Do you remember the scene in The Wrath of Khan where Captain Terrell and Chekov are looking around the Reliant and Chekov suddenly notices a child looking at him through a window and calls out for Terrell? A child that scurries off the second Terrell arrives, leaving Chekov to attempt to describe what he saw? What? You don’t remember this particular scene?

That’s because it was deleted before the film was finalized and released. But in one version of the script, this child did exist and even appears again near the end of film.

In this alternate ending,  Khan would be nearly ready to detonate the Genesis device when we suddenly see the same toddler crawling onto the transporter pad.  With a natural child’s curiosity, he begins to head in the direction of the projectile.

Here is a behind the scenes photo of almost the same scene as a above, but from a different angle. Meyer seems to coaxing the child to come toward him and the child is rising slightly as if he were about to stand.

Again, the bright shiny object with the flashing lights seems to fascinate the toddler and he tries to get closer to it.

And once he had gotten to this point, where he is close enough to touch it, Khan would have detonated the Genesis Device, not knowing that the child is there. Which would have been a horrifying scene in the midst of what is already a horrifying scene back on the Enterprise. If this child exists, then there must be others who also die along with their parents  on the ship. What a way to emphasize the horrors of war.

But even though these photos exist as proof that Nicholas Meyer once had this ending in mind, there is no trace of the actual film footage. It was most likely destroyed once Meyer decided this would be way too dark. The audience would already have been reeling from watching Spock slowly die from radiation exposure. To then watch a scene with a child walking slowly towards his death would be an extra punch to the gut that might detract from the scene before it. Wisely, all scenes involving the toddler were cut.

There are online articles speculating that this child was Khan’s son. Most likely, this was never true. No one from the movie with any knowledge of this scene have ever given even the slightest indication the toddler’s father was Khan. Most likely it was meant to be representative of other small children who would have likely been sired by the young men and women in Khan’s crew.

The Child still appears in the Star Trek II novelization by Vonda McIntyre but only in the Botany Bay scenes:

The child is not brought up again after they take over Reliant (in fact Khan later has to crawl to the transporter room to activate the Genesis Device and crawl back to the bridge because I guess no one had thought of having the control device on the bridge until a latter version of the script.

*edit

Greg Cox’s To Reign in Hell (part 3 of his awesone 3 Part Khan books in the early 2000s) postulates that the children and weaker members of his Entourage were left behind on Genesis guarding the Reliant crew.

Star Trek author Vonda N. McIntyre died yesterday after a long battle with metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was 70 years old. 

A winner of both the Nebula and Hugo awards, she’s best known by the masses for a single name she contributed to the Star Trek mythos: Hikaru, Sulu’s given first name in the novel The Entropy Effect. The name became canon when writer Peter David visited the set of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to prepare for the film’s comics adaptation. He convinced Nicholas Meyer to insert in the script, making a certain set of fans (including myself) very happy.

Thank you for everything, Vonda.

Photo by Michael Ward on Flickr.

RIP Vonda, you expanded the Star Trek universe & we salute you.