20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)
17. Roddenberry’s Comments About Ceti Alpha Five Improved The Story
In the finished film, when Captain Terrell and Commander Chekov beam down to Ceti Alpha Five, they don’t realize it’s the same planet where Kirk marooned Khan and his followers twenty years before (Terrell and Chekov think it is Ceti Alpha Six). After they’re captured, Khan explains that years ago, Ceti Alpha Six exploded, which shifted the orbit of Ceti Alpha Five and laid waste to the planet’s surface. “Admiral Kirk,” he says bitterly, “never bothered to check on our progress.”
In earlier iterations of the script, however, things were quite different. Meyer’s initial concept was that Ceti Alpha Five was a barren wasteland from the beginning, and when Terrell and Chekov beam down to the planet, they do so without even consulting the data banks about previous exploration of the planet. Roddenberry ardently objected to these story points in a memo sent to producer Harve Bennett:
This planet description just does not fit the planet, or any planet, on which Kirk could have marooned Khan and his crew. The idea of Kirk condemning people to this kind of death (even if we could believe him as an “executioner”) flies directly in the face of everything Star Trek was about, i.e. humanity having finally matured into a mature, tolerant, non-violent, life-respecting species...Most unbelievable of all, of course is letting the U.S.S. Reliant run even a casual check on Ceti Alpha without first checking it out in the ship's computer records.
Roddenberry didn’t just present objections to the problem in his memo, however, he also presented a solution:
We must ask our science advisor to concentrate on a very major kind of catastrophe occurring to this planet which would be capable of not only changing its look but also of knocking it out of its original orbit.
On this point, Meyer followed Roddenberry’s advice and rewrote the script. His changes brought the movie more in line with “Space Seed” (which established Ceti Alpha Five as “habitable, although a bit savage, somewhat inhospitable”) and helped make Terrell and Chekov’s actions easier to swallow. Plus, they had the added benefit of deepening Khan’s motivations for seeking revenge against Kirk (in twenty years, not a single ship was sent to check on him?).