Strange New Worlds Showrunner Explains Why Season 4’s Wrath Of Khan Shakeup Isn’t A “Retcon”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is delivering a major shakeup tied to The Wrath of Khan, but showrunner Henry Alonso Myers doesn’t want this to be viewed as a “retcon.”

There’s a little over a week to go until Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 premieres on Paramount+. Just like in the first three seasons, Paul Wesley will recur as James T. Kirk, who is still a ways off from succeeding Christopher Pike as the USS Enterprise’s captain. Season 4 will explore a corner of Kirk’s personal life that was previously touched on in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Myers explained why fans don’t need to worry about this causing continuity issues.

While speaking with SFX Magazine, Myers, who co-created Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with Akiva Goldsman, revealed that David Marcus, Kirk’s son, will appear in season 4. This is despite the fact that in The Wrath of Khan, it was established that Carol Marcus, David’s mother, raised him as a single parent, and Kirk didn’t even recognize David as an adult. So, Myers said the following about the Strange New Worlds team deciding to show Kirk as a father to young David:

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.

David was originally played by Merritt Butrick in The Wrath of Khan, while Carol was played by Bibi Besch. It was established that Kirk and Carol had a “complicated” long-distance, on-and-off relationship, and it got to the point where Carol decided she didn’t want Kirk involved in David’s life. Though the father and son finally formed a relationship in the second Star Trek movie, it didn’t last long, as David was killed off in 1984’s The Search for Spock.

Now, Strange New Worlds will depict Kirk parenting David in at least his early childhood. Myers also said in the interview that “every new thing is like going back and trying to reimagine the things that we know now, as if we were doing it then.” He described this as the “joy of doing a prequel,” because it allows the creatives and fans to “live in the moment, knowing the future, showing things that they probably hadn’t planned to do back in the day.”

It’s unclear if Carol will appear in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds alongside David, or if we’ll only see the boy interacting with his father. Alice Eve also played Carol in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, which established how she and Chris Pine’s Kirk met in the Kelvin Timeline. The Prime Timeline’s version of Carol was also mentioned by Kathryn Janeway in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “The Omega Directive.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 premieres Thursday, July 23, and among the other things fans can look forward to is a puppet episode. The Wrath of Khan can also be found on Paramount+ alongside all the other Star Trek movies.