvious, but it should be the logical conclusion if the audience has paid attention and thought it through. (I’m not a fan of the tendency of some writers of serial fiction to change the intended ending because the audience figured it out “too soon.” Fair play demands that the answer be deducible from the clues, so changing the facts when the audience outsmarts the writer is just cheating.)
As for Marla, I do agree her portrayal is somewhat revisionist, but I think there are some points in common with the “Space Seed” version. When Kirk suggested that Marla found Khan personally intriguing, she replied that her interest was professional, that of a historian intrigued to study the mind of a man from the past. Also, in her first interaction with Khan, she started out all business and initially resisted his flirtations. The episode played that as a cover for her true infatuation, but it’s easy enough to flip that around and take her at her word, which is what the miniseries did. It reinterpreted her submission to Khan as strategic, a pretense to continue to have access to him so she could learn more about him — though when she told him that in the miniseries, it seemed to me that she might have been putting on a pretense there as well. The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The actresses’ performances are profoundly different, to the point that I could never really connect them in my mind, but if you limit it to how Marla was written in “Space Seed” rather than how her lines were played, I think there’s room for reconciliation.
The way I saw it, Marla deliberately took a different approach with the Augments in this show, partly because she was still reeling from being branded a traitor to Starfleet. In her mind, she needed to reestablish her professional reputation – hence her initial isolationism and refusal to deal with Khan on any terms other than her own. I like it, because it allowed for her to have an arc of learning to let her past self go and embrace Khan and her new “crewmates”.
I think this has been an interesting experiment. I hope it does well.
The Doctor Who audio productions always seemed to have their niche, and Star Trek is another great legacy IP that could make use of it. Not only did it allow for fan favorite Doctors and their companions to have more adventures, they even did well by ones who were less well received.
It is in no surprise that they decided to go back to the Khan mines. Compared to most of the other ways the franchise has tried to mine the character or the premise of the character since TWOK, this succeeds.
I have only minor quibbles, and I don’t want to linger on them. The character reveal KRAD mentioned is definitely obvious, but it’s fine.
Naveen Andrews really does anchor the story with his portrayal, and Wrenn Schmidt and Sonya Cassidy both do well. The voice acting overall, honestly, was quite good. While the age absolutely shows on the voice of George Takei, it’s still quite enjoyable to hear him. Getting early Tuvok again is also fun, and it is a treat to hear one of our best Vulcans in fine form again.
I want to see where they go from here. Lower Decks showed that the franchise can create enjoyable stories where they brought back voices from all over the franchise. The worry, of course, is what you got from Takei in this entry. I’d also be worried about another entry without some voices grounding it, as KRAD put it, in the Star Trek universe. It’s just that the window for that narrows by the day.
That leads to my hot take: They should do an Enterprise continuation. Give the poorly written crew another shot, bring Jeffrey Combs in as a full time Shran that was rumored. Give them good scripts and see if they can have a redemption arc like some of the lesser Doctors in their audio productions. Would it bring people in? No way. Do I kinda want it? Absolutely.
“It is in no surprise that they decided to go back to the Khan mines.”
I think it’s not so much that they decided to do their audiodrama about Khan, as that they decided to do Nicholas Meyer’s proposed Khan miniseries as an audiodrama after deciding not to do it on TV as originally conceived.
I don’t think the personal connection makes the world feel smaller, since it’s not a coincidence, but is the direct and logical motivation for that character’s actions catalyzing the story. I don’t think it was even a coincidence that the Excelsior was involved; didn’t Sulu say he specifically requested the assignment because of his concerns about Khan?
Fair. I didn’t realize the Nicholas Meyer take was originally a series pitch. Even then, his miniseries is him going back to the mines. It’s mines all the way down!
I just feel like it’s such a common trope these days that it becomes obvious for a reason, and I’m burnt out on it. The first episode makes it clear that Lear is challenging convention and is emotionally invested in it. It could be for any number of reasons that she could want to do this based on her own past and experiences. It’s a point of interest and tension for the audience. “Why doesn’t this person love Kirk? Boooooo.” When the real reason dawned on me, it landed not with joy, but with disappointment. Does the idea work in the context of the story? Of course. Did I enjoy it? Nope.
I didn’t mind Sulu and the Excelsior being involved. I had a hard time picturing the first scene in my head outside of “Starfleet tribunal / legal thing” given the audio clues and wondering why Sulu’s hanging out there. Sulu’s motivations get laid out just fine right from the beginning, and the Excelsior being part of it does what it does. Of course, it also gives us fans known characters in a sea of the mostly-unknown to latch on to. I just give it a bit more of a pass since it’s not really a key piece of the drama. Any ship could have taken her there, it’s just more fun and expedient that it’s Sulu and Tuvok.
I was able to guess the spoiler in episode 7.