The Real Problem with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Villain Role in Star Trek 12

It’s more or less official now which villain Benedict Cumberbatch is playing in the Star Trek sequel. It’s been confirmed by multiple off-the-record sources, and Trek Movie seems pretty sure about it. And there’s already a protest movement brewing about it.

But nobody’s brought up the real problem with Cumberbatch’s Trek villain yet.

Top image: Star Trek set photo via MTV.

Spoilers ahead…

So by all accounts, Cumberbatch really is playing Khan Noonien Singh, the villain made famous by Ricardo Montalban in the Original Series episode “Space Seed” plus the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This seems logical, based on what we’ve seen of set photos thus far — whoever Cumberbatch is playing, he apparently doesn’t have any alien makeup on. And he doesn’t have godlike Squire Trelaine powers, because otherwise Spock wouldn’t be able to nerve-pinch him. It’s clear Cumberbatch is playing someone human(ish), which narrows things considerably.

We already devoted tons of space to explaining why bringing back Khan is a bad idea — in a nutshell, it smacks of sequelitis and rehashing old ideas. It feels like pandering to the fans rather than doing something fresh and interesting. You can’t improve on Montalban. Chris Pine doesn’t have the gravitas to face up to a villain with that level of intellect and personality. Khan will probably get needlessly combined with another set of villains to make the story seem new — and indeed, there are multiple reports the Klingons are a major part of Trek 12.

Meanwhile, there’s already a protest movement brewing against the idea of casting a white guy as Khan. Who, after all, is a POC character who was played by a POC actor. And yes, this is clearly a bit of whitewashing, along the lines of the Last Airbender controversies and other similar stuff. Khan is one of the most iconic people of color in space opera, so to turn him into another angry white guy seems just kind of sad. Also, one wonders if Cumberbatch is attempting to do some kind of pastiche of Montalban’s accent — let’s hope not. Originally, they had sought Benicio Del Toro for this role, but he had to pull out.

But there’s another huge problem with casting a white guy as Khan.

Khan’s whole backstory and reason for existing have to do with the Eugenics Wars. He’s the product of selective breeding (or, according to Wrath of Khan, genetic engineering) to create the perfect human. He’s smarter, faster, cleverer and more cunning than any normal human, and he can learn any topic from top to bottom in moments. That’s why he’s such a huge threat to Kirk and the others — much more than a regular human villain like, say, Harry Mudd. Or the Outrageous Okona.*

Khan is basically the ultimate racial supremacist, who believes everyone else is his inferior. He’s clearly a product of the post-World War II generation grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust and Hitler’s terrible ideology, like so much other pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. (For more on this, read here.)

Making the ultimate representation of eugenics into a vaguely Asian villain played by a Latino was an oddly clever choice — it divorces his claims of genetic superiority from the real-life advocates of eugenics, and forces you to see the issue in a new light. For most of its history, eugenics was synoymous with “white superiority” — but Khan flies in the face of that, by giving us a eugenics experiment in which race is apparently not a factor. (Khan’s followers are mostly white, so apparently Khan’s ethnic identity is just pure happenstance, and the creators of this master race weren’t aiming for any particular skin color.)

A color-blind eugenics program gets past the “white supremacy” aspects of eugenics to reach for the heart of why eugenics is so terrible — the very notion of one group of humans being innately better than another devalues us all. It dehumanizes all people, even the allegedly superior ones, by assigning to us a value based on arbitrary characteristics. It’s one more step into making us like cattle, who can be bred for certain characteristics. Or more like things, really.

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