Paramount PicturesFamously, just before Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) screams “KHAAANN!” in The Wrath of Khan, the titular wrathful character recounts his basic reason for his hatred of Kirk. Khan rasps that Kirk and the Enterprise left him and the other criminals from the S.S. Botany Bay “marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet...buried alive!” But was there ever a chance of rescue? Was there ever another way off of Ceti Alpha V? In “The Good of All,” Episode 6 of the new audio podcast drama Star Trek: Khan, the cliffhanger ending teases that, at one point, there was a way off this dreaded planet. Spoilers ahead.For its first four episodes, Star Trek: Khan unpacked how Khan and his Augment followers tried to tame the wild world of Ceti Alpha V, which included their discovery of the fatal Ceti eels, and the details of how former Starfleet officer Marla McGivers (Wrenn Schmidt) won the trust of the rest of the exiles. But, starting with Episode 5, the story of Khan veered into a surprising direction. Fans certainly anticipated a survival story, and the inevitable explosion of neighboring planet Ceti Alpha VI was also expected. But, Episode 5 also brought hitherto unknown alien visitors to Ceti Alpha V in the form of the telepathic and telekinetic Elboreans. Khan’s first starship, the S.S. Botany Bay. | Paramount/CBSWhile the arrival of the Elboreans coincided with the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI, Episode 6 introduces a new plot detail that seems almost apocryphal: At the end of the episode, Khan (Naveen Andrews) and Marla learn that the Elboreans are planning on building an escape craft from the remains of their crashed starship. And the people they intend to put on the escape ship are... the humans.This cliffhanger seems to suggest two outcomes. First, that this ship will never be completed, because we know that Khan and his followers were still on Ceti Alpha V when the Reliant showed up in The Wrath, 15 years later. So, the second outcome is that the ship does work, and that a few of Khan’s followers did make it off the planet, and might have survived well beyond the 2280s. The series Khan has already made a few things clearer about the age of several of Khan’s followers: Older characters like Joaquin have perished, while the backstory of the young Joachim, who is a major character in The Wrath, has been foregrounded. Co-writer of Khan, Kirsten Beyer, previously told Inverse that this was a major goal of the series: to account for all the young people we see in The Wrath. But, the revelation of the Elboreans and their escape ship suggests the possibility of Khan-connected characters who could be contemporaries with characters from the early 23rd century and beyond.La’an (Christina Chong) in Strange New Worlds. | Paramount+Thanks to the character of La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) in Strange New Worlds, we’re well aware that descendants of Khan existed throughout the galaxy, well before Khan himself was rediscovered in 2267 in “Space Seed.” But this twist in Khan is more startling because it possibly suggests that people who literally lived with Khan made it off of Ceti Alpha V, well before the Reliant showed up and Khan’s wrath really got going.What started as a survival story to fill in the gaps between “Space Seed” and The Wrath has now become something else: a sci-fi puzzle involving a missing starship we never knew was missing in the first place.Star Trek: Khan drops new episodes on podcast platforms on Mondays.