Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Just Complicated The Wrath of Khan

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 2

At the climax of “The Griffin Incident,” the second episode of Strange New Worlds‘s fourth season, the haunted ship that Kirk, Spock, and La’an have been investigating nearly drives two of the Starfleet officers to kill one another. La’an stabs Kirk and then stands over his body, mocking him for saying that he wants to live for his young son, David. “Your little boy is going to die just like you,” sneers La’an. “At the end of a blade, bleeding out in a dark corner of space.”

It may not be the real La’an saying these words, but they aren’t wrong. David, Kirk’s son with the scientist Carol Marcus, does indeed get killed by a Klingon d’k tahg in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. However, everything before that moment surprises anyone who knows that movie and its predecessor, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Those films portrayed Kirk as a largely absent father, who had never worried too much about the son he left behind while traveling the galaxy with his true love, the USS Enterprise. But in “The Griffin Incident,” we get a different type of Kirk, one who wants to be a good father and hasn’t yet come to grips with the fact that he never will be.

Original Failures

The legend of James Kirk looms large for everyone who loves Star Trek, including the man who currently portrays him, Paul Wesley. “I’ve always wondered about Kirk’s relationship with his father and with his son,” Wesley explained during a press conference attended by Den of Geek. “Your relationship with your father is very important to who you become as a man. And Kirk had to go through some things in order to understand why he becomes who he is.

“What’s great about Strange New Worlds is that we have this wealth of information about Kirk. But on the Original Series, we just meet Kirk and he is who he is. He’s a sure-footed kind of man who is in command. Being able to explore some vulnerabilities with his family has, for me, and hopefully for the viewers, provided a lot of information and context as to why he became who he is.”

That context comes in “The Griffin Incident,” a favorite among the Strange New Worlds cast, for several reasons (“I enjoyed stabbing Paul,” beamed La’an’s actor Christina Chong). “The Griffin Incident” begins with Kirk, Spock, and La’an discovering a missing starship called the USS Griffin while traveling home from a retreat. As the trio investigates, they find the Griffin abandoned, with no indication of what happened to the crew. Amongst the visions and monsters that assault them, Kirk thinks that he hears the cries of a baby, cries that he believes are coming from his infant son David. Kirk had been planning on visiting Carol, with whom he has a cordial but distant relationship, and David. But instead, he agreed to attend the Future Leaders of the Federation Retreat, a decision that caused him no consternation, as he thought he could catch up with them afterward.

However, the strange effects of the Griffin cause Kirk to hear the sounds of a baby crying, sounds that he associates with David. Later, the Griffin manifests images of the Enterprise crew, including Kirk’s brother Sam. In scenes that don’t feel like horror sequences, Sam compares Kirk’s habits of bringing trinkets back to David to that of their father, whose baubles failed to make up for his absence. Worse, Sam tells Kirk that he hasn’t been able to reconcile his Starfleet duties to his family life, a confession that gains greater meaning when Sam gets sucked out into space, forever floating among the stars and away from his wife and children.

The Wrath of the Son

At the point that Sam goes through the window, we viewers know that he’s a hallucination. After all, we see Sam die in the TOS episode “Operation – Annihilate!” where he’s played by William Shatner wearing a fake mustache.

However, longtime Trekkies didn’t know that Kirk felt so deeply about his son that a haunted ship could use it as a weakness to exploit. Outside of non-canonical novels and comics, David Marcus only appears in the aforementioned two movies, where he’s played by the late Merritt Butrick. Through Butrick’s performance, we’re led to see Kirk as largely an absent father, someone whose mere existence is a problem for David. In his first scene, David stands beside his mother Carol as she listens to Chekov (secretly being controlled by Khan Noonien Singh) order her to surrender the findings of her Genesis project. When Chekov tells Carol that Admiral Kirk ordered the transfer, David’s anger at his father bubbles over, and he starts shouting about Starfleet military overriding the science division.

David’s anger doesn’t subside when Kirk himself arrives on Carol’s station, Regula I, to assure them that he did not give the order. David attacks Kirk as soon as he beams down to Regula I, and the fact that the two don’t even recognize one another only makes it worse. Throughout the movie, Kirk certainly expresses some regret about not being in David’s life more. But the narrative puts the emotional onus upon David, having him warm to Kirk over the course of the film, not so much because he feels a connection to his father, but because Jim is such an exemplary Starfleet hero.

We don’t see much change in Kirk’s demeanor at any point in David’s life. It’s only after David’s death that Kirk begins to show feelings toward his son and their relationship. He uses David’s murder as a justification for killing the Klingon commander Kruge in Search for Spock. Later, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Kirk’s anger about David’s death is cited in Klingon court as a reason that he cannot be trusted to advance peace between their empire and the Federation. Yet, all of this reads as guilt for something in the past. We Trekkies have questions about what Kirk thought of David during the boy’s life.

The Failure of James T. Kirk

In his final scene in “The Griffin Project,” Kirk sits alone starring at a screen displaying the words “Outgoing message.” It’s not clear what Kirk plans to say to Carol and David, and our knowledge of Wrath of Khan suggests that he won’t say anything at all, leaving David to grow up with no connection to his father.

Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock only further cement Kirk’s legend as one of pop culture’s greatest heroes. But that scene, and everything else in “The Griffin Incident” shows us something else about Kirk, that he’s conflicted, afraid, unsure… and ultimately very human.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.