Posted in: Paramount+, Star Trek, TV | Tagged: star trek, strange new worlds

Strange New Worlds S04 Will Revisit Kirk/"The Wrath of Khan" Narrative

Strange New Worlds' Henry Alonso Myers on Season 4 diving into Kirk's relationship with his son, previously explored in "The Wrath of Khan."

If there are ongoing narratives of The Original Series that we never got a chance to learn more about, which were introduced in the films, are James Kirk's (William Shatner) relationship with Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch) and their son, David Marcus (Merritt Butrick). We discover this in the 1982 fan favorite Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which saw the film's B-story about the woman he never discussed with his Enterprise crewmates and had a child with. As both parents are workaholics, with Jim away in the stars and Carol's work on the top-secret Project Genesis, which terraforms barren wastelands into livable planets. What we know about Jim and Carol's relationship is that there wasn't much of one after their fling, and she kept David away from his father until the events of the film. Strange New Worlds executive producer and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers spoke to Cinemablend about how the younger Lt. Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) will actually be involved in David's life since it was revealed that Carol told Jim she never told David about his father while raising him.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Tapping into Revisiting Kirk and Son, David

As far as how Myers wanted to address Kirk as a father, he was trying to be careful on how SNW was going to address that aspect: "I don't want to call it a rewrite, but it's like a rethink. The experience of David was not a part of the series because they didn't really figure David out until the movies….Kirk is heroic, and none of us wanted to imagine that he is a lousy father, so that offered a lot of opportunities about how to get into his mind, emotionally." During The Original Series run, family wasn't really much of a subject among the crew, except we do meet Kirk see his dead brother, Sam, also played by Shatner in a mustache, sorry for the 60-year spoiler alert.

It wasn't until the films that we met Kirk's ex and his biological son, who is helping his mother with his research, and sadly passed in the following film, The Search for Spock (1984). It wasn't a narrative that was ever developed much among the two films because while David forgave Jim for not being in his life, we see him separated on the Genesis planet alongside Lt. Saavik (Robin Curtis) during most of the film to recover Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who was reincarnated and aging rapidly. Sadly, the film's villain, the Klingon Kruge (Christopher Lloyd) would murder David in his quest for Genesis, something that Kirk would bitterly hold on to in The Undiscovered Country (1991) in a personal log that he shared, saying that he would "never forgive Klingons for the death of my boy," played at his Klingon trial accused of assassinating Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner).

One benefit in doing a TOS prequel is the opportunities naturally since they get to explore some gaps neither the series nor the films previously addressed, "Every new thing is like going back and trying to reimagine the things that we know now, as if we were doing it then," Myers said. "That's actually the joy of doing a prequel. You get to live in the moment, knowing the future, showing things that they probably hadn't planned to do back in the day." For more, you can check out the entire interview. Strange New World season four, which also stars Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, Jess Bush, and Martin Quinn, premieres July 23rd on Paramount+.

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