Sulu and Chekov, not in Space Seed

After watching STAR TREK (TOS) ~ "SPACE SEED" I noticed real fast that Sulu nor Chekov was on this episode but later during the movie, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, Mr. Chekov knew all about the story of Khan, the SS Botany Bay and Kirk's decision to leave Khan on a planet from the television series. Chekov (Walter Koenig) didn't come on the series until Season 2 and Space Seed was during Season 1.

So, I guess the reason that Mr. Chekov knows about Khan is due to the fact that he was off duty during television episode. Does anybody have any other ideas?

 

I believe Koenig did make a joke about Khan and Chekov met in a corridor.

 

Yes, Koenig's joke was along the lines of: Chekov is off duty with, ah, stomach problems. Khan has an urgent need to, ah, use the little boy's room, but Chekov is, ah, monopolising it. So when Chekov finally leaves, after Khan's endured an agonisingly long wait, Khan swears that he'll never forget the man who made him suffer so long...

 

Or maybe Khan was confusing Chekov with one of the Beatles...

 

It's a big ship with over 300 people on board. No reason why Chekov and Khan couldn't have met off camera at some point.

 

In DC Comics' Who's Who in Star Trek, writer Allan Asherman posited that Chekov had been assigned to engineering during "Space Seed" and led the resistance to Khan's takeover of that section. I borrowed that explanation for my novel Ex Machina, and I believe Greg Cox followed that lead in his To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh.

Of course, there are many other continuity errors in TWOK that are hard to resolve. If Khan and his band of multiethnic adult followers were stranded 15 years ago, how come all his followers are now white and in their 20s? For that matter, how come Khan himself was no longer made up to look Indian? How could Chekov and the Reliant crew have no knowledge of Khan being stranded in the Ceti Alpha system, and how could their observational skills be so inept that they couldn't tell the fifth planet from the sixth? How come the refugees had movie-era Starfleet equipment adorning their hovels (and a movie-era insignia as Khan's medallion) when they were stranded years before that paraphernalia came into use? And so on. At least one can see a valid story reason for the continuity departure with Chekov, and it's easy enough to rationalize. (Although I don't see why they couldn't have used, say, Uhura in the role instead of Chekov -- unless it's because Walter Koenig was the better screamer.)

 

It's also possible that Khan met Chekov shortly after the events of "Space Seed," but before Khan's people were dumped on Ceti Alpha V. In To Reign in Hell, I made a point of establishing that Chekov was among the crew members who escorted Khan and his people to the planet and provided them with supplies, said goodbye to Marla, etc.

The simplest explanation has always been that Chekov was already a member of the crew during Khan's takeover, just not assigned to the bridge yet. This seems perfectly plausible to me. How many random crew members did we see every episode, most of whom had never been seen before? Presumably they'd always been there.

I mean, take Marla McIvers for example. She didn't just magically appear on the ship in time for "Space Seed." We didn't see her in any earlier episodes, but I imagine she bumped into Charlie Evans at some point, was affected by the "Naked Time" virus along with everybody else, beamed down to the Shore Leave planet for some R&R, and attended Anton Karidian's shipboard production of "Hamlet" . . . .

 

It has been a long time since reading the WOK novel...anyone else recall if the Khan and Chekov matter was explained?

 

Ah, we had met Chekov before this episode, several hundred stardates before in fact: his introductory "Catspaw" apparently takes place before "Space Seed" in-universe.

From there, it's not a big leap to accept that everybody on the ship got Khan's autograph, many insisting on anatomically challenging locations and tattooing gear. The budget of the episode just didn't allow them to show more than a handful of the groupies, but the message was clear enough: only Spock could fight the irresistible charm of the superman.

Because they are genetically perfect fifteen-year-olds, all born from the dominant marriage(s) on the colony?

Let's remember that for all the talk, Khan's followers in "Space Seed" all represented the generic western ethnicity (albeit with dark hair more prevalent than blonde). If Scotty was right and there were other types, they were apparently all slaves to the top clique and toiling in menial tasks off camera...

He got sandblasted before throwing together that cool mask.

Chekov demonstrably had the knowledge, and Khan deduced on screen that Chekov had kept the facts from Terrell - and Kirk thus supposedly from Starfleet. Not much mystery there.

How could anybody? If there are five planets, then the fifth is the fifth, not the sixth, with one world arbitrarily left uncounted! One could just as well ask why Earth isn't correctly identified as the fourth rock from Sol by Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally, what with Vulcan (the real one) once having been the first even if later developments made that unhappen.

Or are we assuming that the heroes could uniquely identify a planet whose primary attribute in the movie was that all its attributes had changed? If Ceti Alpha V had changed its orbit and become a desert after Ceti Alpha VI had exploded, odds are that there wouldn't be anything recognizable about the star system's planets, and no good way to tell whether the desert world had been Ceti Alpha I, II, III, IV, V or VI previously.

Had the system been charted in detail, Kirk wouldn't have dared strand Khan there. And had Starfleet possessed the ability to monitor distant star systems in real time for cataclysmic explosions and the like, we wouldn't have had "Doomsday Machine".

...Kirk even referred to her in terms that suggested that she was a longterm nuisance. Chekov in contrast was spoken of as a newcomer in his first onscreen appearance, so it's a slightly different case from either McGivers or some random Joe Tormolen who was not given a background one way or the other.

Timo Saloniemi

 

If I remember correctly, the joke involved Chekov taking too long to use the restroom, prompting Khan to threaten that he would "never forget his face."

--Sran

 

Works for me.

 

This.

I've never understood the hang up that fans have about Chekov not being in "Space Seed". FFS, when he was introduced in Season Two, it was never implied that Chekov was a completely new recruit... he was just an officer we hadn't seen before. There is absolutely no evidence that Chekov wasn't on the ship in Season One. Just because the actor didn't join the cast until the next season doesn't mean that Chekov himself was a new member of the crew.

As for the OP... so neither Sulu nor Chekov were in "Space Seed". So what? It doesn't mean they weren't on the ship.

 

^Still, it was an odd choice on the filmmakers' part to have the characters remember a meeting that we never saw in the episode. It can be easily enough rationalized, obviously, but it's still a retcon rather than building on what "Space Seed" actually established, and that's a curious creative decision. Why did they decide to make Chekov the one who recognized Khan? Why not put, say, Uhura or Scotty on the Reliant instead?

 

^ I agree completely, it is a strange choice but not one that is necessarily beyond the realms of a quick retcon. I heard that Walter Koenig himself recognised the contradiction, but didn't bring it up with the producers in case they decided to remove Chekov from having such a strong role in the script and replace him with someone else.

 

This is a great point, Christopher. I think the inclusion of Scotty aboard Reliant would have made perfect sense given his engineering background. It's entirely plausible that his expertise would have been needed to determine the best way to deploy the Genesis device without endangering the ship once a test site was chosen, so it goes without saying that he should have been included in the site selection process. I suppose the writers wanted to show Chekov in a different role to emphasize the passage of time, but as a navigator and security officer, his presence on a scientific mission would otherwise have been difficult to justify, even knowing the sensitive nature of the Genesis experiment.

Scotty's absence from Enterprise during the initial confrontation with Khan would have changed the nature of those events, but he still could have been present for the battle in the Mutara Nebula near the film's end.

--Sran

 

I'd go with the opinion that Khan and Chekov meet off screen. It's easy enough to rationalise that with a crew of 430 that Khan meet some of those off screen.

 

Walter Koenig once joked that Khan was going to the bathroom and Chekov was blocking it. Khan got upset yelling "I will never forget your face!"

 

Ahhh! I thought I had a faint memory of some sort of Chekov backstory to explain Khan recognizing him.

He had a case, and since the production cared enough to bring back a "C" player from TOS under the idea that some would recognize him, they handed Winston a bargaining chip!