Khan Noonien Singh
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| Khan Noonien Singh | |
|---|---|
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| Species: | Human |
| Gender: | Male |
| Eye color: | Brown |
| Home planet: | Earth |
| Affiliation: | Augments |
| Portrayed by: | Ricardo Montalbán |
Khan Noonien Singh is a villain in the fictional Star Trek universe. He first appeared in the original Star Trek series episode "Space Seed", and then in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In both cases he was played by Ricardo Montalbán. He is generally referred to simply as Khan.
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[edit] Backstory
Khan, one of many genetically engineered "supermen" produced by a group of scientists on Earth during the 20th century, possessed physical strength and analytical capabilities superior to ordinary humans. He is of Jatt heritage, from the northern region of India (Punjab). Though his name suggests the Sikh faith, he cannot be a practicing Sikh, since Khan cuts his hair and shaves, and the definition of a Sikh forbids cutting hair and shaving.
Scientists used a selective breeding program combined with genetic engineering to achieve their aims, and in many ways they succeeded; the "supermen" were mentally and physically superior to ordinary men and women. They were roughly five times stronger than the average person, their lung efficiency was 50 percent greater than normal, and they had an increased capacity for learning. What the scientists failed to anticipate was that creating a superior race meant creating a superior ambition; the "supermen" felt that their advanced abilities gave them the right to rule the rest of humanity.
In 1993, a group of "supermen" seized power simultaneously in more than 40 nations. Khan was considered the most dangerous of the ambitious cadre. At his most powerful, he ruled all of Southeast Asia and half of the Middle East—more than a quarter of the entire planet—but even this was not enough for him. He envisioned ruling the entire world, but so did the other genetically engineered leaders, and they ended up fighting among themselves.
This led to the Eugenics Wars, during which whole populations were bombed out of existence and the entire planet was threatened with a new dark age. Fortunately, by 1996 the tyrants were brought under control by a rebellious population. Most of the "supermen" died or were sentenced to death, but 84 of them, including Khan, escaped aboard the sleeper ship SS Botany Bay.
On board the ship, the crew were cryogenically frozen to allow them to remain in suspended animation. Khan was considered so dangerous that even two centuries later, genetic engineering was banned throughout the United Federation of Planets for fear of creating another tyrant like Khan.
[edit] "Space Seed"
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Khan's ship was not discovered for almost 300 years, when it was found by the starship USS Enterprise. An away team led by Captain James T. Kirk found Khan and several dozen others frozen in cryogenic chambers. The ship's historian, Lieutenant Marla McGivers, took particular fascination in Khan. Khan nearly died during the reanimation sequence when his chamber malfunctioned. Khan was beamed to the Enterprise and taken to sickbay, where his recuperative powers amazed Dr. Leonard McCoy. Upon awakening, Khan grabbed McCoy and put a knife to his throat, but did not kill him because he was impressed by McCoy's courage when the doctor pointedly suggested that cutting the carotid artery would have the fastest results. Khan did not divulge anything about himself beyond his name, claiming fatigue. Meanwhile, he began plotting how to take over the Enterprise. Kirk readily granted Khan's request to study the ship's technical manuals, which gave him knowledge of how to take over and operate the Enterprise. Later, he used Lt. McGivers's attraction to him in getting her to help him beam back to the Botany Bay, where he revived the other supermen.
With the help of Marla and his revived crew, Khan took control of the Enterprise's engineering section and used what he had gleaned from the technical manuals to shut off life support to the bridge. Kirk found that Khan had anticipated every contingency for retaking control of the ship, and the bridge crew faced imminent suffocation. After passing out, they found themselves alive, though captives of Khan. Khan declared that humans had advanced technologically, but there had been little improvement in human evolution in the last 300 years. He still considered himself superior, and believed that it gave him the right to rule other men — only this time his target was not merely Earth, but the Universe.
But Khan still needed help in selecting a planet with a population that would be willing to be led by him. He decided that the best way to convince the Enterprise crew to cooperate would be to put Kirk in the ship's compression chamber and slowly reduce the pressure, forcing the crew to watch until they agreed to join Khan. Fortunately, Marla could not stand by and let her captain be killed, and she rescued him. Kirk then flooded the ship with neural gas, neutralizing Khan's men. Khan, however, escaped to engineering, and set the ship's engines to self-destruct. Kirk arrived on the scene and engaged Khan in hand-to-hand combat, a fight he was losing badly until he used a metal tool to knock Khan out.
Captain Kirk faced a dilemma. He felt it would be a waste to confine Khan and his followers to a rehabilitation colony, but they could not be allowed to go free. He therefore dropped all charges against them, including against Lt. McGivers, and deposited them on Ceti Alpha V, a rough but habitable planet where they could start a new life.
Kirk had offered Khan a world to conquer, believing such a challenge would keep the would-be despot from causing harm elsewhere. Spock, however, wondered at the "seed" his captain had planted, and what fruit it would bear.
[edit] Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
[edit] Khan seeks vengeance
For approximately six months, life on Ceti Alpha V was harsh but fruitful for Khan and his people, as they worked to tame the wild planet. But then Ceti Alpha VI, the system's sixth planet, exploded. This shifted Ceti Alpha V's orbit to one similar to the now-missing sixth planet. The stresses of the gravimetric shockwave resulted in major climatic changes and earthquakes.
Once the planet had stabilized, huge amounts of dust in the atmosphere caused surface heating, turning the planet into a desert wilderness. High winds made the air barely breathable, leaving only a limited atmosphere dominated by craylon gas. Some of the colonists managed to survive, but the greatest hazard to their existence proved to be not the unrelenting hostility of the environment, but the one other surviving species: the Ceti eel. Over the following 17 years, 20 of Khan's people, including his wife, Marla McGivers, were killed by these creatures, and most of the rest died from other causes. By the year 2285, fewer than 20 of the settlers (including Khan) had managed to survive.
In 2285, almost two decades after Khan and his people had arrived on Ceti Alpha V, the crew of the USS Reliant conducted a close-range sensor scan of the planet as part of the top-secret Project Genesis, mistaking it for Ceti Alpha VI. Khan, angry and vengeful that Kirk never checked up on their settlement, abducted the Reliant's captain Clark Terrell and first officer Pavel Chekov when they went down to the surface, and implanted Ceti eels in their brains, rendering them vulnerable to his suggestions. Khan then seized control of the Reliant, hell-bent on revenge. His second-in-command Joachim argued that there was no need to take on Kirk as they had a ship and could go anywhere they pleased, but Khan was obsessed with asserting his superiority.
Once Khan had learned of the Genesis device, he had Chekov contact its creators and instruct them to hand over the device on Kirk's orders. Khan counted on their contacting Kirk to confirm the order, which would bring his enemy to him.
When the Enterprise reached Regula I, Khan was able to launch a surprise attack, as Kirk was slow to respond to general orders requiring a defensive posture when the Reliant refused to visually respond to hails (claiming on voice communication that the ship's Chambers Coil was overloading its communications system). This hesitence on Kirk's part allowed the Reliant to close range sufficiently to inflict substantial damage on the ship's engineering section, knocking the main energizers down and making it impossible to raise the ship's defensive shields. Within a few minutes, the Enterprise was crippled. Khan hailed the vessel, so that Kirk would know his adversary's identity before he destroyed them. Fortunately, Kirk was able to buy time by promising to beam himself over to Khan's ship with all the information regarding Project Genesis. This gave Kirk the chance to tap into Reliant's command console, using the ship's prefix code to lower its shields before he gave the order to fire on the ship. The effective gunnery of the Enterprise crew resulted in sufficient damage to the Reliant's weapons systems that Khan was persuaded to withdraw and repair--operating on the assumption that the Enterprise was no longer a tactical threat and was so damaged that its escape was impossible for several hours--if at all.
[edit] Endgame
With both ships badly damaged, they were forced to withdraw to carry out repairs. By the time partial power had been restored on the Enterprise, Khan had managed to get his hands on the Genesis Device. While Kirk and Spock tricked Khan into thinking that the Enterprise still required days of work to repair and was helpless, Khan's ship was still in far better condition than Kirk's. In order to even the odds, Mr. Spock recommended that they enter the nearby Mutara Nebula where static discharges would interfere with both ships' shields and sensors.
On board the Reliant, Joachim was reluctant to follow the Enterprise into the nebula as he knew it would negate their advantage. However, Kirk contacted them and taunted Khan ("We tried it once your way, Khan, are you game for a rematch? Khan...I'm laughing at the superior intellect."). The genetically enhanced madman, frustrated at Kirk's ability to thwart his best efforts to defeat him, could not resist the opportunity to prove his superiority and ordered his ship to follow the Enterprise.
Both ships scored direct hits on one another as they blindly maneuvered around each other, until Spock noted that Khan's tactics indicated only two-dimensional thinking, as for all his intelligence the great dictator lacked any real experience in space combat. Kirk ordered the Enterprise to move downward before coming up behind the Reliant and firing multiple torpedoes. The Reliant was completely disabled and all the crew were killed, except Khan, who refused to accept defeat. He was determined to take Kirk with him, and in a last desperate effort he activated the Genesis device.
Spitefully eloquent to the very end, Khan revelled in the idea that the Genesis Project would ultimately kill Kirk. He succumbed to his injuries before seeing the Enterprise warp away to safety, thwarted one last time by Kirk. However, Kirk's victory was not without its price. Spock had sacrificed his life to enter the damaged, radiation-contaminated engine room to repair the Enterprise's warp drive, enabling Kirk and the rest of the crew to narrowly escape the detonation of the Genesis device.
[edit] Other references
Khan was mentioned in the DS9 episode "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?", where Admiral Bennett says "for every Julian Bashir that can be created, there's a Khan Singh waiting in the wings—a 'superhuman' whose ambition and thirst for power have been enhanced along with his intellect. The law against genetic engineering provides a firewall against such men and it's my job to keep that firewall intact".
According to Greg Cox's non-canonical novels Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars, Khan and his followers were placed aboard the Botany Bay by Gary Seven as part of a deal to stop Khan's machinations on Earth. Seven's agent Roberta Lincoln stole Botany Bay from Area 51, where government agents were building top secret technology that was based on the Klingon communicator and phaser left behind by Pavel Chekov in the year 1986 in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and inspired by Ferengi technology studied as part of the Roswell UFO Incident in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Little Green Men." Cox also told Khan's story between Space Seed and Star Trek II in his novel and Exile of Khan Noonien Singh.
Ironically, when Arik Soong attempted to raise a new army of Augments by thawing out some of their frozen embryos left over from the Eugenics Wars, the Augments dismissed the existence of Khan himself as a "myth".
[edit] Notes
Khan Noonien Singh is not to be confused with Noonien Soong, the scientist who created the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The characters' names have the same origin (they were both named by Gene Roddenberry), and an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise has hinted at some link between the characters beyond a coincidental name similarity.
Admiral Kirk and Khan were never physically in the same room at any point during The Wrath of Khan. They only spoke to each other over communication links. In fact, the scenes in which Kirk and Khan spoke to each other were filmed four months apart; part of this was due to neccessity, namely the fact that the bridges of the Enterprise and Reliant were redresses of the same set.
[edit] Khan's Recognition of Chekov
Careful Star Trek observers have noted a minor discrepancy in the Khan storyline. When Khan encounters Chekov on Ceti Alpha V, he recognizes Chekov by name, stating, "I never forget a face". However, Chekov's character was not introduced in the original series until the second season, whereas "Space Seed" aired in the first, thereby necessitating a retcon of sorts. One argument intended to explain this is that Chekov was aboard the Enterprise all along (or at least as early as the events of "Space Seed"), but was simply one of hundreds of crew members not shown on screen.
Some non-canonical sources place Chekov as the watch officer in command of the "overnight" or gamma shift on the starship, thereby explaining Khan's recognition. Other sources indicate that Chekov had led an attempt to stop Khan with other crew members, an attempt that had failed. In a 2006 novel, "To Reign in Hell" (the third novel in the Eugenics Wars series), Chekov had accompanied Khan and his people to Ceti Alpha V to oversee their placement on the new world - and he gave Khan a phaser before returning to the Enterprise.
In a humorous anecdote told by actor Walter Koenig, he speculates that his character, while on his gamma shift, had a severe case of "Arcturian flu," based on something Chekov had eaten that disagreed with his system. While in the head suffering symptoms from the "flu," Khan, who was enroute to seducing Lieutenant McGivers, arrives to use the facilities. However, the head was occupied, and after a few minutes Khan became enraged at being made to wait. Beating on the head's door, Chekov finally stumbled out, pale and sickly and gasping an apology for the wait. An unsympathetic Khan pointed an accusing finger, saying dramatically before dashing inside the head, "YOU! — You! — I will NEVER forget you for this!"
In slightly different version of the story, Koenig says that Khan's remark "I grow fatigued" at the banquet in his honor was actually an excuse for a stomach upset of his own, and that, as in the other version of the story, the only lavatory Khan could find was occupied by Chekov. Koenig says that, as he did in his own quarters later in the episode, Khan forced open the locked door, dragging out the hapless Chekov by his shirtfront with his pants dangling around his ankles. According to Koenig, Khan looked Chekov in the eye, cried "You I will remember!", flung him down the corridor (still with his pants around his ankles), and marched into the lavatory, pointedly relocking the door from the inside.
Yet another version of the story indicates that Khan had gone to use one of the lavatory facilities. When he arrived Chekov was leaving. Khan went in to find that Chekov had used the last of the toilet paper, and Khan then said that he would not forget Chekov.
And the rest, Koenig says, is Star Trek history.
[edit] Trivia
- Although it is alledged that Ricardo Montalbán wore a false chest piece as part of his costume while filming Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, its director, Nicholas Meyer, insists in an interview on the special edition DVD that Ricardo Montalbán's real chest is seen while he is in costume.
[edit] See also
- Space Seed (TOS episode) - The original episode introducing Khan Noonien Singh.
[edit] External links
- Khan Noonien Singh article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki.
