SPOILER ALERT!!! If you haven't seen the movie, go see it and form your own analysis, then read on.
I'm not sure for how long now, IMDB has listed Benedict Cumberbatch as playing John Harrison/Kahn, but given the reliability of the site, I disregarded this information and persisted that it was not true. Every magazine article that has said it, every source on this site that has claimed it over the past year, I scoffed at. Why? Because it didn't make sense to me given what we know about the rules of this new rebooted timeline.
So, being a huge Trek fan, and having faith in J.J. Abrhams, I held to the hope that John Harrison was just that: John Harrison. Then, tonight, I saw the film and screamed inside as Benedict spat the words on screen, "My name is Kahn."
"How could this be?" I wondered. It didn't make sense at all and it didn't follow the rules. Sure, given the new continuity, the SS Botany Bay could have been discovered earlier, as he suggests it was, and Kahn could have been awoken sooner. In fact, I have no problem with that aspect at all. It still all falls into the parameters set forth by the first film and the creation of the new time line. In other words, anything that happened before George Kirk crashed his ship into Nero's remains intact, which is further proven in an Into Darkness Easter Egg. (A model of Zefram Cochran's ship and the Enterprise NX-01 are on a table in Admiral Marcus' office.)
The problem is, this does not explain why Kahn would look so different and have a different accent. Sure, in Space Seed he was awoken and brought immediately onto the Enterprise, where as John Harrison's Kahn had years of god knows what going on before we saw him, but no mention of reconstructive surgery or further genetic manipulation was made. So, why does "Kahn" look so different.
The answer, for me at least, is this: He is not Kahn. He lied.
Given what we know about the rules of the rebooted timeline, which I won't go into in depth, he can't be Kahn. Therefore, he is not. "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." He does not look, sound or act like Kahn, so he is not Kahn.
I know what some of you might say, that they had to recast the role just as they did with Kirk and Spock and the others, and so what we are seeing is simply a different actor's portrayal of an old character, but that doesn't satisfy the equation. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy look and act very similar to the way the characters looked before so why not attempt the same with Kahn?
Admiral Marcus could have woken any of the Botany Bay crew, and surely he must have, which either makes John Harrison a liar, or means that Kahn is simply an idea (like the Mandarin in Iron Man3). It doesn't matter which. I just think using the name Kahn was lazy writing, and done simply because non-trek fans wouldn't get who he was if he was just one of Kahn's lackeys trying to protect his frozen leader, and the name wasn't said. Creating a whole new villain is just too much work I suppose, but the movie would have been better for it.
So much for boldly going...