Contrary to early reports, Khan may actually show up in the next Star Trek movie, but you’ll be surprised to hear who won’t be appearing.
Back in October, it was confirmed (via an anonymous source) that Khan wouldn’t appear in the sequel to Star Trek. Well, now it turns out that may not be entirely true, and this time the information is coming directly from a named source.
Speaking to MTV, the movie’s co-writer Damon Lindelof talked a little bit about the sequel without giving away too much actual detail. However, he was very firm on one thing: “We know what the movie’s about, we know what the key relationships are, what the stakes are, who the bad guy is…or girl…or Borg. No Borg. No Borg. We can rule out Borg.”
However, Lindelof also mentioned that Khan isn’t entirely out of the running as the next movie’s villain:
“To Khan or not to Khan was the jumping off question and we actually put a big list up on the board: pros and Khans, because it’s a pun, and sort of weighed it all out and had a big debate and came to a decision, and once we came to that decision we stuck to our guns.”
Honestly, that first bit is probably for the best. The Borg were intriguing, scary, villains on The Next Generation when they first appeared, were amazing antagonists in Star Trek: First Contact, and then kind of got overplayed in Voyager. If Khan is included in the new movie, though, it’ll be interesting to see how he’d be implemented considering that everything is different from the original universe canon thanks to the reboot provided in the first film.