Hey, don't ask me. I didn't write the script.How is 200 a good estimate for 270, as opposed to 300?Why must everything be precise? People don't talk like that. They estimate.
Unless they're Spock or Data, of course.
Will Khan Still be From the 1990s?
- Thread starter Jackson_Roykirk
- Start date
This.
THIS.
Read this people! Star Trek is FICTION. Who says it has to mesh with what we know of the past?
Too bad it's not Khan Trek.
^ 
It's a khanspiracy, I tell you!
It's a khanspiracy, I tell you!
That's a bit different. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is of historical fiction, and that's the reason people are interested in the book/movie. Meanwhile, people check out Abrams Trek because they want to see shit blow up in space. To the target audience (people who never saw Space Seen or TWOK) a referance to something happening in 1996 that onviously didn't really is going to stick out like a sore thumb.
If I were in charge (which, clearly, I'm not), I would make Khan have been born in 1996.
Escalating conflict and a spiraling economy have made much of the world ripe for charismatic dictators to start taking over. By 2040, many of these genetically engineered super-fellows simultaneously take control of numerous nations which have suffered the worst. Under the New Regime the people are rallied to fight and eventually, of the supermen's nations, only Khan's remains, having defeated and absorbed his neighbors.
He rules over a quarter of the Earth, mostly Western and Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and large parts of Africa. Khan's success is rapid but once his power is finalized, it becomes more and more clear that he is not able to get anything done really. He places severe regulations on all of his people and tries to force them into his vision of order which becomes more and more oppressive. After ten years or so of relative quiet in his dominion, he decides that since most of his earlier success was military in nature, he chooses to attempt to invade and conquer his biggest competitor, the U.S.A.
American intelligence agencies catch wind of this and the president orders a preemptive strike at the heart of Khan's empire which plays out in very short order. Khan's counter-Intelligence finds out the Americans are coming and Khan sees that he has made a dangerous miscalculation and that he will either rot in some prison camp someplace if he is captured, or get "SEAL-Team Sixxed." He can't bring himself to end it all himself, Hitler-fashion. But he doesn't have to. Hitler and Bin-Laden didn't have access to spaceships, Khan does.
He gets his most loyal personnel, about a hundred people, and launches in hibernation before the Americans can rush in and finish it off. No one was expecting this and he couldn't be stopped. But the Botany Bay was launched just in the nick of time, as the military strike was starting. The media reports Khan and everyone there were killed and it's all done.
This sets up an interesting connection to WWIII. In this version, Khan's take-over from the other Augments was the Eugenic's War. His empire ruled in peace and quiet ("there were no wars under his rule") but to get there he employed draconian measures to keep everyone down ("and as little freedom"). But, things did go smoothly for being such a huge operation ("he was the best of the dictators"). But he managed to rule everything with a cult of personality. After he was out of the picture, the whole empire collapsed into even more fractious and chaotic cells than they were when Khan first found them!
This is the boiling pot that overflows into WWIII as a direct result of his departure. So, later historians would look back at the period and discuss the Eugenics War and World War III in the same breath. So in that case, the Eugenics War would be the period of the last World War.
There are plenty of interesting ways to do this kind of exposition in a movie. Sarah Conner's description of Judgement Day in T2, Galadriel's narration at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, the nested flashbacks that start out the movie Serenity, even the birth of Kirk and the Kirk and Spock childhood moments in Abram's last Star Trek movie.
This of course does play around a bit with the pre-existing continuity, but I think it preserves enough while still making it play to a 2013 audience. And his birth in 1996 wouldn't even ever have to be mentioned in dialogue, just have it on a screen in the background or something. something subtle where it isn't important but it's there for the fans, so to speak.
I doubt they'll go that route, though. But I am interested in seeing how it does play out.
--Alex
Escalating conflict and a spiraling economy have made much of the world ripe for charismatic dictators to start taking over. By 2040, many of these genetically engineered super-fellows simultaneously take control of numerous nations which have suffered the worst. Under the New Regime the people are rallied to fight and eventually, of the supermen's nations, only Khan's remains, having defeated and absorbed his neighbors.
He rules over a quarter of the Earth, mostly Western and Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and large parts of Africa. Khan's success is rapid but once his power is finalized, it becomes more and more clear that he is not able to get anything done really. He places severe regulations on all of his people and tries to force them into his vision of order which becomes more and more oppressive. After ten years or so of relative quiet in his dominion, he decides that since most of his earlier success was military in nature, he chooses to attempt to invade and conquer his biggest competitor, the U.S.A.
American intelligence agencies catch wind of this and the president orders a preemptive strike at the heart of Khan's empire which plays out in very short order. Khan's counter-Intelligence finds out the Americans are coming and Khan sees that he has made a dangerous miscalculation and that he will either rot in some prison camp someplace if he is captured, or get "SEAL-Team Sixxed." He can't bring himself to end it all himself, Hitler-fashion. But he doesn't have to. Hitler and Bin-Laden didn't have access to spaceships, Khan does.
He gets his most loyal personnel, about a hundred people, and launches in hibernation before the Americans can rush in and finish it off. No one was expecting this and he couldn't be stopped. But the Botany Bay was launched just in the nick of time, as the military strike was starting. The media reports Khan and everyone there were killed and it's all done.
This sets up an interesting connection to WWIII. In this version, Khan's take-over from the other Augments was the Eugenic's War. His empire ruled in peace and quiet ("there were no wars under his rule") but to get there he employed draconian measures to keep everyone down ("and as little freedom"). But, things did go smoothly for being such a huge operation ("he was the best of the dictators"). But he managed to rule everything with a cult of personality. After he was out of the picture, the whole empire collapsed into even more fractious and chaotic cells than they were when Khan first found them!
This is the boiling pot that overflows into WWIII as a direct result of his departure. So, later historians would look back at the period and discuss the Eugenics War and World War III in the same breath. So in that case, the Eugenics War would be the period of the last World War.
There are plenty of interesting ways to do this kind of exposition in a movie. Sarah Conner's description of Judgement Day in T2, Galadriel's narration at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, the nested flashbacks that start out the movie Serenity, even the birth of Kirk and the Kirk and Spock childhood moments in Abram's last Star Trek movie.
This of course does play around a bit with the pre-existing continuity, but I think it preserves enough while still making it play to a 2013 audience. And his birth in 1996 wouldn't even ever have to be mentioned in dialogue, just have it on a screen in the background or something. something subtle where it isn't important but it's there for the fans, so to speak.
I doubt they'll go that route, though. But I am interested in seeing how it does play out.
--Alex
What about Captain America? People went to that to see shit blow up, and they didn't care that their WWII with it's Nazi splinter group and Redskull didn't happen IRL, even though the movie ended in "our" present day. Likewise, flashbacks to the 1990's in Star Trek XII can be similarly fictionalized yet lead to our present and Trek's future.
It really has nothing to do with intelligence. It has more to do with the audience still being able to identify with it. If you go back and change something, it becomes more of an alternate fiction, which is just more niche. People can't identify as much with a past where they were oppressed and grew up through a war.
And this is just one of those things with Star Trek being almost 50 years old. There are lots of the particulars from 1966 that aren't really important in telling those stories today. The latest movie definitely took a lot of such liberties, and I just can't imagine them not taking liberties with something like the date of a huge war.
Personally, with any sci-fi I like to imagine that it's our future, even if it involves farfetched concepts or things that will never happen.
Of course it isn't.
And for the record, I so hope that the Khan rumour is nothing but. Hell, I'll watch the movie regardless, but....damn. Khan is an even more retarded villain than Nero...because he didn't know he was retarded.
I still think that Khan can be from 1996, but was a government secret. This would explain why he's not in the history books and why we don't know who he is.
The retcon would be no worse than movies like the Transformers, where giant f'n robots from space fight in downtown LA, yet the government is somehow able to surpress that knowledge such that in Transformers 2, people still don't know they exist.
The retcon would be no worse than movies like the Transformers, where giant f'n robots from space fight in downtown LA, yet the government is somehow able to surpress that knowledge such that in Transformers 2, people still don't know they exist.
It's no more a sore thumb than the 16th President of the U.S. having a secret history of hunting vampires.
Let's just state the real reason for a change: they think the audience is too stupid to realize Star Trek is a fictional universe.
Yeah, that's it exactly.
BTW, if you actually read the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter book, it really is quite amazing how convincingly the vampires are inserted into Lincoln's life.
They must read Star Trek boards on the Internet.
That argument doesn't really hold water. I have a parent who is 100% Slavic while the other parent is a mish mash of European and English ethnicities. My siblings and I closely resemble the mish mash parent. My neice has a parent who is 100% Hispanic (Mexican) and except for the brown, not black hair, she looks much like her mish mash parent. The same can be said about my spouse's parents, one being 100% Nordic and the other mish mash. All the siblings closely resemble the parent who has many ethnicities involved in their genetics.
KNS used the phrase "genetic engineering" in TWOK to describe his superiority (supremacy) over all others. Spock used the phrase "selective breeding" in Space Seed as an attempt to improve the race, while Kirk addressed the issue of his not being a "product of controlled genetics" with a red (not gold) shirted KNS. Any which way you say it, it amounts to the same thing.
The mid 1990's was a time referrence given to the "last Great War," of which McCoy then replied as "the Eugenics War." While there was no reference to the Botany Bay, that class of ships was last built in the 1990's.
Is this Khan? If I were basing my guess on the fact that the first actors sought after for the role of the villian were Hispanic, I guess I might assume that it's KNS, but you know what they say about assume. He could simply be an augmented human that uses the title of Khan. Hopefully, we'll find out next month.
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At the time this script was written, most of the Western cultures had been involved with or reading about Eugenics and the idea that some races were superior to others, and some races quite inferior to most. I'm sure this only aggravated the lesser thought of races, and hindered foreign policy greatly. Efforts were made (through abortion) to create a better breed of people. Why use the Sikh ethnicity? McGivers said they were a race of fantastic warriors. This is a requirement in war and ruling a population. Why Mexican? The Aztecs and Mayans of the Latin American countries are thought to be some of the most intelligent ethnicities in history.
Roddenberry liked to send messages through his episode, of what he though about current world affairs of the time. My impression of the episode was that it meant to say that selective breeding through the use of manipulated genetics is a fool's folly.
You know, what's really going to stick out like a sore thumb too, is that we didn't have any ships like the Botany Bay in 1996, either.
Then again, in 1983 (TWOK), Khan being from 1996 (or even the late 20th century) and heading off in a starship was just as ridiculous a notion as it is sixteen years after 1996.
I would only hope Orci et al were at least respectful enough of the Trek timeline to consider the issue of how to handle Khan's "time." And I'd expect they were.
Maybe they talked about it and decided they'd just stay true to what was said in "Space Seed", regardless. That it just wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Or, mabye they decided they should retcon it. Perhaps Khan and his people are now "escapees" of the 2079 "United Earth" war mentioned in TNG.
...That we know about. Like I said, secret government project.
I presented no argument for you to debate, accept or reject - I simply asserted that Montalban was pretty clearly Spanish rather than Indian, and that's just a plain fact.
Wrong, and wrong. Chekov said "genetic engineering" and it was simply a phrase and an idea that hadn't entered common use in 1966; it generally refers to the direct manipulation of the genome using modern DNA techiques. It was clearly a catchphrase familiar to the writer of TWOK in the early 1980s.
"Selective breeding" means just that - selected human beings mating and bearing children - and the writer made it clear in other dialogue that Khan's people were a result of a eugenic breeding program. TWOK was a retcon, whether deliberate or sloppy. Later Trek, like DS9 and Enterprise, has stuck with the retcon.
Chekov said "genetic engineering" - my bad. KNS said "genetically engineered."
Genetic engineering did gain its momentum in the 60's. I encourage anybody to read up on the Eugenics initiative and debate. The ACLU was engaged for many years, in court, over this issue. It did bring about something very good for people who wanted more. It led to research in in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that found fruition in the early 80's.
