Khan By Khommittee

[4thofeleven]

The biggest addition was Benedict Cumberbatch… so the big debate was: should he or shouldn't he be Khan?... Once we had that standalone story, we wondered: are there details from Khan's history that fit?
- 'Star Trek' Writers On Planting Easter Eggs With Tribbles and Khans

 

So that’s an interesting revelation – Cumberbatch wasn’t specifically cast as Khan in Into Darkness. Rather, it seems the part of the villain was adapted to be Khan after he’d been cast.

I’m not entirely convinced these people know what an ‘Easter egg’ is. The Mudd reference, one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line, yeah, that’s an Easter egg. The models on Admiral Marcus’s desk, yeah, they’re eggs. The main villain of your film? No, not so much. The camera zooming in dramatically on him as he gives his name, not really. A whole scene of new Spock calling up old Spock to find out who this guy is… At this point, you may as well try and claim that having a character called “Captain Kirk” is a subtle Easter egg for the fans.

This does explain a lot about the movie, though – not just how the whitest man in existence got cast as Khan – but also why it feels so much like a perfectly decent movie that’s had chunks of the Wrath of Khan crudely inserted in random. Because, it seems, essentially that’s what happened.

(It does give the amusing mental image of the writers sitting there, going through a list of Trek villains they could include as ‘Easter eggs’. “Hey, Bob – what about the Gorn? Would Cumberbatch work as a Gorn? No? What about a Horta? We could make it that there’s Horta eggs in the torpedoes, and he’s the mother Horta trying to get them back…)