• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Khan: Alternate Alternate Timeline?

Bry_Sinclair

Bry_Sinclair

Vice Admiral
Admiral
Has there been an explanation (or at least a wild theory) as to why, if the timeline diverged from the Prime in the 2230s with the destruction of the Kelvin, Khan looks so radically different?

Should he look just like he did from the 1990s/2000s? I'm sure the technology exists to have used a stand in and then CGI-ed Ricardo Montalbán in their place.

Is NuKhan actually Khan or another 'superman' pretending to be him? Did Marcus have him undergo plastic surgery? Was the Botany Bay caught up in a temporal flux caused by the change in timeline?
 
Khan looks different because he's being played by a different actor. The same reason Kirk has blue eyes, and McCoy's gone from stickman to beefcake.

If you need a fanwanky explanation to reconcile everything, seeing how Khan turns white between "Space Seed" and TWoK (IRL they dropped the faux-Indian makeup), I wonder if Khan was merely heavily tanned in "Space Seed" - a tan he lost on Ceti Alpha V in one life, and in the Section 31 base beneath London in another.
khan_whitening.jpg


Being engineered in a lab somewhere (although even this part is a WoK retcon, Khan in SS was merely a product of selective breeding), how he looks is irrelevant anyway - either a fluke, or the whim of his designer.

Now we just need to explain how his followers morphed into blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan youths between SS and WoK. Any takers?
 
First they selectively breed you, then they engineer you in a lab, then they place you on hostile Ceti Alpha V to untan you, and finally they give you invasive plastic surgery against your will... And then they wonder why you got so mad at everyone?
 
Because a descendant of the bum who phasered himself in COTEOF was on the team that genetically engineered Khan and he wanted him to be white. In the Prime Universe, this guy is dead, so another guy ended up leading that team and he preferred a more darker complexion for his creation.
 
FKnight said:
Because a descendant of the bum who phasered himself in COTEOF was on the team that genetically engineered Khan and he wanted him to be white. In the Prime Universe, this guy is dead, so another guy ended up leading that team and he preferred a more darker complexion for his creation.
Click to expand...
The undetected presence of Data's head caused someone to die? Or they fallen off a chair as they were picking the sequel to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which Twain never wrote in the Abrams timeline, from the top shelf? Or maybe their head exploded trying to figure out the time travel paradoxes on the Interwebs?
 
He looks different because he's played by Benedict Cumberbatch rather than Ricardo Montalban.
 
One wonders if Khan's Blood of Life isn't something engineered into him in the 23rd century, too...

His new job would certainly call for him to receive a face change or three. But he would also gain access to technologies new to him, and might put one of those to good use: he might have altered his blood for the specific purpose of the blackmail scheme at the beginning of the movie. The technologies would come courtesy of S31, but Khan, the product of mad scientists from the 20th century and a longterm resident of their evil labs, would no doubt know a trick or two of his own that he now could play out with those technologies.

This would patch up yet another plot hole: none of the other corpsicles available to McCoy would have been sufficient for curing Kirk, meaning Spock and then Uhura would really have to succeed in their mission of retrieving Khan alive.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Nah. He had magic blood all along.

And it's not a plot hole for McCoy to want Khan alive. He didn't have a chance to test any of the other supermen for healing blood. McCoy knew that Khan's blood had curative properties and he needed a sure thing.

As far as Khan's appearance goes, it never bothered me. Cumberbatch is a fantastic actor and Trek was lucky to get him. As Daniel points out, it wasn't as if Ricardo Montalban was particularly swarthy.
 
McCoy knew that Khan's blood had curative properties and he needed a sure thing.
Click to expand...
What he really needed was a quick thing, though. Why not try out some of the other donors while Spock was at it?

If Khan had it all along, then it would be very odd for the others not to have it. And IMHO we could and perhaps should assume McCoy did test some of the others while he had the time, came up negative, and for this reason didn't call off Spock and Uhura; why wouldn't McCoy have done that?

Sure, thawing one of the crew might take some time. But it's not as if taking a blood sample would have been established as lethal to a sleeper.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Since Spock recognized both Kirk and Scotty in the '09 movie, the obvious intent is that everyone looks the same in the alternate timeline. Don't drive yourself nuts coming up with explanations.
 
FKnight said:
Because a descendant of the bum who phasered himself in COTEOF was on the team that genetically engineered Khan and he wanted him to be white. In the Prime Universe, this guy is dead, so another guy ended up leading that team and he preferred a more darker complexion for his creation.
Click to expand...

Since anything that happened before 2233 is common to both timelines (indeed, before that time, there WERE no separate timelines), the bum phasering himself is part of the past of both of them.

Same goes for Data's head. From the point of view of the 19th-century environment where it was found, both the prime and Abrams timelines are possible futures, and characters from both of those futures could come back. And even encounter each other.
 
Khan no look like Mr. roarke. Me no like magic blood. Me think it too not goodest plot element they did
 
Khan was Top Secret Agent John Harrison. Surely he changed his face at least twice for professional reasons!

The actual visual discontinuity there is that the movie has the sleepers in coffin-like cryopods, while the episode had them in built-in shelves of the Botany Bay.

No, the shelves could not have been the pods - it was almost a plot point that they could not be removed for examination, but had to be opened. Yes, it might be that only Khan and his closest lieutenants were on quick-thaw shelves while the rest were in these pods - but where did Marcus then get pods for those lieutenants? No, they aren't modern pods, McCoy makes that clear. Although yes, Khan might have carried spares. And indeed some of his crew died while asleep as per "Space Seed" - perhaps their coffins could be repaired and put to use?

Timo Saloniemi
 
And of course the second best explanation (after the obvious "who cares?") would be that while the pods themselves were new, the cryogenic equipment in them was ripped out of the walls of Botany Bay, which proved to be easy.
 
That'd work - although it makes the S31 folks quite the aces, as they manage to perform a transfer while McCoy feels he's not competent enough to open a lid, and they apparently don't even thaw and/or lose anybody.

Or do they? In "Space Seed", there were 72 survivors sharp (not counting the already awakened Khan), but perhaps there had still been 79 or so a bit earlier, and those were lost to the S31 experiments...

Timo Saloniemi
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

FederationHistorian
Role swaps in the Kelvinverse
Replies
2
Views
378
Tenacity
Tenacity
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top