Did Captain Kirk know that the solar system where he ditched Khan was unstable? One of the central questions posed by Dr. Lear (Soyna Cassidy) in the audio podcast series Star Trek: Khan is the details of why Ceti Alpha VI exploded, and how that ruined the lives of Khan and his followers. But, in Khan Episode 8, “Original Sin,” it turns out that the marooned aliens, the Elboreans, are the real cause of the tragedy that changed everything. And if there’s anyone Khan (Naveen Andrews) should have wanted revenge against, it's probably them.
Spoilers ahead.
Framed as a series of rediscovered logs, Star Trek: Khan finds Dr. Lear, a historian, enlisting the help of the USS Excelsior, Captain Sulu (George Takie), and Tuvok (Tim Russ) in the year 2293, a decade and a half after Khan avenged himself on the Enterprise, Kirk, and Starfleet in general. And in “Original Sin,” Lear learns that, in truth, Kirk probably wasn’t to blame. Although the Elboreans were helping Khan and the marooned Augments build an escape craft to search for help out in the galaxy, it was the Elboreans' unique propulsion system that caused Ceti Alpha VI to explode.
As the Elborean leader Delmonda explains, their ship has “at its heart, a generator capable of destroying and creating subatomic particles so complex that smashing them against one another releases enough power to bend space and time.”
The time detail might make you think that the Elboreans are from the future or the past. But the truth is, like all fictional faster-than-light travel, some manipulation of time is required, since the relative distances between star systems are so vast. Before the Trek franchise settled on “warp drive” and “warp factors,” the first pilot episode, “The Cage,” referred to the velocity of the Enterprise as a “time warp.” In fact, one character in “The Cage,” Lt. Tyler, even mentioned that in the 2250s, the “time barrier” had been broken. So, when Delmonda is talking about an alternate form of warp drive, the bending of space and time makes sense, and is not only in line with Trek canon, but also with the scientific theories behind FTL travel.
In terms of Khan’s overall character arc, the revelation in “Original Sin” revives his fury in a massive way. While the demise of his wife, Marla, in the previous episode wasn’t really anyone’s fault, he says to Delmonda in this episode that the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI wasn’t “eternity’s design,” but rather, Delmonda’s decision. The telepathic Elboreans could have made a different decision in terms of ejecting the energy from their unstable propulsion drive, but chose to crashland on Ceti Alpha V, because they wanted to make repairs.
There’s still one episode of Star Trek: Khan left, and therefore, a bit more to unpack when it comes to Khan’s feelings about the Elboreans, and who is really to blame for his tragic circumstances. But this new wrinkle does change the way we think about Khan’s story to Chekov in Star Trek II. In that movie, Khan simply says, “Ceti Alpha VI exploded, six months after we were left here.” He doesn’t say, “Some weird telepathic aliens called Elboreans ruptured their wild FTL drive and blew up Ceti Alpha VI, and then I became friends with them for a little while.”
Does Star Trek: Khan offer reasons as to why Khan would have never spoken about this during his wrathful phase? Granted, he was probably pretty impatient to get off of Ceti Alpha V in The Wrath, and who knows, maybe off-screen he mentioned some stuff about the Elboreans to his followers. But, one thing is for sure: Khan has one more mystery to explain by the end of this audio drama. What happened to Khan’s daughter Kali? Only the series finale can answer that question.
