Ceti Alpha V

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Ceti Alpha V

Ceti Alpha V was the fifth planet in the Ceti Alpha planetary system. This planet was suitable for colonization by humanoid life-forms. However, this planet was "barely Minshara-class" in 2156 and was "habitable, although a bit savage, somewhat inhospitable" in 2267. It was located a considerable distance from the Delphic Expanse and the planet Denobula. (TOS: "Space Seed", ENT: "Twilight")

History

In 2267, Khan Noonien Singh and his Augment followers were exiled to this planet by James T Kirk, after Khan attempted violent mutiny aboard the USS Enterprise. (TOS: "Space Seed")

Only six months later, Ceti Alpha VI exploded, shifting Ceti Alpha V's orbit and turning it into a desert-like world, dominated by craylon gas and high-velocity winds. The planet became incapable of supporting life, with the only remaining known indigenous lifeform being the Ceti eel.

In 2285, the USS Reliant visited the planet as part of Project Genesis. Mistaking it for Ceti Alpha VI, Captain Clark Terrell and XO Commander Pavel Chekov beamed down to the surface, only to be taken prisoner by Khan and his surviving followers. Khan then hijacked Reliant and stranded its crew on the planet's surface. The crew were later recovered by the USS Enterprise, following Khan's death at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula. (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

In an alternate timeline, Ceti Alpha V was the refuge for the last 6,000 members of the Human race in the 2150s and 2160s – survivors of the devastating Xindi attacks on Earth and its colonies – as it was far from the Delphic Expanse. The colony's location was kept secret for a great deal of time, but a Yridian discovered it by tailing Doctor Phlox, thus allowing the Xindi to attack. (ENT: "Twilight")

The writers have joked on the audio commentary that, if it wasn't bad enough the Xindi killed off almost all of Humanity, a hundred years from "Twilight", Ceti Alpha V would have been destroyed as well.

Ceti Alpha V in 2285

Commander Pavel Chekov and Captain Clark Terrell on Ceti Alpha V in 2285

Appendices

Background information

In the script of ENT: "Twilight", the surface view of Ceti Alpha V was described thus; "Dozens of makeshift human dwellings are clustered in this small valley. We’re on a harsh but habitable Class-M world... only a few occasional patches of vegetation are visible here and there."

Due to its dry nature, Ceti Alpha V is apparently a Class H planet or almost matching that classification after the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI.

There was no explanation given as to how the loss of one planet in a star system could affect others to the degree shown.

Apocrypha

The spin-off novel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh explicitly addressed the above issue. Spock postulated that Ceti Alpha VI's destruction and the environmental impacts on Ceti Alpha V had another, shared cause (possibly a small black hole passing through the system), while apparently the miscounting resulted from the Reliant's crew counting inward, finding the outermost planet (and mistaking the remains of Ceti Alpha VI for part of an outer asteroid belt).

In Vonda N. McIntyre's novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there was some dialog between the Reliant's bridge crew speculating about the cause of the discrepancy between the planet count of the system reported by an old interstellar probe (20) and the current count (19) – one possible conclusion they drew was that the limitations of the probe's imaging systems had led to inaccurate data being reported. This dialog occurred shortly before Terrell and Chekov decided to beam down to the planet.

External link

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