As Jack Crusher said at the end of Star Trek: Picard, “names mean almost everything.” This is particularly true in Star Trek. From various starships re-using the same name, to heroes coming from important Trek families, to minor characters being sneakily related to other characters, the Star Trek universe is often held together by its names and the complex spider-webs of continuity they string together.
One of the best examples of characters becoming a canonical Easter egg basket happened 20 years ago, on October 29, 2004, with an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise called “Borderland.” Here, with the introduction of Arik Soong, the Trek canon fixed a few lingering mysteries and set up a whole new parade of retcons.
Soong and Khan
Introduced in the 1967 episode “Space Seed,” Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) became one of Trek’s most iconic baddies when he returned in 1982’s The Wrath of Khan. Even casual viewers can hear William Shatner screaming his name with several faux-syllables added, but Khan is more than just one of Trek’s first viral moments. He’s a character from The Original Series who didn’t quite fit with future tweaks to Trek’s canon and background story, and while some of this has been “fixed” with time travel shenanigans, Khan is a bit of an anachronistic character, a villain from the 1990s who ends up in the 2300s, as imagined by writers in the ‘60s.
In canon, Khan lived during the ‘90s before he and his followers were put in suspended animation. A tyrant during Earth’s Eugenic Wars, Khan was seen by history as a kind of Napoleonic figure. His full name, Khan Noonien Singh, was created by Gene Roddenberry in an homage to a real-life friend named Kim Noonien Singh. Then, when The Next Generation had to create a father character for the android Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner), Roddenberry again paid tribute to his friend with a character called Noonien Soong. In our world, there was an explanation for the similarity, but what was the reason within the Trek universe?
Arik Soong explains it all
Set a century before The Original Series, Enterprise was doing some canon tap-dancing from its very first episode. In its fourth and final season, Enterprise tackled a variety of thorny canon questions all at once, from the origins of the Federation to a shift in Vulcan traditions. In “Borderland,” the show introduced Arik Soong, a rouge geneticist still trying to create enhanced humans. This practice had been outlawed since 21st-century experiments led to the Eugenic Wars, but Soong was a holdover hoping to create more superhumans like Khan who wouldn’t go on murderous rampages.
“Borderland” began a three-episode arc that clarified the events of the Eugenics Wars and Khan’s place in that era. The unifying factor in all of it was the casting of Brent Spiner as Dr. Arik Soong, familiar to fans as Data, Lore, and Dr. Noonien Soong in The Next Generation. By the end, Soong decides that human “Augments” aren’t worth the trouble, and that his work would be better served developing resilient humanoid androids. Data’s creation essentially begins with Arik Soong, and because of Arik’s involvement with Augments like Khan, the name “Noonien” is essentially a family name.
The legacy of Khan and Soong
Does all of this mean that Data and Khan are like cousins? No, but “Borderland” did establish that these names had far-reaching effects. For example, in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, La'an Noonien-Singh is depicted as Khan’s descendant, even though she’s not a genetically engineered Augment.
In Picard Season 2, the character of Adam Soong, a deranged mad scientist, is seen in the 21st century checking out a shady document called “Project Khan.” Even more than Enterprise, that season of Picard linked the Soong family tree with the Noonien-Singhs. This doesn’t make La’an Data’s great-aunt, but the connection is there.
Enterprise did a decent job clarifying all these intricacies two decades ago, but that retcon patch job has only grown since then. Right now, we’ve got a decent grasp of the Soong family and the Noonien-Singh lineage. But there’s plenty more Star Trek coming, meaning the best of Soong and the worst of Singh may only be the beginning of the story.
