How Modern Star Trek Gets Khan Wrong

So, with Khan and his crew, Star Trek gives us Nazis with the “bad” bits taken out. Khan’s crew is ethnically diverse (even if that’s not exactly shown on the screen). Scotty describes them as “mixed types. Western, mid-European, Latin, Oriental.” Khan himself is from North India, and a Sikh, although this raises questions as Ricardo Montalban is a Mexican descended from Spanish immigrants, and is completely clean-shaven.

Khan’s band are driven by science, not nationalism, and they have dropped any ideas of white supremacy. They seize power in 40 nations, uniting people “like a team of animals under one whip,” but even Kirk and his human colleagues express admiration for Khan as the “best of dictators” to tease Spock, because even in the 23rd century being an edgelord is a still a thing.

But ultimately the episode shows Khan remains a villain, that if you strip out all the “problematic” elements of Naziism its underlying ideas are still toxic, resulting in a strata of people who think they’re better than other people and entitled to rule over them. The problem with the Nazis was not that they did it wrong, it’s their fundamental premises.

By the time of the actual ‘90s and the early ‘00s, Nazis seemed far more like something from the history books, and our concerns were far more technological.

Enterprise tried so hard to reconcile and namecheck its own continuity, it never really stopped to think about what the Khan story was actually about. This leads to weird like Archer being told the research that lead to the augments could have cured his dad’s “Clarke’s Syndrome” while Soong’s plans to “liberate” a lab full of frozen embryos seems weirdly anti-abortion rather than anything to do with science. The whole plot ends up echoing movies like Deep Blue Sea or Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where the moral, intentionally or not, is “trying to cure Alzheimer’s is wrong.”

Star Trek is going back to its roots with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a show following Captain Pike and the Enterprise on more planet of the week type morality plays. One of the new crewmembers of this version of the Enterprise is Chief Security Officer La’an Noonien Singh, who appears to be related to Khan despite not appearing to be of Mexican or North Indian descent. So “The Space Seed” is not a story Trek is planning to leave alone any time soon. One does wonder why Spock, Uhura and Nurse Chapel never mentioned working alongside one of Khan’s relations when they met, but that is a problem for another day.

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