Spoilers Canon, Continuity, and Pike's Accident

The first draft of the script the villain was supposed to be John Harrison, renegade Starfleet officer turned terrorist. Then Orci or Lindelof (I forget which) had the idea "what if John Harrison was an alias and he's really Khan?" Which ever one thought it up, the other was against it, and the two spent an entire year arguing over it, which is why the movie's release was postponed from 2012 to 2013.

When the decision was made to go with Khan, they decided to use John Ericson as the alias, as an easter egg, and thus all the actors spoke that name while filming. But during post-production, Orci worried this made it way too obvious to the fans that the character was Khan and thus had it dubbed to Harrison.

 

This one.

Abrams gets a lot of shit, undeserved, but Lindelof had the tendency to throw out a lot off odd ball ideas. He was also responsible for a Promethus rewrite.

 

There were versions of the story where it was Khan and where it was rogue Section 31 agent Robert April. This was early phases though, I doubt it got as far as scripting.

And because these movies are action sequences first, the big gun Khan has on Kronos is called "April's big gun" in concept art.

 

Renegade Robert April ended up being used in the movie's prequel comic Countdown to Darkness.

 

I was spoiled as soon as "John Harrison" asked the number of torpedoes the Enterprise was carrying and Spock replied that there were 72. The exact same number of survivors that were left among Khan's people in "Space Seed." I immediately thought, "Shit, they're doing Khan." (I was already 85% sure it was going to be Khan, but I was holding out hope they'd do something more original.) One of the many disappointments that movie had for me.

Yeah, that sums it up well.

 

Excellent comic and leads up to a fun movie.

 

I do not have as much disdain for STID as some do. I think its an entertaining but far from perfect entry in the series. STILL, the one thing I think they should have done with the movie was to keep Admiral Marcus the villain but drop the Augment storyline and have Benedict Cumberbatch as John Harrison, a disgruntled Starfleet Intelligence Officer with information that was a threat to the Admiral and his plans for weaponization. That would have been a far more interesting storyline in my opinion than adding Khan just because it was the second movie (which is what it felt like).

 

Yeah, I had successful avoided spoilers on Cumberbatch's identity, but then a couple of days before the movie came out, a trailer or TV advert mentioned that number and I was like "Whelp, he's Khan."

 

100% agreed. I think Harrison as an intelligence officer, possibly an augment that Section 31 had been experimenting with gone rogue. Marcus was an amazing villain I love him with his reactionary viewpoint.

 

I mean, the Badmiral thing certainly is overdone but it didn’t bother me too much here because his motivation actually was a great post-9/11 parallel.

 

Similar thing happened with me for Beyond. They managed to keep a lid on the fact that Krall was human, until the day of release, I was watching TV before leaving for the theatre and there was a commercial on TV showing Idris Elba as a human which basically gave the whole thing away.

 

I hate that! Trailers should never give away something like that!

 

They literally spoiled it with a TV spot where you see Bones watching them do the space jump and the screen says "KHAN"

 

That one got me too. Around here that commercial didn't come out until the week after the premiere ( or I didn't see it until then ). I was supposed to go with some other people the weekend the film came out, but unfortunately they went without me so I didn't end up going until the following week and by that time I had seen the spoiler.

 

I think I remember one of the trailers showing the back of his head, but not his face.

 

I love Benedict Cumberbatch, but he was horribly miscast in STID. And the whole Khan thing made it worse.

 

And coincided with a drone strike that I had recently heard about and listened to on the news. There was a lot of interesting allegories in it, and Weller did fantastic in the job.

I would have preferred no Khan, but Cumberbatch did great in the role. A wonderful menacing figure.

 

Same. Honestly Into Darkness would have been a better film if Cumberbatch's character had just been a terrorist radicalized by Marcus's militancy and jingoism rather than Khan.

 

YUP.