The Wrath of Gary

Put on your nerd pants everybody, I'm about to talk about Star 2rek: The Ensequeling. If it's too much for you, here's a link to Reuters. Anyway, according to Topless Robot who read it on Totalfilm.com, who heard it from some guy (Karl Urban, aka Dr. McCoy, aka Judge Dredd), Bilbodict Cumberholmes might not be playing Khan after all.

'...this is for Season 3 of Heroes you green-blooded son-of-a-bitch!'

-Bumberdink Clumberhitch in Star Trek 2

'A female...space officer? Is she like,
in charge of the space kitchen?'

-NBC Executives

Instead, according to Karl Urban, Cumberbatch will be playing oft-overlooked Kirk nemesis Gary Mitchell. Who the shit is Gary Mitchell? Well, way back when Gene Roddenberry was putting together The Star Treks for NBC he filmed a pilot episode called The Cage. It was about super intelligent telepathic aliens with throbbing, ass-shaped skulls who kidnap Captain Pike (this was pre-Kirk) and two female crew members as breeding stock for their space zoo. It was pretty smart for TV sci-fi in the 60's and featured a female first officer-she wore pants and everything.

Cool right? Well, no. NBC decided there wasn't enough over-acting and flying dropkicks so they told Roddenberry to try again. The result was the second pilot: Where No Man Has Gone Before starring William 'Priceline' Shatner-the inventor of the two-fisted punch.

'Yes, and throw in some more punching. In fact, make it double-punching. With two fists.'

-Network notes

God-like powers are the sci-fi equivalent
of rabies-at some point your friends are
going to have to put you down. And how.

This time the Enterprise passes through a lava-lamp barrier field which hyper-evolves a couple crew members including Captain Kirk's best pal Gary Mitchell. The rest of the episode is about Kirk deciding exactly how hard to kill his BFF before he goes all Dark Phoenix on the ship and crew. It was also a pretty good episode and if J. J. Abrams insists on boldly going where Trek has already gone before, the Wrath of Gary sounds like way more fun than a Khan re-tread.

Above: A truly dizzying intellect.

Of course it might also be that Karl Urban is throwing up some sort of smoke screen to make us think Khan isn't the big bad in the movie. On the other hand, Urban might be the sort of man who would know that we're on to him and so he's telling us the truth in hopes of misleading us into believing a lie. So is this rumor a sure thing? Not remotely. Because Karl Urban comes from New Zealand and as everyone knows New Zealand is entirely peopled with sheep. Anyway, I'm suddenly way more excited to see Trek 2.


On a side note, if Trek 2 is a WNMHGB (acronym!) remake, it might mean that Alice Eve (seen left) is playing Doctor Elizabeth Dehner (right)-the other crew member who catches super-powers from the magic space barrier. In fact, it seems pretty obvious now. Look at the on-set pictures:

Of course at this point it's all wild speculation. I mean, Alice Eve's hair
is parted on the right whereas Elizabeth Dehner's is parted on the left.