Star Trek: Who is Carol Marcus?

Key Takeaways

• Captain Kirk’s long-term relationship with Carol Marcus led to the birth of their son, David.
• Despite their past, Carol chose to raise David alone to avoid a co-parenting relationship with Kirk.
• It remains uncertain whether Carol Marcus will make an appearance in the upcoming season of Strange New Worlds.

By the time Star Trek fans meet Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise, he’s already earned his reputation as a lady’s man. As he explores strange new worlds in Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), Kirk also explores lots of women, both human and alien. In the series, Kirk never has a long-term partner. Though he’s had a few long-term relationships in the past, they always ended because of devotion to his true love — Starfleet.

One of Kirk’s few long-term relationships was with a woman named Carol Marcus. Trekkies first found out about Kirk’s relationship with Marcus in the TOS movie The Wrath of Khan. At that time, their relationship was a thing of the past, with only one thing tying it to the present: their son. Now Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) is giving Trekkies a peek at Kirk’s earlier years, and some more details about his relationship with Carol Marcus.

Who is Carol Marcus?

In the ninth episode of Strange New Worlds’ second season, “Subspace Rhapsody,” Lieutenant Kirk told La’an Noonien-Singh that he’d had a long-distance, on-again-off-again relationship with a woman named Carol for a while. He explained that she was a scientist stationed on Starbase One, and then dropped a bomb on Noonien-Singh: Carol was pregnant with his baby. Avid Star Trek fans immediately recognized the name, and knew that Kirk was referring to the early days of his relationship with the mother of his child.

Marcus played a major role in The Wrath of Khan, the second TOS movie. She was a well-respected scientist within the Federation, working on a top-secret project called Project Genesis. Along with her team, Marcus developed the Genesis Device, an extremely advanced piece of technology that could completely reform matter on an uninhabitable planet to make it into a lush paradise suitable for human life. Though the Genesis Device obviously had positive uses, it also had the potential to be a terrifying weapon. Since it reformed matter to make a new environment on a planet, if it was used on a planet that contained any kind of life, the Genesis Device would eradicate that life.

In The Wrath of Khan, Marcus’ team was paired with a Starfleet vessel, the U.S.S. Reliant, and tasked with finding a barren planet on which to test the Genesis Device. Unfortunately, the Reliant was commandeered by Khan Noonien-Singh, a violent dictator from Earth’s past who had been marooned on the planet they were surveying for the Genesis Device test 15 years prior by none other than Captain Kirk himself.

Khan used Ceti eels, a parasite that burrowed into the brain and made its host easy to control, to interrogate officers from The Reliant about their mission. In doing so, he found out about the Genesis Device and hatched a plan to use it against Kirk and his crew to exact his revenge. He lured Kirk to Regula I, the research base for Project Genesis, and Kirk was reunited with Carol, and their son, for the first time in over 20 years.

Carol Marcus’ Son With Captain Kirk

When Kirk and Marcus finally met again, she was hunkered down in the Genesis cave on Regula I with another scientist from Project Genesis, a man in his early 20s. The man tried to attack Kirk when he beamed into the cave, because he assumed Starfleet was trying to steal the Genesis Device to make it into a weapon. He had reason to believe this, since Khan had arrived to steal the device on a Starfleet ship, the Reliant.

As they fought, Kirk demanded to see Dr. Marcus, to which the man replied that he was Dr. Marcus. When Carol Marcus rushed in to break up the fight, Kirk realized that the man he’d been fighting was his son, David Marcus.

As the crew tried to figure out how to safely get out of the cave and prevent Khan from getting the Genesis Device, Kirk and Carol took time to discuss their son and their former relationship. During that conversation, fans found out that Carol had asked Kirk not to be involved in David’s life. Kirk wasn’t happy with the decision at the time or when he reunited with them, but Carol didn’t regret it. She stood by her belief that she had made the best decision for her and her son. Kirk told Marcus that seeing her and his son reminded him of:

[…] my life that could have been, and wasn’t.

Even when she was pregnant, she knew a long-term, long-distance relationship with Kirk would never work. They were both too dedicated to their careers to sacrifice their work for a co-parenting relationship. And she didn’t want her son to grow up “chasing through the universe with his father.” So, she raised David alone, and he accompanied her as she did her scientific work for the Federation. As he grew up, David showed an interest in his mother’s work and an aptitude for science, so eventually, he joined Carol as a Federation scientist.

Though Kirk and Carol never fully reconciled, their encounter set up a reconciliation between Kirk and David, who told his father that he was:

[…] very proud to be your son.

Will Carol Marcus Show up in Strange New Worlds Season 3?

Though little has been confirmed about the storyline of Strange New Worlds season 3, Lieutenant Kirk’s reveal about Marcus’ pregnancy in Strange New Worlds season 2 could set up a Carol cameo for season 3. Showrunners have already confirmed that the show’s third season will heavily feature the budding bromance between Kirk and Spock, so Kirk will definitely be a mainstay of the third season. Given that having a pregnant girlfriend is a pretty big deal, it would be strange for the third season’s storyline to completely ignore his relationship with Marcus.

Details about the modern Star Trek shows are notoriously hard to come by before the seasons air. So, whether Marcus remains an unseen presence or shows up every once in a while, like T’Pring in the show’s first and second seasons, remains to be seen.

Bringing Marcus into the events of Strange New World would give Trekkies an opportunity to see another new side of Kirk, which has been the theme for his character throughout the series. Though Strange New Worlds has stuck to the Star Trek canon with Kirk’s arc, the show has definitely revealed that there’s more depth to Captain Kirk than TOS ever showed. Bringing Marcus in to continue this exploration of Kirk’s hidden depths could make for some interesting, dramatic stories, especially if it reveals the details behind Marcus’ decision to prevent Kirk from being in David’s life.