“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” has become a huge part of the franchise's legacy and is considered by many to be the best “Star Trek” film of all, but bringing it to the screen was a major challenge. After the relative failures of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” franchise creator Gene Roddenberry was stepped aside, allowing for a darker and grittier “Star Trek” than we'd ever seen before. “The Wrath of Khan” is an operatic epic about the struggles of the crew of the USS Enterprise under the command of Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the genetically modified villain Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán). Khan was one of the most terrifying antagonists in Star Trek: The Original Series, specifically in the episode “Space Seed,” so bringing the character back was a big deal. This upped the ante as Khan was able to do real damage – by stealing terraforming technology called the Genesis Device, which would kill the entire world to transform it into a lush paradise.
Khan wants revenge on Kirk for forcing him into exile for 15 long years, trapped on a planet that over time became completely uninhabitable. Despite his murderous plans, he is a somewhat sympathetic villain because he wants to do right by his people and has endured so much suffering. However, in the original plans for “The Wrath of Khan”, the film made his character even more tragic, including a plot twist involving his young son.
The tragic plot twist with Khan's baby was just too much sadness
In the original screenplay of “The Wrath of Khan” by Harve Bennett and Jack B. Sowards, which was ultimately completely reworked by director Nicholas Meyer, there is a scene at the beginning in which the captain of the carrier ship USS Clark Terrell (Paul Winfield) and Pavel Chekov ( Walter Koenig) – who serves as the Reliant's first officer at the beginning of the film – came across the infant while exploring Botany Bay, Khan's sleeper ship, on the planet Ceti Alpha. The child is presumably Khan's son, and was intended to reappear at the very end of the film, crawling towards the Genesis device aboard the Reliant's teleporter, just before Khan detonates the device and kills them all. Although Khan claimed to want to create a new future for his people, he was ultimately willing to sacrifice his own son to attempt to exact final revenge on Kirk. It's a really great (if completely depressing) ending that works well with the themes and ideas Meyer was already working with, or it could have just been too dark when Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sacrificed himself to save the Enterprise.
There is evidence that the scene was filmed, as a photo of Meyer directing the scene with the baby on the telepad appeared in a 1982 issue of StarBlazer magazine, but unfortunately little else has appeared. Meyer wasn't much of a wimp and didn't even shed a tear while filming Spock's emotional death scene, so the decision to cut out footage of Khan's baby probably wasn't his to make. Removing the scenes didn't change the film much, although it would have added additional depth to Khan's character.
According to Roddenberry, Khan was given a short shift
While it's unlikely that Roddenberry wanted to include a subplot involving Khan's son, as it's far too dark for his upbeat sensibilities, he really felt that Montalbán deserved more work from the script. He was extremely critical of the film, but credited the actor with being his saving grace by taking some of the more corny lines and turning them into something more operatic.
Although not everyone and some critics liked “The Wrath of Khan” completely, it was then that I noticed that it became quite widely liked. While much of this can be attributed to Meyer's direction and intense entertainment compared to “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” Khan is also quite a spectacular villain. If the scenes with the son had been left in, it could have been something even bigger and more complicated, but it's quite understandable that the studio didn't want to completely alienate viewers with such a depressing ending.
