Star Trek Into Darkness co-writer denied that Mitchell was in the screenplay, arguing that he couldn’t come to terms with the idea of an “ultimate villain named Gary.” But then again, lots of people connected to the movie also denied that John Harrison was in fact Khan – including Cumberbatch himself, who told Access Hollywood in December 2012, “I play a character called John and not that other name [Khan].”

With hindsight, there were actually clues buried in Star Trek history for those with sharp enough eyes. Back when Khan Noonien Singh was still just a character on a page in the mid-1960s, he was a Caucasian villain with the name Harald Ericsson. Put the front half of his first name with the second half of his surname, and you get Harisson – not too far from the John Harrison bandied about by JJ Abrams and his team in the run up to Star Trek Into Darkness.

As we now know, John Harrison really was genius super-villain Khan, thawed out, given a new identity and put to work on designing high-tech weapons by Peter Weller’s Admiral Marcus. The revelation was more widely greeted with gasps than groans by movie-goers, and JJ Abrams himself later admitted that hiding Khan’s identity was a mistake.

“When we did Star Trek Into Darkness,” Abrams said in 2015, “we decided that we weren’t going to tell people that Benedict Cumberbatch was playing Khan. And that was a mistake, because the audience was like, ‘we know he’s playing Khan’.”

What made the revelation doubly strange was Cumberbatch’s casting as Khan when so many fans know the character as a Sikh villain played by Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban. Surely having a British actor with a cut-glass accent was a bit of a stretch, even in a universe where events have been shaken up by Nero’s antics in the first Star Trek reboot?