Ok, I think I have the trailer figured out...

[Samuel T. Cogley]

Tosk wrote:

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For my money, Garth is the best candidate for a new take because his episode was lame. Whereas they would have to compete with good material doing Khan or Mitchell, with Garth the only way is up.

Well, using this analysis, the villain is clearly Harcourt Fenton Mudd.

[Balrog]

Hell, he could be the sibling of a dead Red Shirt.

[Maestro]

I'm going with someone having the last name of Garrovick. Why? Because no one else has guessed this.

[Ian Keldon]

Robert_T_April wrote:

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In response to your quote from the trailer:
"We found him. He tried to take over. We exiled/imprisoned him..."
That actually fits the backstory of Garth.
The race of "shape-shifters" gifted him with their ability to change form because he was so gravely injured, and could have in some way altered him mentally. He ended up turning on them and wanted to destroy them. Naturally his officers turned on him and Garth was inevitably imprisoned/exiled and later deemed insane by Starfleet.
So IMO this quote from the trailer more fits Garth...not Khan.

That quote was not from the trailer. That was a generalized idea from me of how to handle the Khan backstory in film.

And the shapeshifters never gave Garth the sort of "supersoldier" attirbutes that the trailer character displays. Garth was not a one-man weapon as the trailer character is said to be.

[Therin of Andor]

Vorta Claus wrote:

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Why wold Khan wear a Starfleet uniform?

Have you seen "Space Seed"?

[M'Sharak]

Therin of Andor wrote:

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Have you seen "Space Seed"?

In this story, Therin. That one's already been done and we're in a different reality now.

[Enterprise is Great]

Maybe Cumby's suit gets ripped and he's forced to wear a Starfleet uniform. So many possibilities. Guy in a Starfleet uni doesn't necessarily equal Starfleet officer. Most likely it does but not 100%.

[Saul]

M'Sharak wrote:

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In this story, Therin. That one's already been done and we're in a different reality now.

Right. So Khan can look white too

Khamberbatch isn't wearing a full uniform. Possibly he joined starfleet in some capacity after they found him in deep space.

[MPH]

It just seems obvious to me its Gary Mitchell.

[Vektor]

My Name Is Legion wrote:

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Yeah, the notion that race has anything important to do with Khan is arrant nonsense.

Folks who develop "expectations" about people's backgrounds based on their surnames must live in a frequent state of surprise if not shock.

If we were talking about a new character, you would be correct. Khan, however, is an established character portrayed in an iconic fashion, so it's fair to make certain assumptions about his race, nationality, etc. based on the Khan we've seen before. What a lot of people fail to understand is that Abrams and his team may have chosen to simply ignore those assumptions.

In fact, the longer this goes on, the more I'm leaning toward the Khan theory. They were after Del Toro for the role originally, which might suggest at least a superficial effort to match the Montalbahn template, but when that didn't pan out they just decided not to limit themselves. If Cumberbatch's audition blew them away as much as they said it did, maybe his skin tone and accent simply ceased to matter.

But what about Khan predating the timeline changes? Well, maybe this timeline is actually a lot more divergent than anyone realized. Maybe something else changed things much further in the past so even Khan was affected. Or maybe Abrams just said screw it, we're going with Cumberbatch, and let the fanboys bitch. For the record, I'll be one of those, but I'm also willing to be sufficiently entertained by the movie that I really don't care in the end. I gave up being a Trek purist a long time ago.

So if it is Khan, how does he fit into the new timeline? Well, just off the top of my head, what if the new Star Trek timeline was actually created long before Nero's temporal incursion in the last movie? What if the new Star Trek timeline is actually our timeline, one in which the Eugenics Wars were somehow prevented from happening? What if Gary Seven, played by Robert Lansing dead ringer Peter Weller, somehow thwarted Khan before he could rise to conquer half the world and either shipped him off in cryo sleep aboard the Botany Bay or simply froze him and stashed him in the basement for a couple of hundred years? What if someone other than Kirk and the Enterprise found him and revived him, turning him loose on the world that wronged him and denied him his destiny?

That's just one possible scenario out of dozens in which Khan, or some incarnation of him, might be the villain. The fact that Cumberbatch bears no resemblance whatsoever to Montalbahn may be entirely beside the point.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Vektor wrote:

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They were after Del Toro for the role originally, which might suggest at least a superficial effort to match the Montalbahn template, but when that didn't pan out they just decided not to limit themselves. If Cumberbatch's audition blew them away as much as they said it did, maybe his skin tone and accent simply ceased to matter.

This would be my thinking as well; it's the way things often work.

[Nameless Crewman]

Is there any reason the villain has to be an established character? I doubt that he is any of the top listed contenders.

[Sindatur]

Nameless Crewman wrote:

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Is there any reason the villain has to be an established character? I doubt that he is any of the top listed contenders.

No reason other than being told the Villian is a Season 1 Canon person

[Ian Keldon]

Ok, I'm about to piss some people off...with the revelations from today (and after learning that the recent comic story with Mitchell. IS canon to the JJ-verse), I have to admit that it's possbile that it could be Mitchell. The description in the "9-minutes" story could lend itself to Mitchell easily. The new still puts a different spin on the "glass wall" scene (referencing the Delta Vega holding cell scene in WNMGB).

I don't know which way to go now...