Nicholas Meyer's Secret 'Star Trek' Series May Be A 'Wrath Of Khan' Reboot

We may see Khan in the flesh yet again. The genetically engineered baddie may appear in a rumored spin-off series of Star Trek: Discovery, one that Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer is attached to.

Reports have surfaced that Meyer's secret Star Trek project is a Wrath of Khan reboot miniseries, depicting Khan in his exile before Wrath of Khan took place. Or, this could all be hearsay and we were all...khanned. Get it? No, okay.

Meyer has been attached to Star Trek: Discovery as a consulting producer and writer, but recently teased that chronology of Discovery has opened doors for many other Trek stories.

"One thing that has nothing to do with Discovery is that I am working on another Star Trek project, but I can't discuss that either," he told TrekMovie (via io9) cryptically in June. This spawned a flurry of rumors about what Meyer's secret Star Trek project could be, but it wasn't until this week that we got a sense of what it was. Geek Exchange claimed it was told by two sources that the project is a miniseries about Khan Noonien Singh, one of the Enterprise's most famous antagonists.

When asked about the mysterious Star Trek project he was involved with, Meyer told Inverse, "I Khannot possibly comment."

Excellent pun aside, Meyer's response all but confirms that the project is centered around Khan, or at least tangentially related to him.

According to Geek Exchange, the miniseries would explore what Khan was up to during in his exile on Ceti Alpha V after the events of the 1966 Star Trek episode "Space Seed" and before the events of 1982's The Wrath of Khan. Khan's origins have been frequently explored in novels, comics, and even the new Star Trek Into Darkness film with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the hyperintelligent superhuman. Greg Cox explored Khan's backstory in The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, and IDW Comics dived into the events of Meyer's reported miniseries in 2011's Ruling in Hell.

Cumberbatch's performance as Khan, as well as Into Darkness itself, was not well-received, so I wouldn't put it past Meyer to take another stab at the character that he helped make famous. It would also give Meyer a chance to cast a young Khan as a person of color — which Cumberbatch was notably not. Cumberbatch's casting made sense in relation to the twist reveal, but not in terms of the character's name nor original actor Ricardo Montalban's ethnicity as a Mexican actor.

Star Trek: Discovery premieres on CBS All Access on September 24.