Apparently, his character's name is John Harrison.

http://www.startrek.com/article/chec...darkness-image

Who the hell is John Harrison? And when will we hear about Peter Weller's character?

A disgruntled genetically engineered human who was denied admission to Starfleet?
JJ's alter ego? Maybe John Herriman's grandfather and they changed their family name to Herriman to Harrison when whatever evil deeds he did happened.

I have two seperate ideas about this "John Harrison".

John and Harrison are two names of two members of the Beatles, it has the same amount of letters as Gary Mitchell as well

1. The idea I've always had for the sequel is that Cumberbatch is playing Gary Mitchell in a re-imagining of his character. In the teaser we see what I presume to be a memorial service. I reckon Kirk and the crew believe him to be dead and so, return to Earth. Then, they get sent on a mission to speak with the Klingons (in a passing reference in the last film, radio chatter on the Kelvin and by Uhura to Kirk later is that Klingon activity is on the rise. The Enterprise tries diplomacy and that doesnt work. They beam over to a Klingon colony (the red jungle planet in the trailer) and encounter dead Klingons all over the place. The Klingons are edging for was with Starfleet because theres a rogue Human killing whole Klingon squads or whatever, Kirk discovers Mitchell, super powered due to Genetic Augmentation experiments by the Klingons (in TOS they had agents dotted around the place "Trouble with Tribbles"). Kirk interrogates Mitchell who is clearly aggrieved at being abandoned by his family thus;

"You think your world is safe, this is a lie told to protect you"

Mitchell then ends up recruiting others to his cause and detonates a bomb, making it look like the Klingons have done it. The Enterprise crew have only a short amount of time to capture Mitchell before the Klingon fleet arrives at Earth and begins its attack, by this time however, Mitchell has his own ship (the one we see falling into the sea in the teaser)



Or...


2. John Harrison is, in typical TOS tradition, a Starfleet Commodore drunk with power

John...... WHAT??!?!

Wha...

Ah...

...I have nothing.

Some of the guys on StarTrek.com think it's a pseudonym used in place of the character's real name to keep it a secret from the fans. They're just calling him John Harrison because they don't want to call him "Cumberbatch's character".

Now that would make sense.....

Here is an example of this that I remember. Notice the caption on the right says:

"Liam Neeson as Henri Ducard in Warner Bros. Batman Begins - 2005"

Obviously Liam was actually playing Ra's al Ghul, but the audience wasnt supposed to know that until it was revealed in the movie.

I, for one, welcome the idea of him being an original character.

C'mon guys, clearly he's playing Khan...

JJ's taking a piss on everything Trek, might as well shoot the bird at Montalban's manly ghost as well.