Space Seed

DVD, Star Trek S1 (Space Seed)

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! Yes, for it is he, Noonien Singh (as opposed to Noonien Soong, the creator of Data, though 'Enterprise' showed there was actually a connection between those two disparate strands of Trek lore), the space seed who is planted on Ceti Alpha V instead of being sent to a correctional facility like the Tantalus Penal Colony we saw in 'Dagger of The Mind' - that for the best because Khan would have been running the place within a week! But while his magnetic, domineering personality rules the episode, it's really just the final third that I found to be compelling - for much of the story I was wondering why this is considered one of the finest in the series, beyond its obvious leaping off point into a great Trek film fifteen years later. When you know the whos, the whats and the whys, you're merely waiting for Khan to strike, and though he doth joust verbally with our good Captain, he isn't, as the simplifying Hollywood view of his character appeared to suggest in 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' the Joker to Kirk's Batman. The fault for that impression comes with 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan' when Kirk can only win with great personal loss against this crazed, vengeance-addled supermaniac. But what Khan is, and what the shrewd Harve Bennett saw in him and his story, was a great character. Much like the Romulan Commander in 'Balance of Terror,' Khan is more than the script makes him, the actors bringing so much more to turn the pages into a deeper character through their performances. So much of 'TOS' is recalled in a kitschy way, but these two examples are where the serious Shakespearean drama came from, whose roots spread and flourished in 'TNG.'

A lot of what is to happen is telegraphed early in the episode: ship's historian Marla McGivers is slow to respond to the Captain's orders for her to join the Landing Party and doesn't seem at all thrilled with the prospect of using her skills, which we get the impression she rarely does on the Enterprise (Kirk even saying it will give the historian something to do for a change!), though it's not such a strange position to have on a starship when you consider the law of parallel planet development which gives rise to various Earth-like cultures at varying degrees of our history. Even so, McGivers prefers staying in her quarters to paint portraits of great war leaders and dictators of the past, so much so that she immediately starts on a painting of Khan once she knows who he is, the only time we see this apparent Sikh with a turban! And with Khan himself, who takes the measure of each man he meets, the first encounter between him and McCoy, who shows no fear when his patient grabs him by the throat and holds a scalpel to it. He made the right move, for Khan is impressed with his coolness, respecting those who show no fear, though you know were it but for his knowledge and confidence in his own power giving him a sense of unquestioned choice over who will live and who will die (and the small matter of DeForest Kelley's contract), he could have killed the Doctor without hesitation.

The same can be said of his meeting with Kirk, both talking to each other as equals, his language and attitude that of a man who expects to be obeyed, even though he's not currently in a position of power. He has an ease of complete belief in himself and his rightful position, and for once Kirk comes up against someone as strong-willed as himself. I can't imagine him talking one of Khan's computers to destruction if he'd built one! Strangely, the only other main character Khan fails to appraise, or have much to do with at all, is Spock. Though going by the 'Into Darkness' writers you'd expect the pair to degenerate into a thumping match. You would have thought that Khan would show surprise at seeing an alien, but perhaps he assumed Spock was a misshapen human, or he may have read further afield than the tech manuals as he sits in Sickbay doing a Gary Mitchell, bar the levitating coffee cup and silver eyes. Spock remains quite mild, when in fact you would like to see him test his physical prowess (though we hadn't yet seen him go full ancient Vulcan in episodes like 'This Side of Paradise' or 'Amok Time'), against the 'selective breeding' and 'controlled genetics' of the supermen - when Kirk finally does, in a vicious and brutal fight in Engineering (unfortunate that the stunt doubles look very little like the characters they're supposed to be!), Khan claims five times the strength of a normal human, and we know Vulcans have three times the strength, but I suspect Khan was boasting, not averse to a little deception to try and shake Kirk's resolve, perhaps.

I would say, as much as the earlier mystery keeps the focus of the episode on target, when you know the answers it can drag a little, especially all the stuff with McGivers and her seeming lack of dedication to her duty and her people, judgement clouded by indulging an attraction to men from a romanticised past that apparently even Kirk believes, describing them as more adventuresome and bold than people today (perhaps a comment on technology as the writers of the Sixties saw it, curtailing the instincts of humanity in the future, against the general grain of Roddenberry's utopian vision which had not yet quite reached full fruition). She's quick to throw off the mundane shackles of her existence aboard the Enterprise, the implication being that her position as historian doesn't fulfil her and wasn't what she'd hoped it would be. Granted, Khan's will is iron, and he's more than comfortable using every kind of manipulation with this young woman, be it physical or emotional, but Khan's flaw was his own conceitedness, believing as he did in his own superiority. It brings to mind something Bashir said in 'Statistical Probabilities' (ironically, another episode dealing with genetic modification of humans), to another modified leader about how he couldn't even predict what would happen in one room when one of his gang rescues Bashir, so how could he predict the outcome of an entire war! It's the same with Khan, always thinking big so that he fails to see the smaller picture, something Kirk uses against him again in their feature film meeting: he didn't imagine Marla would rescue Kirk.

The scene where Khan gathers the main characters together in the Briefing Room is the best of the episode, becoming almost a stage play, showing his flaws in miniature to be applied on the grand scale of lofty ambitions for world-conquering - as he says to his lieutenant, Joaquin, controlling a world is small potatoes now there's a whole universe out there to surrender to his will. Uhura gets one of, if not her best, scene ever, when she's commanded to operate the screen which shows Kirk locked in a pressure chamber. She defiantly refuses to cooperate so Joaquin whacks her in the face, and she's ordered again, but when he goes to hit her a second time she makes to rise to the blow rather than cringing from it, such a great moment of bravery rarely seen, especially from a character mostly underused and under-appreciated (though at least she got to be in it, as Sulu's once again completely absent - maybe he was showing Chekov round at the time. A little in-joke there). Khan completely misjudges the level of dedication to duty, and loyalty to the Captain, that his crew has, perhaps guided by how easily he was able to turn the bored McGivers to his cause. In a way, she did them more service than they realised, because if she hadn't been so easily swayed he might have had an entirely different impression of these lowly, ordinary humans and simply culled the lot of them. But he wants to rule and only sees destruction as a necessary tool to control the masses, intelligent enough to know that you can't lead a people you've massacred - his historical biography suggests he was always like that, only responding violently when his kingdom was attacked, which is why he went down as one of the more admirable tyrants of history.

The greatest service Marla performs is in rescuing Kirk from his assured destruction - the simple reason that Khan knew he had a strong rival being enough to off him. Perhaps he even secretly feared such a man as Kirk, though we could never know. We do know that he became obsessed by him during his long exile, not helped by the fact that he was unable to tame the difficult planet he was set down on, when at first he practically approves and relishes the chance to subdue a harsh environment. There were rumours recently that Nicholas Meyer, the Director of 'Star Trek II,' was creating a miniseries set during the reign of Khan on the planet Kirk stranded him on, and while I'd hate to see someone else play Khan (and I never believed it was even the slightest bit likely), no one ever realistically going to have the majesty and nuance of performance the great Ricardo Montalban exhibited in the role, seeing that last scene with the description of this wild place and the capability of Khan to subdue things to his will, I can imagine that it could be a great drama, whether it showed the early years of dealing with this newfound Hell to rule, or the later, when the planet has been devastated by the destruction of its neighbour, Ceti Alpha VI, which turned their home into a barren, barely survivable desert. The ending of the episode is terrific, sober and thoughtful, a far cry from the comedic high they preferred to conclude on that would leave the audience in a happy place ready to return next week. No, this time they leave us pondering the future of such a venture.

One big question about the episode regards canon and whether we should take what is said as fact. Because later Trek deliberately crafted a living, unfolding history that began in the film series and was furthered by the spinoff TV series' to this day. Inconsistencies abound with regards to historical records and accuracy, not to mention that no one really knows Khan when they see him, yet they all seem to have heard of him and discuss his legacy. I can understand this, as if Hitler was unearthed, thawed out in some future time, you wouldn't automatically know it was him (even Charlie Chaplin did a satire in his likeness, more the facial hair we think of than the face), so it's not hard to let that pass. The toughest mistake is dating the series to the 22nd Century, as they speak of Khan's reign in the 1990s, taking power in 1992 until 1996 when the supermen were defeated, then say that it was two hundred years ago. If it was later in the episode I could make the argument that the anaesthezine gas was to blame, affecting their memories, or Kirk's jaunt in the decompression chamber, but it was early on. Slip of the tongues? Even more dating troubles occur when McGivers, the historian, let's not forget, states that it took years to travel from one planet to another, until 2018 when some advancement made a difference. As far as I know, we still haven't travelled to another planet (unless she was referring to robot missions which we have achieved, and they did take years), and I know that technology is developing at an increasingly rapid rate, but unless Section 31 is already here and keeping details of interstellar travel hidden from the general public, it seems unlikely we'll be going to the stars next year, especially not with atomic power!

That's the thing with making an ongoing history out of something that began in the 1960s (and one reason I wish 'Discovery' had been set further into the future, post 'Voyager'), is that extrapolation is surely going to be way off base and it would take all the ingenuity of the best writers, and more, to make everything tie in together as it should, in which case things are just ignored, annoyingly, bent to whatever current writer decides. It's magical and amazing that 'TOS' should have made reference to a time thirty years into the future, and had no idea whatsoever that in the period mentioned, their humble little TV show would have spawned a vast marketing empire that was putting out fifty-plus episodes a year, with a long-running film series giving us a film every two years. There was no way to predict such an outcome, and to this day it remains unprecedented, at least in Western culture. There are books that have posited ways in which these 'historical' events could have transpired as part of known history (and I do wish that 'Voyager' had at least referenced the Eugenics Wars to a small degree when they visited 1996 in 'Future's End'), but it remains difficult to see humanity building such a vessel as the SS Botany Bay, complete with suspended animation. But perhaps, if it was built by the supermen themselves in secret for their flight from defeat… See, there's always a way to justify anything on screen, and they even give themselves an out in the episode when they say that there are only fragmentary records of the era.

More glaring is that Spock cites this as the era of 'your last so-called World War,' which is another big mistake, unless he was referring to World War III which came later, as the reason for the missing records and inconsistencies, and who are we to say that history was kept intact in this period, the 21st Century repeatedly noted as a bad time for humanity in various Treks (in that regard perhaps we are fulfilling its predictions - I've always found it startlingly ironic that even the utopian, optimistic future portrayed by Trek has said that really bad stuff happens between us now, and them then), though it seems pretty clear Spock was referring to the Eugenics Wars. However you look at it, allowing for so much time to have passed as the reason they get some fundamental facts wrong (and it could be that later historians were able to uncover better evidence as happens today, where older, more accurate translation of the Bible became possible, for example), it's very enjoyable to hear and see more of the unfolding world of Trek come to light, much as it was to see the history of the Enterprise explored earlier in the season, Roddenberry knowing the value of things having history rather than always being brand-spanking new as is often the case with other series'. It's wonderful to see an actual Earth ship, other than the Enterprise - I mean, it's great to see any ship at all when so often the budget didn't stretch to more than a reference in dialogue or a glowing blob on the Viewscreen!

We get the dress uniforms, too, with Kirk, Spock, McCoy and even Scotty getting to slap on the fancy togs (though Mr. Scott hadn't yet been granted a kilt at this point). Mr. Kyle returns, credited as Transporter Technician in the credits, and even Mr. Leslie can be seen on the Bridge and at the meal in Khan's honour. I wonder, was that blue liquid they had to drink, the famed Romulan Ale we'd hear so much about? They liked their weird space foods, like the colourful cubes, though as in 'Star Trek VI,' it was really all just a different setting for a war-game, Khan and Kirk pitting their tactics against each other in wit and difficult questions. I'd say Kirk got the victory in that regard, if Khan's retreat to his quarters is anything to go by, not to mention his angry mood when McGivers visits to apologise and gets pulled into his web. McCoy may not show fear when Khan threatened his life, but he does show another inconsistency - I'm sure there's an episode where he rants about butcher's knives and the savage means of medicine in the past, but there on his wall he proudly displays a collection of antique surgeon's tools which Khan is only too happy to appropriate as a weapon! No doubt it was a gift from whatever surgery he worked at in honour of his joining the Enterprise, and knowing he was a crotchety man, especially sensitive on the subject they must have made sure to give him such a present as a bit of a joke, and he would have kept it on the wall as a reminder of how far his profession has come. That's what I reckon, anyway.

The legacy of Khan has been developed into legendary status, almost entirely due to the success of 'The Wrath of Khan,' which singlehandedly ensured Trek's future (for at least two films, since 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home' was the most successful of the original film series), and while we can thank Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer in large part, much credit should go to Ricardo Montalban, Gene L. Coon, and Carey Wilbur (the two writers), for giving us such a surprising and thoughtful ending that was unlike most of the twenty-odd stories that had gone before. Khan's influence stretched into most of the succeeding TV spinoffs, right up until the final season of 'Enterprise' in 2005, which, until recently, was the last word of Trek on TV, so it's especially good to go back to the origins of this compelling figure and see how well the Captain and crew compared with him.

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