Draft:Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V

Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V is an upcoming American audio drama podcast created by Nicholas Meyer. It is part of executive producer Alex Kurtzman's expanded Star Trek Universe and is set before the events of Meyer's film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).

Work on the project, which originated as a three-episode television miniseries written by Meyer, was first revealed in June 2017. That version did not move forward due to the cost of producing such a short series. Kurtzman revealed plans to expand the Star Trek Universe into scripted podcasts in May 2022, and Meyer officially announced Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V that September. Meyer expanded the scripts to nine or ten episodes for the podcast.

Premise
The series tells the story of Khan Noonien Singh and his followers when they are stranded on the planet Ceti Alpha V between the events of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed" and the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Cast and characters

 * Khan Noonien Singh

Development
After joining the CBS All Access series Star Trek: Discovery as a consulting producer and writer, Nicholas Meyer revealed in June 2017 that he was also working on a second Star Trek project that was unrelated to Discovery. Meyer previously wrote and directed the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). In May 2018, Meyer referred to the project as a "stand-alone Star Trek-related trilogy", and said it was on hold due to the heated relationship between companies CBS and Viacom. As Viacom is the parent-company of Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the Star Trek films, CBS was not able to use content from those films at that time, and Meyer's project was rumored to be a prequel to The Wrath of Khan. The next month, after becoming sole showrunner of Discovery, Alex Kurtzman signed a five-year overall deal with CBS Television Studios to expand the Star Trek franchise beyond Discovery to several new series, miniseries, and animated series. This included a limited series based around the character Khan Noonien Singh and his storyline in The Wrath of Khan, in which he was portrayed by Ricardo Montalbán. Terry Matalas discussed becoming showrunner of the series with Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman, before eventually joining the series Star Trek: Picard instead.

The project was still on hold in November 2018, when Meyer revealed that it was a three-episode miniseries titled Ceti Alpha V, named for the planet that Khan and his followers live on before the events of The Wrath of Khan. He was unsure then if the project would be moving forward, and said CBS was concerned with how expensive the series would be to produce relative to its short running time. In August 2019, Viacom announced that it was merging with CBS, bringing the film and television sides of the Star Trek franchise under the control of one company, ViacomCBS, for the first time since they split in 2006. ViacomCBS announced in September 2020 that CBS All Access would be expanded and rebranded as Paramount+ in March 2021. In February 2021, Kurtzman said a new series was unlikely to be added to Paramount+'s slate of Star Trek Universe series until one of the existing five came to an end. A month later, Meyer said the project had originally been suggested to him by Kurtzman and he had thought it was a great idea that he was excited to pursue. He was still interested in making the project, but expressed concern at potentially having to extend it beyond the three episode plan which he felt would make it like the television series Gilligan's Island. In May 2022, Kurtzman said there were discussions about the Star Trek Universe expanding to other media such as video games and dramatic podcasts, and a month later Meyer revealed that he was negotiating a deal to turn Ceti Alpha V into a podcast that he would write and possibly direct. At the Star Trek Day event on September 8, Meyer officially announced the scripted podcast as Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V, with Kurtzman, Aaron Baiers, Trevor Roth, and Rod Roddenberry set as executive producers.

The podcast was announced to be premiering in early 2023, but no more news had been released by November 2023. At that time, Meyer said the project had "a kitchen filled with cooks" and "whatever timeline we had went out the window some months ago". Meyer revealed that the podcast was being expanded from the initial three, hour-long television episodes to nine or ten half-hour episodes. He added that they would begin casting and hire a composer once some "behind-the-scenes issues" had been resolved, and said there was a chance that the podcast could lead to a television or film version if it was successful.