The Star Trek: Khan podcast was fantastic overall, yet there’s one omission that kept the finale from being perfect: Captain Sulu never got the opportunity to speak with Dr. Rosalind Lear after Ensign Tuvok figured out her true identity was Khan Noonien Singh's daughter, Kali.
For the uninitiated, the Khan audio drama explores that 15-year period in between The Original Series episode “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan. At the end of “Space Seed,” Khan (Ricardo Montalban) was defeated, with Kirk giving him a chance to live with the rest of his augmented race on, as Mr. Spock put it, the "somewhat inhospitable" world of Ceti Alpha V.
Star Trek II revealed that Ceti Alpha VI exploded only six months into Khan’s exile. That devastated Ceti Alpha V, with many of Khan’s followers dying, including his wife, Marla McGivers, after being attacked by one of the planet's many Ceti eels. That drove the now-insane Khan to seek revenge on Kirk.
The audio drama was excellent, delving into Khan’s history with Naveen Andrews turning in a fine performance in the lead role of Khan. He was matched by Wrenn Schmidt as Marla, and listeners heard their love story in full. The romance then turned tragic with Ceti Alpha VI’s destruction, the effects on Ceti Alpha V, and an alien race getting involved. It worsened as Marla’s fate pushed Khan to the edge.
All that was good enough, but the framing device to the tale offered the real meat while altering canon.
The story opened a few months following the “death” of Captain Kirk in the opening of Star Trek Generations. Dr. Rosalind Lear (Sonya Cassidy) was a Starfleet historian who argued that Kirk knew Ceti Alpha VI was unstable and that he was sentencing Khan to death.
That obviously didn’t go over well with Captain Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), with a young Tuvok (Tim Russ) assigned to aid Lear in her research. That meant going to Ceti Alpha V to find old audio logs which were recorded by Marla.
Once there, Lear uncovered additional logs made by Khan himself following his wife's death. The logs recorded by Marla and Khan revealed how they had a daughter, Kali, who took the name Rosalind Lear to conceal her true identity after she escaped Ceti Alpha V.
The final episode of the podcast featured Tuvok confronting Lear in the wreckage of the SS Botany Bay to confirm what many listeners had already suspected: Lear was Kali. She’d escaped on the small four-seat vessel called the Venture, but due to a terrible misunderstanding, Khan believed the ship was destroyed once it reached the atmosphere. The apparent loss of his daughter finally made Khan snap and focus all his wrath toward James T. Kirk.
Tuvok promised to keep Lear’s true identity a secret from everyone before they departed the lifeless world. That was a powerful storyline and capped Lear’s compelling arc. However, it robbed us of a key confrontation between Lear and Sulu.
Sulu’s brief appearances meant he didn't interact much with Lear. Their big face-off was in the first episode, with Sulu being quite upset at Lear slandering Kirk as a killer. Yet the lack of a final meeting between the characters was a letdown. Just imagine if Sulu had known Lear was really Khan's daughter.
Having someone who’d fought Khan meeting his daughter would have been fantastic. Sulu could have broken Lear’s rose-colored glasses to bluntly tell her how her father became this monster and Kirk was justified in fighting back. The scene between Sulu and Lear likely would have been harsh.
At the same time, Sulu could have been sympathetic to Lear, given how she survived that horrid world and made her own path in Starfleet. Sulu might have blamed Kali for her father’s sins, but he also might have agreed with Tuvok on keeping Lear’s identity quiet from Starfleet. Sulu was always a caring man and could have understood why Lear had been hoping to show her father wasn’t as terrible as Sulu thought he was.
The Khan podcast was still a fantastic production and a must-listen for Trek fans without that scene happening. Yet having Sulu and Lear face off one last time, with the captain knowing the truth would have made a great finale even better.
For more Star Trek content, visit the Redshirts Always Die Facebook and X pages. And you can listen to the Khan podcast courtesy of Star Trek's YouTube channel below.
Add us as a preferred source on Google