Why Khan on ‘Star Trek’ Is Still the Greatest Villain That Ever Was—60 Years Later
An exclusive look into the tragic legacy of Khan
Few antagonists in Star Trek history have had the staying power of Khan Noonien Singh. First introduced in the 1967 original series episode “Space Seed,” Khan (Ricardo Montalban) was a genetically engineered superhuman from Earth’s 20th century who, along with his followers, was discovered in suspended animation aboard the SS Botany Bay. Charismatic and brilliant, yet dangerously ambitious, Khan nearly seized control of the Enterprise before Captain Kirk (William Shatner) exiled him and his people to the seemingly habitable world of Ceti Alpha V—a decision that would have far-reaching consequences.
Khan returned in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Montalban reprised the role and delivered one of the most iconic performances in science fiction cinema. Transformed by years of loss and suffering, Khan became obsessed with vengeance against Kirk, his tragedy elevated to Shakespearean levels.
The character’s legacy even extended into J.J. Abrams’ reimagined timeline in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, where Benedict Cumberbatch assumed the role. The film reignited debate among fans by presenting a Khan discovered earlier than in the prime timeline, showing him as both fiercely protective of his crew and brutally ruthless toward his enemies. Kristen Beyer, co-writer with David Mack of the Star Trek: Khan dramatic audio podcast, acknowledges the mixed reception to the film’s heavy echoes of The Wrath of Khan, but she also finds value in what it revealed about the character: “The idea that they took [him] earlier than he would’ve been found otherwise because of this altered timeline… it was just this fascinating look at this different [version of Khan]. And yet the man is still the same. Ultimately, he turns out to be somebody who crushes Admiral Marcus’ (Peter Weller) skull in his hands. He’s the constant, no matter what the timeline is.”
The hunger to know more about Khan’s history has continued well beyond the screen. Author Greg Cox expanded on his backstory in The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (2001–2002) and To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh (2005), novels that delved into both the 20th-century conflicts that birthed Khan and his desperate struggle to survive exile on Ceti Alpha V. These books confirmed what fans had long felt: Khan’s story was too rich to be confined to two hours of film or a single television episode.
A fascination with Khan
For Beyer, who has been part of the creative brain trust behind Star Trek: Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds, the chance to explore Khan in the audio drama was personal. “Wrath of Khan was one of the first Star Trek stories that hit me emotionally in a way very few things ever had,” she says. “Khan was always sort of fascinating to me… what was done to him by the people who made him changed the nature of the Federation forever.”
What it triggered in her, she explains, was endless curiosity. “The more I got to know about Star Trek and the more the whole profound impact that Khan and the genetic augmentation and the Eugenics Wars [had], the more you realize how much impact that had on the Earth from which the Federation is born. It’s hard not to want to know a whole lot more about it, but there’s tantalizingly few pieces of it. It’s sort of scattered all over the board. We know a little bit from this and a little bit from that, but not a whole lot.”
Khan’s tragedy
For Beyer, writing Khan (voiced in the audio series by Naveen Andrews) meant grappling with his story as a tragedy—one where the audience knows the ending but still hopes against hope for a different outcome. Part of that tragedy, she believes, rests in Captain Kirk’s choice back in “Space Seed” when Khan and his people were given a chance to conquer a savage world known as Ceti Alpha V, no one predicting that neighboring planet Ceti Alpha VI would explode, ultimate causing Khan’s world to become inhospitable and claiming the lives of many of his people.
“The odds were long that anything was going to happen to Ceti Alpha VI, right?” she muses. “Nobody could have foreseen that and I bet you a ship was going to go back there in another 20 years. It’s just that one of the things we forget in our universe is that space is really big and it takes a very long time to get anywhere, even with warp drive. So it would not, I don’t think, have been terribly practical to do that.”
At the same time, she doesn’t see Kirk’s decision as negligent. “I think he probably felt like if you just threw [Khan] in prison, no prison was going to hold these guys for long. But when Kirk sends him down there, he very much wants to see what’s going to come of it. And I don’t think he doesn’t return out of negligence or ‘problem solved.’ Kirk’s the captain of the flagship—there’s a lot of sh** going on in his life.”
Her ultimate goal was not to rewrite what came before, but to enrich it. “If we did this right, you get fresh eyes on Wrath of Khan as well, which is so beloved to so many of us. I mean, I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen it—I know the thing by heart.”
Nicholas Meyer’s Influence
When Nicholas Meyer (who had written and directed Star Trek II) first conceived what would become Star Trek: Khan, he was less concerned with plot mechanics than with thematic underpinnings. At the same time, while his instincts were sound, the world of Star Trek has expanded exponentially since The Wrath of Khan. “When Nick made Wrath, there were 80 hours of Star Trek in existence and there are now 900,” Beyer points out. “And I have all of them in my head—for better and worse—and he does not. So there were a lot of choices that he had made that just butt up against things that we know, we’ve changed, we’ve done that had to be reckoned with when you were telling the story.”
Beyer and co-writer David Mack quickly realized that it wasn’t enough to simply recount the disaster of Ceti Alpha V. “We needed a way in for the audience. It wasn’t going to be enough to just say, ‘Well, okay. And then they got to Ceti Alpha V, and this is the whole story of what happened.’ We needed there to be a reason to tell this story now, which is where the framing story came from.”
In that framing story, when a petition is made to revisit Ceti Alpha V and study what transpired there, Captain Hikaru Sulu (voiced once again by original series cast member George Takei) and his officer Tuvok (Tim Russ who played a later version of the character on Star Trek: Voyager) of the USS Excelsior become involved. Along with historian Rosalind Lear (Sonya Cassidy), they sift through long-buried logs and records that reveal the harsh reality of Khan’s exile. As the narrative unfolds, listeners are taken back in time to witness the catastrophic transformation of Ceti Alpha V and the desperate struggle of Khan and his followers to survive, bridging the gap between “Space Seed” and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
“Because Khan’s legacy throughout history is massive and profound,” Beyer says, “it was important to have people in the story that already understand that and can speak to that lets the audience—who also thinks they know everything there is to know about Khan—have a way in at the same time.”
Final reflections
For Beyer, Star Trek: Khan isn’t just a chance to revisit one of Trek’s most famous antagonists, but an opportunity to see him anew, through the lens of tragedy, history and possibility. “The deeper I got into this story about Khan, the more I kept feeling this guy cannot catch a break,” she reflects. “And boy, if he had, what would he have built?”
That “what if” is what makes Khan endlessly fascinating. He is, in Beyer’s eyes, not merely a villain but a mirror—of ambition, loss, choices made and chances missed. His story asks the hard questions about responsibility, power and the human capacity to rise above our worst instincts. And that, she argues, is the essence of why Star Trek keeps coming back to him. By holding a mirror up to one of the most infamous figures in its canon, the franchise also holds a mirror up to us.
“If we could begin to understand what makes these people bad, we might actually be able to intervene at some earlier point or help support during the difficult times,” Beyer says. “Because it’s too easy to write off these characters as, well, they’re the bad guy. But if we look deeper, we can learn something about ourselves.”
Star Trek: Khan is available on all podcast platforms
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