Movies & TV Star Trek: Khan “Love never built an empire” — Star Trek: Khan Debuts With “Paradise” Remember Khan? He’s back, in podcast form! By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on September 9, 2025 Comment 1 Share New Share The character of Khan Noonien Singh debuted on the original Star Trek’s “Space Seed” in 1967, played with immense charisma by the late great Ricardo Montalban. The character created enough of an impression that Nicholas Meyer brought him back when he was hired to direct the second Trek feature film fifteen years later. The Wrath of Khan is still, forty-three years later, one of the most popular and beloved of the fourteen Trek movies. The character has endured in several ways throughout the franchise. His mendacity was the reason given for why the Federation banned genetic engineering, as established in Deep Space Nine’s “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” We saw some Augments who didn’t join Khan in space-bound exile in Enterprise’s “Borderland”/“Cold Station 12”/“The Augments” three-parter, and Khan was further referenced in Picard’s “Farewell” via some paperwork we saw in the possession of Adam Soong in the early twenty-first century. We saw the Bad Robot timeline version of Khan in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), and we saw him as a child in Strange New Worlds’ “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” (played by Desmond Sivan). Plus, of course, SNW’s La’an Noonien Singh is a descendant of Khan’s… One of the many projects that was announced as being developed following the debut of Discovery in 2017 was a Khan-focused miniseries that Meyer (a consulting producer on Discovery’s first season) would be heavily involved in. Over the years since, that project has finally come to fruition in a much different form, to wit, an audio drama being released as a podcast. While the story is Meyer’s, the script is by Kirsten Beyer (the co-creator of Picard and a co-executive producer on both Discovery and SNW, in addition to being a veteran Trek novelist) and David Mack (also a veteran Trek novelist, indeed one of the franchise’s most prolific prose stylists, who also was a consultant on the first seasons of both Lower Decks and Prodigy), with Fred Greenhalgh serving as director. (Full disclosure: Mack and Beyer are both good friends of your humble reviewer.) The first episode, “Paradise,” dropped on the 8th of September, also known as “Star Trek Day,” as it’s on this day in 1966 that Trek debuted on television with the airing on NBC of “The Man Trap.” The episodes are free (albeit with commercials), and are available on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and most anywhere else one might download a podcast. The main plot focuses on the time between “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan. At the end of the former episode, Captain Kirk exiled Khan and his Augments (as well as ship’s historian Marla McGivers, who had fallen for Khan and also betrayed the crew, and chose exile over a court-martial) to the verdant paradise of Ceti Alpha V. A decade-and-a-half later, the U.S.S. Reliant is exploring what they think is Ceti Alpha VI, but it turns out to be the fifth planet, CA6 having exploded and turned CA5 into a brutal desert wasteland. This audio drama is not the first time this period has been explored. Greg Cox did it in prose in his 2005 novel To Reign in Hell (the followup to his The Eugenics Wars duology, which chronicled Khan’s life leading up to “Space Seed”). In addition, Scott & David Tipton and Fabio Mantovani did a four-issue comic book miniseries for IDW in 2010, Khan: Ruling in Hell that provided another interpretation of those events. And now we have a third. Montalban, who died in 2009, is obviously not available to reprise the role of Khan, and one suspects that Cumberbatch would be too expensive, or perhaps the producers didn’t want to cross the streams with the Bad Robot timeline. (Cumberbatch has plenty of audio voiceover credits, most notably his excellent work on the comedy series Cabin Pressure.) Instead, Naveen Andrews, probably best known for his excellent work as Sayid Jarrah on Lost, takes on the title role. Perhaps to give the production a bit more Trek cred, there’s a framing sequence that takes place in the early twenty-fourth century, after Kirk was lost in the Nexus in the prelude to Star Trek Generations, involving Captain Sulu and his command, the U.S.S. Excelsior (established in The Undiscovered Country), along with one of Sulu’s crew, Ensign Tuvok of Vulcan (as established in Voyager’s “Flashback”). George Takei and Tim Russ, respectively, reprise those roles. However, the main character of that framing sequence is Dr. Rosalind Lear (Sonya Cassidy), who has gotten her hands on some accounts of Khan’s life on CA5 that were recorded by McGivers, and she is petitioning Starfleet to allow her to go to CA5 to see if the rest of them are there. Lear, like McGivers, is a historian, and she wants to know more about Khan beyond the legend, and the heavily redacted log entries from the Enterprise. She even mentions the possibility of Kirk having known ahead of time about CA6’s imminent destruction, which gets Sulu’s back up. However, Sulu also wants to get at the truth, and so agrees to ferry Lear to CA5. Sure enough, she and Tuvok find a treasure trove of tapes, and the main part of the audio drama is her listening to them. First of all, the casting in this is superb. Andrews absolutely nails Khan’s bearing as we saw him in “Space Seed”: regal, arrogant, confident, in control of everything around him. And if he’s in danger of losing control, he is expert at regaining it. Cassidy does excellent work as the passionate Lear, and Takei and Russ are their usual fine selves in roles they’ve both inhabited a whole heckuva lot over the years. (Takei’s vocal tremors betray his age, but it’s not a deal-breaker for his performance.) All the various Augments living on CA5 with Khan are well played, particularly the two women who have been attempting to reverse the enforced sterilization of the Augment women, done in order to keep them from breeding without control. (The men were not sterilized, which is just typical.) But the standout here is Wrenn Schmidt as McGivers, both in her performance and particularly in how she’s written. McGivers was very much not well-served by Carey Wilbur and Gene L. Coon in 1967, as she at no point behaves in any way like a professional historian or a professional officer. Neither Wilbur nor Coon really understood the importance, or even the actual job, of a ship’s historian, either. Meyer, Beyer, and Mack (which really does sound like the name of a law firm in a farce…) rectify this oversight in spades. Schmidt’s McGivers is much more forceful a personality than the timid one played by Madeline Rhue, insisting she bunk down in the cargo pod rather than in Khan’s cabin, which surprises everyone—especially Khan himself, though he respects her decision. In addition, she makes it clear that at least part of the reason why she joined Khan on CA5 is for the unprecedented opportunity to witness a great moment in history as it happens. (She claims it’s the only reason, but not wanting to face a court-martial and probably imprisonment for her mutinous acts kinda had to be a motivating factor, too, even though one can’t blame her for not admitting it.) The best part comes toward the end of the episode. McGivers learns about the enforced sterilization of the Augment women, and she concludes that Khan brought her along to his exile because he needed breeding stock in case they prove unable to reverse the sterilization. This, by the way, also addresses another minor flaw in “Space Seed,” to wit, what Khan saw in McGivers, in two different directions: the fact that she has a functioning uterus makes her valuable to Khan, and also this version of McGivers is someone you can see an enhanced human actually being attracted to. I particularly love their exchange about Hernán Cortés. Khan tells the legendary story about how Cortés burned his ships to motivate his troops to fight and not desert during a long battle. McGivers throws it back in his face, saying that in truth Cortés left one ship intact so he could escape if necessary. The punchline, of course, is that they’re both wrong, but that plays perfectly into the theme throughout the episode—and presumably throughout the series—about the different ways in which history can be interpreted, depending on who’s writing the accounts and what their biases are. The other bit of retconning that every chronicle of this period has to address is to provide an explanation of why Khan tried to take over the Enterprise with an ethnically diverse group of contemporaries in the 1967 TV episode, but his followers in the 1982 movie were all blond-haired blue-eyed young people. “Paradise” at least sets this up by establishing that there were also children on the Botany Bay, whom Khan rescued as his last act before heading off into space on the latter ship. He didn’t revive them in “Space Seed” because he needed adults to take over the Enterprise. One assumes these children will be the ones who Khan brings aboard the Reliant in the 1982 movie… Star Trek: Khan will be nine episodes, each one released on a Monday. After the final episode airs on the 3rd of November, I’ll be back with a review of the whole schmear.[end-mark] The post “Love never built an empire” — <i>Star Trek: Khan</i> Debuts With “Paradise” appeared first on Reactor.