Trek news: the identities of Alice Eve and Benedict Cumberbatch's characters supposedly revealed

First off, the trailer, since I never posted it here for some reason.



Now on to the news. Ever since the trailer came out, speculation has been rife about who Alice Eve was playing in the movie. An almost general consensus formed that she was playing Elizabeth Dehner, a one-off character from the Star Trek episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before". This apparently was due entirely because of Eve's hair in the trailer. No, really. A hairdo.

Alice Eve.
Credit: Memory Alpha.

Elizabeth Dehner (played by Sally Kellerman).
Credit: Memory Alpha.

Well, I guess she just has to be Dehner, who was obviously the only woman in TOS with shoulder-length blonde hair. Just don't tell Janice Rand and Christine Chapel. Hit the jump for the rest.


However, according to Bleeding Cool, Eve isn't playing Dehner. They're reporting that she's playing Carol Marcus instead. I'm skeptical because it hasn't been confirmed by J. J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, or Damon Lindelof and I'd like some secondary sources to back this up. Silas Lesnick, the guy Bleeding Cool cites, wrote this article about visiting the Abram's Bad Robot studio, yet doesn't actually give any details other than Eve is playing Carol Marcus. No quotes. No video clip. Nothing.

This is the same reason why I'm skeptical about this Tor.com report that Benedict Cumberbatch's character has finally been revealed.

According to them, a caption to this picture ("sanctioned" by Paramount Studios, whatever that means) IDs his character as John Harrison. Much like the Alice Eve-Carol Marcus story, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.

And the grain weighs three tons.

Here's why: As Tor themselves point out, John Harrison was a generic name used by TOS writers for when they needed to name a male extra and didn't want to go to the trouble of creating a new name every time. So, this might just be a red herring.

Credit: Toonopolis.

Who do I think they're playing? No idea and any of the guesses would probably prove to be wrong. I don't think he's Khan or Gary Mitchell, however. I didn't see anything in the trailer that really screamed "godlike being" to me. As for Khan, Abrams and Co. have said that they're not doing remakes of any of the original movies and want to make their movies separate from those. That's the reason why the movie's called Star Trek Into Darkness and not Star Trek II: Into Darkness, or just Star Trek: Into Darkness. Making Khan the antagonist in the second Trek movie would contradict that goal, wouldn't it?

On the other hand, he could be playing a wholly original character and folks are just projecting their desires onto it. In the end, I think we should just wait for confirmation from Abrams and Co. before we all go crazy and start writing Kirk-Spock-Mitchell/Khan/Harrison slash fiction.