The book is written by CBM editor Edward Gross with satirical illustrations by artist Tom Holtkamp. No other book goes behind the scenes of every episode of the original Star Trek in the way that Trek Classic does, featuring the comments of dozens of writers, directors, producers and guest stars. The Kindle edition is only $8.99.
Episode #21
"Space Seed"
Original Airdate: 2/16/67
Written by Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilbur
Directed by Marc Daniels
Guest Starring: Richard Montalban (Khan), Madlyn Rhue (Marla McGivers), Blasidell Makee (Spinelli), Mark Tobin (Joaqin)
The Enterprise comes across a derelict "sleeper ship" named the Botony Bay, which contains a crew of approximately 70 men and women in suspended animation. Led by Khan Noonien Singh, these people turn out to be the result of genetic experimentation on Earth in the 1990s. Basically a race of supermen, with strength and intelligence nearly ten times that of an average person, they had attempted to take over the Earth and triggered World War III, the Eugenics War. They managed to flee in the Botony Bay, and are now revived in the 23rd Century.
Khan seizes the moment and, using historian Marla McGivers, nearly takes over the Enterprise. Kirk and company manage to gain the upper hand (barely) and sentence Khan and his people to the somewhat savage Ceti Alpha V. At least it will give Khan, McGivers and the others a chance to tame a world, rather than waste their lives in a Federation penal colony.
*****
Surprisingly, Khan Noonien Singh may never have come into existence at all if it hadn't been for Captain Video.
"Hell," laughs writer Carey Wilbur, "the plot for 'Space Seed' came from an old CAPTAIN VIDEO I did. Of course we did some very far out things on that show, including the popular idea of people being transported in space while in suspended animation."
Allan Asherman's THE STAR TREK COMPENDIUM states that "Carey Wilbur began his outline for 'Space Seed' by explaining how out of place in today's world a man from Renaissance times would be."
"That sounds a little grand to me," Wilbur smiles. "I was just thinking of an adventure story, although there was some of that element there. I had this idea, which I revived from Captain Video because I thought it was time to do it again. It was a crazy story where we did the legend of men being turned into beasts, and our villainess had been transported from the days of Greek mythology to the future. So in doing 'Space Seed,' we took away the mythological powers and replaced them with a genetically altered human being.
"To be honest, I don't remember a heck of a lot about Khan. He was a criminal who had been deported in a seed ship who tried to take over the Enterprise after he was more or less accidentally revived."
As a writer for hire, Wilbur had been asked to supply a script for the show, which eventually became "Space Seed." Gene Coon did a rewrite on it and the author had no further contact with STAR TREK as he went off to other assignments.
"I had no qualms about Gene rewriting me," he points out. "He was an excellent writer and certainly knew the show better than just about anyone. I'm sure he rewrote the script to conform to the series, but I've never seen it. I think I've only seen three or four things I've written, for the simple reason that I know what's in them. The only exception has been LOST IN SPACE, which I wrote numerous scripts for. We were doing fairy tales and I used to watch them all the time. Hell, I used to watch other people's episodes as well, simply because it was such a fun show.
"People want to believe that there's going to be that glorious period of space flight. We want to believe that there's something out there. STAR TREK offered the human race a future, and God knows we need the promise of the future."
Stated director Marc Daniels, "There's not much I remember about the episode except that we used those capsules which carried people in suspended animation. Ricardo Montalban was a very capable and good actor, and the episode, of course, led to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Part of the problem in 'Space Seed' was trying to visualize Khan's tremendous power--where he could turn out a finger and turn somebody upside down. That was difficult, but we got away with it thanks to stunt people and judicious editing."
Recalled the late Ricardo Montalban, who had previously starred in Gene Roddenberry's THE SECRET DEFENSE OF and who, of course, brought Khan to life, "In those days, there wasn’t the dearth of material that we have today on television. Some shows were quite special, and certainly STAR TREK was one of them. I was quite familiar with it. As an actor, I thought it would be great fun to do it. Khan was not the run of the mill sort of portrayal. It had to have a different dimension. That attracted me very much. And when they sent me the script, I thought it was a fascinating character and I loved doing it.
“Khan was a character that was bigger than life,” he added. “He had to be played that way. He was extremely powerful both mentally and physically, with an enormous amount of pride. But he was not totally villainous. He had some good qualities. I saw a nobility in the man that, unfortunately, was overridden by ambition and a thirst for power. I saw that in the character and played it accordingly. It was very well received at the time, and I was delighted. Then I forgot about it and went on to the next thing.”
Besides pride in his performance and the final episode, there was no reason for Montalban NOT to move on and continue with his career. Just as there was no reason to think that a role he had portrayed in a 1967 television series would enter his life again some 15 years later. But it did.
There is an interesting moment at the end of “Space Seed” where Spock says to Kirk, “It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years and learn what crop has sprung from the seed you planted today,” to which Kirk responded, “Yes, Mr. Spock, it would indeed.” Even MORE interesting was an earlier draft of the script in which Kirk’s response was, “Let’s just hope that seed doesn't come after us.” Prophetic indeed.
Following the release of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, which was deemed by most people to be something of a disaster (though there is definitely more to it than most people believe), Gene Roddenberry was “boosted” to the position of executive consultant, and TV veteran Harve Bennett (THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, TIME TRAX, INVASION AMERICA) was brought in to produce the second (and ultimately third through fifth) film in the series, ultimately called STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN. As he began researching the story for the film, he studied old episodes of Star Trek along with writer Jack Sowards.
“I thought ‘Space Seed’ was wonderful,” said the late Sowards. “Ricardo Montalban is a classically trained actor. Anybody who can deliver those lines has got to be. Most actors in town would mumble them, but the man knows just how far to go. If you’ve watched FANTASY ISLAND or his movies, there’s a smoothness. In this, he was something totally different and he knew just where to go with it without going over the edge. He IS Khan. He brings that sort of macho arrogance to it and you believe this is a genetically engineered man who is stronger, smarter and brighter. A hero is nothing without a villain. If you overcome a slug and a snail, you haven’t done anything. If you overcome something like Khan, a hero is defined.”
No one was more surprised than Montalban himself to be asked to reprise the role of Khan, particularly since he had become so identified as Mr. Roarke from FANTASY ISLAND. “When I started to articulate the words of Khan for myself,” he explained, “I sounded like Mr. Roarke, and I was very concerned about it. Then I asked Harve Bennett to send me a tape of the old show that I did. I ran it two or three times. When I first saw it, I didn’t even remember what I did. On the third viewing, a strange thing happened to me and I started reliving the moment and the mental process that I had arrived at at that time began to work in me and I associated myself with that character more and more. Finally, I took the script, found one of the scenes and did to myself, and I did feel than that Roarke had disappeared and that indeed I was into this character.
“Now this character presented a different problem,” he added. “The original character was in total control of the situation. Guided simply by his overriding ambition. The new character, however, was now obsessed. He was a man obsessed with vengeance for the death of his wife, for which he blamed Kirk. If he was bigger than life before, I felt he really had to become bigger than life almost to the point of becoming ludicrous to be effective. If I didn’t play it fully and totally obsessed with this, then I think the character would be little and insignificant and uninteresting. The danger was in going overboard. Very often, an actor will play things safely and it works. You can play safe, you can underact, put the lid on and it works beautifully. In this case, I thought if I did that it would be very dull. I had to be, if not deranged, then very close to it. I had to find a tone of really going right to the razor’s edge before the character becomes a caricature.”
One bit of criticism WRATH OF KHAN received was the fact that Kirk and Khan never come face to face, only dealing with each other over view screens and communicators. “I don’t think this was a drawback,” opined Montalban. “Actually, that was an element that was interesting. It was difficult as an actor, but that separate of the two ships gave it a really poignant touch to the scenes. The fact that being so strong, there was such pressure knowing that he can’t get his hands on Kirk. I didn’t mind that. I minded as an actor. I wish William Shatner and I had somehow been able to respond to each other at the time. The actual situation, though, I thought was a plus. I think we left the audiences wanting them to get together and we don’t.”
Khan may have perished at the end of the film, but the character still managed to live on in author Greg Cox’s pair of novels, THE EUGENICS WARS: THE RISE AND FALL OF KHAN NOONIEN SINGH, as well as TO REIGN IN HELL: THE EXILE OF KHAN NOONIEN SINGH. Wikipedia describes the books as follows: “The first volume deals mostly with the Chrysalis Project, which was how Khan Noonien Singh and the rest of the supermen were created. The genetically engineered ‘Children of Chrysalis’ were mentally and physically superior to ordinary men and women. They were five times stronger than the average person, their lung efficiency was 50 percent better than normal, their heart valve action had twice the power of an average human, and their intelligence was double that of normal humans. When Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln begin to learn about this project, Roberta goes undercover as a scientist that wants to join the Chrysalis Project. The members of Chrysalis are convinced that she is who she claims to be, and she is allowed to join. Roberta heads out to an underground complex beneath the Thar desert in India where the project is housed. Once there, Roberta begins to work out a way to stop the project.
“Roberta and Gary Seven finally decide that they should blow up the nuclear reactor that runs the underground complex. Of course, being humanitarian, they do not wish anyone to be harmed, so they give all of the scientists plenty of time to leave and Roberta uses Gary's matter transporter to get the children (including the then young Khan) to safety. The complex is destroyed, along with the project's head & Khan's birth mother, Sarina Kaur, who refused to leave her life's work. This was not the last time Khan would have to deal with Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, however. Gary Seven kept tabs on Khan and initially hopes to train Khan as his successor. But, at the end of the book, Khan betrays Gary and Roberta and the hopes that Khan could be Seven's apprentice are completely shattered.
“In the second volume, Seven tries to prevent World War Three from breaking out. He has to deal with not only Khan though, but many of the other ‘Children of Chrysalis,’ most of whom are now major political figures (an African military strongman, a European dictator, an American leader of a separatist movement, and a religious cult leader, among others). The superhuman men and women begin to battle for power and several of them manage to gain influence. None, however, have more power than Khan. At first, Khan seems to be building an empire, but, after several assassination attempts by fellow supermen and riots of his people, he begins to lose everything.
“After Khan feels that he is doomed to be defeated, he begins to power up his Morning Star Satellite which will destroy the ozone layer and kill all life on earth after he dies. Seven shows up though, and convinces Khan that it would be better to forge a new life elsewhere using the stolen DY-100 sleeper ship that he and Roberta obtained from Area 51. Khan and a large group of the other superhumans leave on the ship in search of a better life. The novel ends in 1996 as Seven leaves Earth for retirement.”
Offering his overall opinion on Khan, author Greg Cox says, “He’s a great, charismatic villain. He’s like the Doctor Doom of the STAR TREK universe, both appealing and evil at the same time. And, of course, you have the fact that ‘Space Seed’ is one of the episodes that cried out for a sequel, and it came with a back story that I could expand on. There’s a scene in ‘Space Seed’ where Kirk and Scotty try to explain to a bemused Spock that’s it’s possible to condemn somebody and admire them at the same time. You can actually kind of like Khan and oppose everything he stands for at the same time. That’s the key to the character, which Spock doesn’t get. On the one hand you want to root for him, he’s interesting and fascinating, and at the same time he’s very dangerous.
“I tried to keep him sympathetic,” he adds, “even though over the course of my books I had to arc him from idealistic young man, to somewhat crazed, maniacal Khan of the movie. On the film there are two different Khans. There’s the young Khan we see in ‘Space Seed’ who is kind of ruthless, but is not the demented, vengeance-crazed loon he is in WRATH OF KHAN. They’re very different characters. You can connect the dots between the two Khans. That was what was interesting in doing the books, especially the third book, taking him from young red jump-suited Khan, to crazed wild-eyed Khan in the movie. Especially the third book, which is the Ceti-Alpha Five years. I basically got 300 pages out of three lines of dialogue from WRATH OF KHAN. It’s all about taking fragments of information and extrapolating, while writing a story that everyone knows the ending of.
“With Khan, we had very little information in ‘Space Seed’: 1990s, Northern India. We know that the supermen ended up quarreling among themselves and he made an escape in the Botony Bay. That’s all I had to work with. Needless to say I watched the episode and WRATH OF KHAN over and over again looking for information. Regarding the Eugenics Wars books, there were two approaches we could take and we went back and forth. You had the problem that the 1990s have come and gone and Khan did not take over the world. So, should we just assume STAR TREK is an alternate timeline and just ignore history as it were and I make some fantastic, apocalyptic TERMINATOR-like global war thing that never happened, or do we try and somehow finesse this and squeeze Khan into history as we know it? My editor, John Ordover, felt strongly that STAR TREK should be our history, not an alternate history. My directive then was to try and squeeze the Eugenics Wars into the ‘90s as we know it – Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, the whole thing. We eventually took the approach that it was like THE X-FILES, that it was a secret war that nobody knew was happening. There were all these random instances, but the true story is that these were all inter-connected and there was this underground conspiracy of supermen trying to take over the world that did not come out until generations later.”
Interestingly, Cox explains that the Khan books more or less happened by accident. “I was writing the book ASSIGNMENT: ETERNITY, my ASSIGNMENT: EARTH [see the season two episode guide] novel, and there’s a moment where Spock says, ‘We have to return Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln to their own time, because according to historical records, they were responsible for helping to overthrow Khan Noonien Singh in the 1990s.’ As God as my witness, I intended that to be a cute punch line. It made sense. Then I turned in the book and my editor said, ‘Great idea. Do you want to write that book?’ So we ended up doing the Eugenics Wars books, which led to the Ceti Alpha V book.”
The possibility actually exists for Khan’s live-action return to the STAR TREK universe. In J.J. Abrams’ feature film, an alternative timeline has been created that would seem to pave the way for just such a situation. In fact, the issue was raised in an interview with co-screenwriter Roberto Orci that was conducted by GEEK MONTHLY magazine.
Q: Does your alternate timeline approach make anything possible in a sequel? So could Kirk and crew run into Khan, but have it play out totally differently than it did the first time?
ORCI: Without a doubt. The benefit of doing it this way is that the universe is not entirely changed, but it is not entirely predictable anymore. So the same characters can encounter the same situations, but have different outcomes.