Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “Space Seed”

One of the earliest explanations for how Khan recognized Chekov was in DC Comics’s Who’s Who in Star Trek special written by Allan Asherman. Asherman proposed that Chekov had been posted to engineering before being transferred to the navigator post (like Kevin Riley before him), and that he’d led the defense against Khan’s takeover of engineering, which was why Khan remembered him. I cribbed this explanation in my debut novel Ex Machina, and IIRC, a bit of editorial coordination led to it being mentioned in Greg Cox’s To Reign in Hell as well. I’ve occasionally been credited for coining the idea, so I always try to give Asherman proper credit when I can.

It’s certainly better than the explanation offered in William Rotsler’s Star Trek II Biographies, which was that Khan had memorized every personnel file in Starfleet during his time in sickbay. Of course, this is the same book that proposed that the name of Pavel Andreievich Chekov’s father was Alexei rather than Andrei…

Keith covered most of the highs and lows of the episode pretty well, but there are some other technical and factual issues I have with it. Of course, the big thing is the pretty lousy handling of Indian/Sikh ethnicity. First off, there’s the choice to cast a Mexican actor in brownface makeup, one of the uglier casting practices of the era, and not even have him change his accent. Second, there is absolutely nothing about Khan’s appearance that would lead Marla to recognize him as a Sikh. Sikh men do not cut their hair or beards, they wear turbans, and they wear various ceremonial items, none of which Khan possessed. The only thing they got right was giving him the last name Singh, like most male Sikhs — but the rest of his name is a complete ethnic jumble. Khan is a Mongolian/Central Asian title that’s generally used as a Muslim surname, not a given name; and Noonien is apparently a Chinese name. (The story goes that Khan and TNG’s Noonien Soong were named by Roddenberry after a Chinese friend from his military service, possibly named Noonien Wang, in hopes of getting his attention and renewing contact with him. Apparently it never worked.)

The one positive about the treatment of Khan’s ethnicity is that it was a bold statement to depict a genetically superior human as a brown-skinned man instead of the Nordic type favored by the Nazis and other European eugenicists. That’s no doubt what Carey Wilbur had intended by the original Harold Ericssen character, as a critique of such eugenics movements, but it works even better to subvert their racist assumptions of white superiority by depicting a multiethnic race of superhumans. (This is what I did in my novel Only Superhuman, making the leader of the genetically superior Vanguardians a black man, his daughter a mix of multiple ethnicities, and their general population extremely diverse.) It’s unfortunate that TWOK fell back on the more conventional image of Nordic superhumans — never mind the continuity and logic mess that creates. (Seriously — they were stranded there 15 years before but are mostly in their mid-20s? Do the math, Meyer!)

And the alleged ethnic diversity of Khan’s people (it was more asserted than seen in the extra casting) actually makes a lot of sense. TWOK introduced the retcon that Khan’s people had been “genetically engineered” (a ret-Khan?), but that term hadn’t been coined yet in 1967. “Space Seed” said they’d been produced by selective breeding. Wilbur was probably thinking in terms of the real-life eugenics movements that were popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, movements that actually attempted to control human breeding to create superior specimens. Of course, they were all doomed to failure because they thought “superior” meant “white” and were breeding for uniformity, when anyone who knows anything about biology and isn’t a racist moron knows that genetic diversity is the key to a species’ adaptability and robustness. But if there had been one 19th-century eugenics group that wasn’t just a club for racist morons, if they’d recognized the benefits of genetic diversity and selectively bred for genuinely advantageous traits rather than just whiteness, it’s conceivable that — if they’d been extremely lucky — they might’ve produced some pretty impressive specimens by the 1960s or ’70s, in time for them to grow to maturity by the 1990s. Which actually makes a bit more sense than the assumption that genetic engineering technology existed in the ’60s or ’70s and was sufficiently beyond the real-world state of the art today to allow the creation of the Augments in a single generation.

Another thing that bugs me is the onboard gravity in the Botany Bay. Artificial gravity in a ship from the 1990s? I like to think that the cryogenic chambers were in a centrifuge section within the cylindrical part of the ship, rotating to create gravity like the centrifuge in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The set doesn’t quite fit that assumption, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. Both in plausibility terms and in Trek-continuity terms, since Voyager: “One Small Step” showed that human ships didn’t have artificial gravity yet in 2032.

There’s also the oddity of the name “Ceti Alpha,” a weird inversion of the Bayer designation of the star Menkar, aka Alpha Ceti. Aside from that, though, the idea of the Botany Bay being found relatively near Alpha Ceti (or near enough that it’s a convenient place to drop them off afterward) is something that just barely squeaks through as plausible, at least given modern Trek chronological assumptions. Menkar is about 250 light-years away, give or take, so if the ship was launched in 1996, it could’ve reached that vicinity by 2267 if it had been going at 90-odd percent of lightspeed. Granted, a ship that looked like that couldn’t have survived that long at such high velocity, not without some kind of massive shield in front to protect against interstellar debris and dust. But simply from a time-and-distance standpoint, it’s not physically impossible.

Granted, the episode claimed that the ship had been launched only about 200 years before, but at the time, apparently Alpha Ceti was believed to be closer than we now know it to be. I have an old text, from before the HIPPARCOS survey in the ’90s that improved our knowledge of star distances, that gives its estimated distance as 40 parsecs, or 130 light-years. That would’ve required a speed of only 2/3 c for the BB, somewhat more achievable than what we have to assume today.

Although it’s worth noting that James Blish’s 1968 adaptation of the episode, despite quoting the 200-years line and the 1990s Eugenics Wars timeframe, is nonetheless the earliest work in Trek history (as far as I can determine) to mention the 23rd century as the setting of the series.

@1/MeredithP: I agree — a ship’s historian should play an important role, as I’ve tried to show in my Rise of the Federation books, which feature Kirk’s great-grandfather Sam as a Starfleet historian (so Kirk should really know better). After all, if you’re exploring an alien culture, it’s important to study their past as well as their present. And studying history can offer precedents on how to cope with intercultural conflicts or misunderstandings. Not to mention the need to have someone recording all the history that the starship is making.

It’s odd that both of the Starfleet historians seen in the 23rd century — McGivers here and Erickson in “Yesteryear” — are in services red rather than sciences blue. Maybe Starfleet sees historians more as a clerical position, like yeomen, than a research position?

@2/Lubitsch: The problem with Marla’s character is that her portrayal was pretty much the default for female personnel in TOS. Carolyn Palamas fell for Apollo the same way in “Who Mourns for Adonais,” and Charlene Masters did so with Lazarus in the deleted subplot from “The Alternative Factor.” It’s a very condescending, sexist ’60s stereotype, the assumption that female professionals would always place love over duty and thus be unreliable.

@4/GeorgeKaplan: An unflattering interpretation of Marla’s “guess” that Khan was a Sikh was that she actually recognized him as Khan Noonien Singh and kept that knowledge from her superiors. She clearly had a fetish for manly conquerors of the past, and that painting of Khan seemed far enough along to suggest she’d been working on it even before she met him. Maybe she was excited by the prospect of meeting one of her fantasy objects and hid the truth because she didn’t want him to be instantly thrown in the brig or put back on ice.

@10/me: Erratum: I was incorrect to say that the term “genetic engineering” had not yet been coined as of 1967. While the actual practice of DNA recombination wouldn’t exist until the early 1970s, the actual phrase  “genetic engineering” dates back to at least 1949 (and was first used in fiction by Jack Williamson in 1951).

@18/Eduardo Jencarelli: “But being introduced in the very episode you’re supposed to betray your crew feels completely phony and artificial.”

Except this was 1960s TV, where every episode had to stand completely on its own, and where most continuing drama series aspired to be pseudo-anthologies in format. So what you’re describing as “artificial” was the routine practice. Indeed, it was built right into the series premise. In Roddenberry’s original pitch document, it was stressed that the starship “is a whole community in which we can anytime take our camera down a passageway and find a guest star or secondary character (scientist, specialist, ordinary airman, passenger or stowaway) who can propel us into a story.” As I’ve remarked before, most people today take Roddenberry’s “Wagon Train to the stars” pitch to mean he wanted to do a space Western, but he was actually referencing the successful drama series Wagon Train and its anthology-like format of building each episode around a different guest star playing a member of the wagon train.

@21/GeorgeKaplan: I doubt the writers of “Space Seed” had any real understanding of Sikh culture beyond “Some weird Oriental religion.” The ethnic jumble of Khan’s name is a manifestation of the tendency of 1960s Hollywood writers to treat all of Asia from the Mideast to the South Pacific as a single interchangeable mass. Like Jonny Quest‘s Hadji, a stereotypical Hindu whose name is a Muslim honorific.

@29/Eduardo: Roberto Orci didn’t want the villain of STID to be Khan, feeling that was unnecessary continuity porn; it was Damon Lindelof who pushed for him to be Khan. Orci insisted that they break the story with an original character as the villain, to ensure that the plot worked on its own merit rather than resting on the continuity nod alone. Only then did they decide whether or not to make the character Khan. Ironically, I think that STID is a much better Khan story than TWOK was, because I can actually recognize the Khan of “Space Seed,” the cunning, rational conqueror who’s loyal to his people — unlike in TWOK where that personality gives way completely to the vengeful lunatic who throws his people’s lives away just to get back at Kirk. In contrast to Keith, I don’t think STID has that much in common with TWOK at all, aside from that one really contrived and clunky bit with the Kirk/Spock death scene and the “KHAAAN” yell homaged in reverse. Unfortunately, that bit was so jarring that it colors people’s perception of the whole movie.

@46/salix_caprea: “I’m confused. In comments regarding previous episodes it was stated that having Sulu being interested in Asian things like samurai is bad, because it’s stereotypical. But now suddenly having Khan not wearing a beard, turban etc. despite being a Sikh is also bad?”

That’s a false equivalency. Being Asian is an ethnicity. A person of Asian heritage does not have to conform to a single specific culture. The tendency of a lot of fiction to assume that every Asian person is, say, a martial-arts expert or a math genius is stereotyping. The error is in mistaking ethnicity for culture or personality.

But Sikhism is a specific religion and culture, not an ethnic group. Moreover, Sikhism is a religion that requires certain practices of its initiated members. So it’s a different kind of mistake altogether. The error in this case is misrepresenting a specific, clearly defined religious practice. It’s like showing a Jewish or Muslim person having a ham sandwich.

Now, if the episode had said, as Greg’s book did, that Khan was raised as a Sikh but chose not to follow the requirements of that faith, that would be fine. Even followers of a religion have individuality in how they practice it; for instance, Marvel’s Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel is a practicing Muslim but doesn’t cover her hair with a scarf, while her best friend does. But what we got instead was Marla seeing an unconscious Khan and somehow “recognizing” him as a Sikh even though he didn’t have any of the recognizable signs. That’s simply a factual error — there was no way she could’ve known that based on what she saw.

There is more than one way to be culturally insensitive or ignorant. Stereotyping foreign cultures and portraying their specfics incorrectly both qualify. In fact, they usually go hand in hand.

@66/GeorgeKaplan: The problem is that distance from the star is not the only orbital parameter that matters if you want to identify a planet, because planets are not stationary objects lined up in a straight row like so many works of fiction annoyingly assume they are. They are moving bodies whose courses are defined by six distinct elements. In order for a starship to rendezvous with a planet, it needs to match all six of those parameters. It’s like trying to catch up with a car racing around an elliptical racetrack at high speed. You can’t just count how far out it is from the center of the track — you have to match its exact speed and course and position while it’s in motion.

There is simply no way that the explosion of the sixth planet in a system would cause the fifth planet to somehow be sucked into the exact same orbit. First off, explosions in space don’t have shock waves (despite Trek constantly making that mistake), since shock can’t propagate through a vacuum. The only effects would be from radiation or debris impact, neither of which would push a planet out of its orbit, or from the gravitational effects from the change in the system’s mass distribution, which would probably take many millennia to settle in.

I think Greg Cox did a pretty good job rationalizing it in To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh, saying that it was the result of a cosmic string passing through the system, its hyperstrong gravity destroying the sixth planet and disrupting the orbit of the fifth. It doesn’t entirely work, but it makes more sense than the movie did.

@67/Random22: The problem with the idea of the charts being inaccurate is that in real life, right now, we’re charting extrasolar planets in thousands of different star systems. You don’t need to go to another star system before you can chart its planets; that’s a false assumption based on our Earthly experience where distant things are below the horizon and you can’t see them until you get close. But space has no horizons. You can see things from hundreds or thousands of light years away if you have a good enough telescope. So the idea that they could’ve not known the correct orbits of the planets in the system before they got there is unbelievable.

Indeed, given that Starfleet has faster-than-light sensors, an event as massive as the destruction of an entire planet would’ve been detected by Federation scientists almost as soon as it happened. After all, the energy required to disintegrate an Earth-sized planet is comparable to the Sun’s entire output for a week. Given that Alpha Ceti is about 1400 times brighter than Sol, if that explosion took only, say, one minute, then the event would outshine the star by about a factor of eight. It would be impossible to miss. Even if there were no FTL sensors, then the Reliant would’ve intersected that light once they crossed with 15 light-years of the system. They would’ve seen the energy output from the system suddenly get eight to ten times brighter for a minute, and they absolutely would’ve wanted to know why. And their telescopes would’ve shown them that Ceti Alpha VI had disintegrated long before they entered the system.

But since they did have FTL sensors, then the Federation should’ve known about the eruption for the past 15 years — and would’ve sent a ship to investigate 15 years earlier. Khan’s people should’ve gotten off the planet during the second season of TOS!

@63 & 76: The issue is not about whether Khan “really” is a Sikh or whether the characters were right about that assessment, because the characters only do what the writers decide. The issue is that the 1960s television writers were typically ignorant and hamfisted in their attempts to portray non-Western culture. Which is doubly annoying given that their researcher actually informed them of the mistake and they didn’t fix it.

@77/Ellynne: You raise an excellent point. The Khan-Marla relationship does come off as abusive, with Khan controlling and threatening and Marla submitting. She stands up to him at one point, but then goes back to him at the end. It is problematical. Although I suppose the intended reading is that once she stood up to him, he respected her more as an equal — but that’s a questionable interpretation. Could he ever really have accepted a non-Augment as an equal?

Not so sure about the DY-100 class being an Indian design specifically. Even if it originated there, the episode gives the impression that the ships were used pretty widely for decades. And the name Botany Bay suggests a Western influence, at least. So just seeing the ship wouldn’t be enough to pin down the nationality of its passengers.

@79/MikePoteet: Oh, I certainly don’t agree with Section 31’s self-serving claim that the Federation “needs” their dirty tricks. I think that both in reality and in Trek, such unethical tactics tend to backfire and do more to harm national security than to protect it. But I can buy that such an organization exists as a corrupt, criminal element within Starfleet — although I do have a great deal of trouble believing it could last over 200 years without being exposed and dismantled.

@89/MikePoteet: But he isn’t exactly setting Khan and his people free, since they’re on a planet with no civilization and no handy warp-capable ships lying around. It’s the perfect prison, as long as nobody comes for a visit.

I think it’s important to remember the name of Khan’s ship: Botany Bay. That’s a reference to the first British settlement in Australia, which was a penal colony. (Or rather, to the place they planned as their first settlement, whose name was identified with the process even though the actual settlement was somewhere else nearby.) The British dealt with prison overcrowding by exiling their criminals to Australia, where they would serve their sentence by doing labor to help build the British colony there. All Kirk did was to follow the lead of the ship’s name. Ceti Alpha V was to be Khan’s Australia, a remote place where they would be safely in exile but would have the chance to rehabilitate themselves by creating something new.

Granted, it would’ve made a lot more sense if their exile had been supervised, if Starfleet had set up an outpost to monitor the Augments, oversee their rehabilitation, warn other spacefarers away, and provide humanitarian aid as needed in the event of disease or starvation or the neighboring planet blowing up. But that’s more a failing of TWOK than of “Space Seed.”

@91/MikePoteet: Well, it comes down to whether you think that prison should be just about punishing people and locking them away — which is counterproductive, because it just makes them more dangerous when they get out — or that it should be about rehabilitating people into productive members of society. The Federation has always seemed to take the latter view. Ceti Alpha V is a place of exile, a place where they can do no harm to others, but it’s also a chance for them to gain redemption by achieving something constructive and beneficial. If they had been taken back to the Federation, tried, and convicted, their actual sentence might’ve been something very similar, geared toward giving them a chance to achieve something constructive. If anything, Kirk’s sentence was harsher, because if you dump seventy-odd people on a “savage” planet and leave them to fend for themselves, that could easily be a death sentence for all of them, even with Augment abilities. Heck, that’s not enough people for a stable gene pool; without further immigration, such a colony would be doomed in the long term. The early British colonies in America only survived with help from the indigenous communities — although, granted, that’s because the early British settlers were selected more for political or ideological reasons and were pretty incompetent at agriculture. But the Botany Bay‘s passengers were dictators and warlords and strongmen — how many of them do you suppose had any experience with farming or building houses? If anything, Kirk’s sentence was far crueler than a Federation prison sentence would’ve been. He gave them the “freedom” to fend for themselves, but in conditions that gave them a very good chance of dying.

Which is yet another reason that TWOK’s version of the followup is so monumentally idiotic. Kirk’s decision in “Space Seed” only makes sense if he intended there to be some Federation support and supervision, if he wasn’t just leaving them to fend for themselves. And if he did just leave them to fend for themselves, then Khan and the rest would’ve known perfectly well that they all might die on Ceti Alpha V. That would’ve been the risk they accepted going in. So Khan getting all wrathful about it 15 years later would’ve been kind of hypocritical. The movie implies that Khan expected Kirk or the Federation to follow up on them, which makes it all the more inexplicable that nobody did follow up.

@93/Mike: I wouldn’t blame Kirk, though, since the extent of his responsibility would’ve been to report to Starfleet and let Command make arrangements for other ships to do followups, or to establish an outpost. After all, his job was to command an exploration/patrol mission, not to oversee an impromptu penal colony. If there was a breakdown somewhere, it probably involved Kirk’s report getting lost in the gears somewhere. Or deliberately suppressed, if you’re partial to conspiracy-based explanations.

Maybe someone at Starfleet Command or the Federation government was spooked by the discovery that seventy superhuman conquerors from Earth’s darkest era were alive and active in the present, and so they suppressed the report rather than let it get out to the public. After all, as we’ve since learned, the Klingons made an attempt to create supersoldiers using Augment DNA. If other enemies of the Federation knew that Khan’s people were alive on Ceti Alpha V, someone might go there to harvest their DNA and try again. So maybe someone decided it was in the interests of Federation security to lose Kirk’s report and conceal information about the Ceti Alpha system. Which could be why there were no red flags when the Genesis planners picked it as a candidate for testing. Whoever was behind the initial coverup might’ve retired by then, so there was nobody left in a position to realize there was a problem.

@103/crzydroid: But my point is that the Reliant isn’t the only entity involved. They weren’t just wandering around on their own. They were following a plan assigned to them by Project Genesis. So Project Genesis’s scientists would’ve been the ones who prepared the list of candidate planets. So their databases would’ve had to be altered too.

@119/MaGnUs: Ask anyone in the Middle East what they think of Napoleon, and it will be anything but flattering. He pretty much started two centuries of nonstop Western imperialism that created the mess the Mideast has become today. And even in France, people have been debating for centuries whether Napoleon should be considered a tyrant or a hero.

And as I said in the “Savage Curtain” thread, the only reason Westerners consider Alexander nobler than Genghis Khan is because of racial bias. Alexander was just as ruthless and brutal to his enemies as Genghis was. Like many historical conquerors, he was impossible to easily label as “good” or “evil,” because how he treated people depended on whether they accepted his rule or not. As with Napoleon, you can find a lot of debate among scholars over whether Alexander should be classed as “great” or tyrannical.

Khan Noonien Singh strikes me as having been pretty much the same — relatively benevolent to his subjects, but ruthless to anyone who refused to submit to his will. The crew explicitly had this exact debate in “Space Seed” itself, with Spock pointing out Khan’s darker side while Kirk and the others took a more forgiving view.

The problem isn’t enhancing humans, the problem is enhancing only a few humans. Humans have been enhancing ourselves with technology for ages — we fix our vision and hearing when they fail us, we fix our teeth when they grow in wrong or fall out, we vaccinate ourselves against diseases that used to kill millions (or at least we do when we aren’t ruled by corrupt imbeciles). We allow everyone to achieve the same level of physical health and ability that used to be limited to those lucky few who had optimum vision, hearing, immunity, etc. So it made things more equal, not less.

If we do the same with genetic enhancement — if we look on it as a quality-of-life improvement that everyone has an equal right to — then it should be beneficial. The problem is not genetic engineering, the problem is the same problem that’s always plagued humanity, the desire of a privileged few to hog all the advantages to themselves.

@149/roxana: “The scientists who created the Augments seem to have had a vision of a perfected elite governing us all. How they couldn’t see the obvious flaw in that concept is nothing short of incredible.”

But that’s just it. Elitists don’t see it as a flaw for a minority to rule over the majority. They see it as the natural order of things. That’s true whether they want to rule through genetic enhancements, through military conquest, or simply through being rich and buying off politicians and Supreme Court justices to do their bidding. It’s like I said — the problem isn’t genetic enhancement, it’s the desire for power.