The Star Trek Into Darkness teaser trailer has sparked a lot of conversation and speculation. One popular and persistent theory is that Benedict Cumberbatch is playing Gary Mitchell from The Original Series episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before, this means in this particular theory that Alice Eve’s character would be Dr. Dehner. A lot has been made of Alice Eve’s hairstyle compared to the original Dr. Dehner from that afore mentioned episode.
Pushing the popular theory further, there is speculation that the memorial service shown in the trailer is for Gary Mitchell, perhaps events unfolding similarly to how they did in the original episode, but that Gary Mitchell is not actually dead.
In that line of thinking, someone did a trailer mashup, taking the soundtrack, and some of the text cards from the Into Darkness trailer, and inserting shots from the original episode. Take a look.
It’s an interesting theory, but ultimately I don’t know that it’s all that fulfilling to rehash old plot lines. If I had had my way, we would have continued to evolve new Star Trek in the primary timeline. But we are hear now with the pseudo rebooted original crew. And now what I want is entirely new stories since this timeline has been changed in major ways. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to give us entirely new scenarios.
There are of course, other theories about the characters these new actors are playing as well. As far as Alice Eve’s character, there is also speculation that she is playing Nurse/Dr. Chapel. Others think perhaps Carol Marcus, though I find the later to be highly suspect since the indication is that Marcus was never in Starfleet.
In terms of Benedict Cumberbatch, the second most popular theory is that he is playing Khan Noonien Singh, and another theory has him playing a character from a particular episode of The Original Series named Captain Garth. Neither of these are particularly plausible to me, and the idea of doing Kahn again seems like a complete disaster. He was done, and done well, let it go.
In any event, we will see one way or another soon.
For more detail on all this, TrekMovie.com has some good stuff.