Continuity wrinkles in franchises as long-running and lore-heavy as Star Trek are somewhat to be expected. Keeping track of both timelines and character details is tricky business, as Strange New Worlds proved earlier this year when Spock and Kirk came together for a canon-breaking mind meld. Often, the answer is just to label it a retcon and move on.
But close to half a century ago, Star Trek unwittingly pulled off a continuity stunt that will likely never happen again. Thanks to a quirk of releasing and some confusion between creative teams, a Trek release revived a dead Starfleet character before she even knew she was dead. Temporarily at least.
How Star Trek “Resurrected” Lieutenant Ilia
Years after Star Trek: The Original Series ended, appetite for the show remained strong enough to warrant other releases away from the screen. Gold Key Comics released a series from 1967 to 1979, and British comic strips ran between 1969 and 1971. Then came the LA Times Syndicate daily strip that tied directly into Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which released the same week, in December 1979.
The strip came first, on December 2, some 46 years ago today, while the movie came out on December 7 (after a Washington-only release the day before). The only problem was that the first strips featured the immediately recognizable figure of bald Deltan lieutenant Ilia (played by Persis Khambatta in the movie). The same Ilia who is famously killed in The Motion Picture by the V’ger probe and replaced by a doppelgänger. The events of the strip followed on from the end of the movie, so anyone reading after the latter’s release would have been extremely confused.
Confusion is also how the not-retcon happened. Artist Thomas Warkentin placed Ilia at the navigator’s station in the first two arcs of the comic’s release (“Called Home” published Sunday, December 2, 1979, and “Dilithium Dilemma” from Wednesday, January 9, 1980) after being presented with stills from the movie and not knowing that the bald navigator was doomed to die until he saw the movie when it opened. He innocently included Ilia in two panels of “Called Home,” though she didn’t speak, and then again in the second release, “Dilithium Dilemma” when she spoke to Kirk. By the third arc, she was gone, once more listed as Missing in Action after her grim fate in The Motion Picture.
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