On the Evolution of Captain Pike
One of my favorite things about the Star Trek franchise is the way they never let a good piece of worldbuilding go to waste. There are tons of examples I could cite from the latest slew of series, but the one I’m most tickled by is the resurrection of Captain Pike.
(Note: Thar be spoilers in this post, so if you haven’t watched Discovery or Strange New Worlds and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now).
Up until season two of Discovery premiered in January 2019, Pike was one of those asterisk Star Trek captains. Yes, he’d held the title, but most fans knew him more for his iconic wheelchair than his personality or ship leadership. Certainly, he wasn’t up there with the likes of Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway.
Even on his first introduction in Discovery, I took Pike as just another fun TOS easter egg, like Harcourt Mudd. He grew on me as a character over the course of the season, but he was still more a placeholder than a true captain. Like with Lorca before him, I (and most viewers, I imagine) was kind of just waiting for him to get out of the way so Burnham could finally take the captain seat she deserved.
That all changed with the premier of Strange New Worlds, which picks up the 23rd-century thread Discovery drops when it jumps into the future. In the latest series, Pike has earned his way up the captain rankings, and his evolution as a character is well worth a closer look for even non-Trekkies.
The Origin
Pike was supposed to be the captain of the Enterprise way back in 1965. Actor Jeffrey Hunter played him in the pilot (“The Cage”) but when the pilot was rejected Hunter withdrew from the show. When the second pilot aired in September 1966, Hunter had been replaced with William Shatner as the now-iconic Captain Kirk at Enterprise’s helm.
Now, if you’re watching Star Trek today on Netflix you’ll start with “The Cage”, but that wasn’t the case for viewers in the ‘60s. Their first introduction to Captain Pike was “The Menagerie”, a two-part episode that would go on to win a Hugo for Best Dramatic Production.
Like many early sci-fi innovations, the most compelling parts of “The Menagerie” were the result of necessity more than intent. They reused the original pilot footage because they were behind their production schedule, and integrating this existing footage let them make two episodes in one week. Jeffrey Hunter delcined to return for the episode, so they wrote a horrible accident into Captain Pike’s backstory: His heroic rescue of cadets from an explosion leaves him in a wheelchair, unable to speak and horribly disfigured, which would prevent any astute fans from noticing a different actor was playing the character in the “present day” scenes.
This is the first lesson to be learned from Captain Pike’s evolution: sometimes, your best ideas will happen when you’ve painted yourself into a corner and have to figure out a way forward.
The Evolution
An in-world timeline is outlined in “The Menagerie.” Captain Pike’s visit to Talos IV (the footage from “The Cage”) happened in 2254. Spock’s abduction of Pike and subsequent court-martial occur 13 years later, in 2267, an unspecified amount of time after his accident.
Pike assumes command of Discovery in 2257, with his eventual unhappy ending a distant decade into the future. He is an affable change from the dour Captain Lorca, but is still, nonetheless, a secondary character. The viewer’s less interested in Pike’s story than in how he’ll act toward Burnham, Ceru, and the rest of the crew we’ve grown to love during the first season. His affection for Spock builds instant trust, and the viewer grows to care about him over the course of the season, but while he’s shown as a competent captain there’s nothing particularly distinctive from a character perspective about his temporary leadership of Discovery.
That is, until the penultimate episode of season 2 (“Through the Valley of Shadows”). Pike goes to Boreth, a planet known for its crystals that alter time and give glimpses of the future. Here, Pike sees the eventual fate the viewer has known about all along: that he will sacrifice his future to save a group of cadets and become permanently and completely disabled as a result.
When this moment was written, I think it was meant to give a kind of closure for long-time Trekkies, the ones who recognized the old-school footage that started the first episode of the season. To make the time jump it does without addressing the dark cloud hanging over Pike’s more immediate future would have felt unsatisfying. Instead, we see Pike knowing that this fate will be sealed if he takes the crystal. He does it anyway, symbolically giving his life to the cause. And, if that had been the last we’d seen of Pike, it would’ve been a fitting way to leave his story.
The Payoff
Even before the final episode of Discovery’s second season aired, a fan petition was already up on Change.org calling for a Pike-centered spin-off. It’s possible the show’s creators had already been playing with this idea, but at the very least it wasn’t officially green-lit until 2020, so it’s plausible that it was a fan-driven show concept.
Regardless of where the show’s concept originated, the foreknowledge of his accident Pike gets in Discovery gives his character that last little something it was missing before. When we first see Pike in Strange New Worlds, he’s taken a leave in the aftermath of Discovery’s departure to come to terms with what he learned on Boreth.
The early episodes of Strange New Worlds reminded me of Commander Sisko’s introduction in Deep Space Nine. Instead of opening with Sisko taking command of the station, the first scenes of the pilot take place three years earlier, during the battle with the Borg at Wolf 359 where Sisko’s ship is destroyed and his wife killed. Adding salt to the wound, he receives his new mission orders from Captain Picard, who as Locutus fought on the side of the Borg, and whom Sisko blames at least in part for his wife’s death. This has Sikso halfway to resigning his commission when he’s sent to a distant deep space station.
Like Sisko, Pike is questioning his future in Starfleet when the series opens, and though his reasons for this differs it adds the same humanity and depth to his character. He isn’t simply a captain on a mission of exploration, though he fills that role well, too. Pike has an immediate sense of his mortality. He’s seen exactly when and how his life as he knows it ends, down to the names of the people who will be in the room with him when it happens. Pike’s emotional arc over the first season of Strange New Worlds is him coming to peace with this fate, though he fights it initially, even attempting to rewrite the future he’d been told on Boreth was inevitable.
And there is still one little bit of dramatic irony left for the show’s writers to play with. Pike knows he ends up in the wheelchair, but he doesn’t know about the glimmer of light at the end of that dark tunnel. Yes, his body is destroyed in the accident, but his mind will live on thanks to Spock’s actions in “The Menagerie.” Spock’s eventual act of mercy is set up in the season 1 finale with Spock’s statement that he believes he owes Pike “a debt of gratitude,” a debt that the viewer already knows he pays in full.
The Big Lesson Writers Can Learn From Pike’s Evolution
Gene Rodenberry didn’t plan to build Pike’s character arc over three shows spanning 50 years. None of the steps that developed his character to its current form were intentionally plotted, but they were all logical choices consistent with the existing world. It made sense to re-use unseen pilot footage when the Original Series was running low on material, just like it made sense to re-use Pike as a character in Discovery instead of creating a new captain, or immediately promoting Burnham into the position. But the show’s creators also reused this material in a smart way. They knew Discovery wasn’t Pike’s show, yet. They saved his full potential as a character for the right moment.
Now, as a writer, you could absolutely create a similarly complex character arc without taking this kind of long, winding road to get there. But Star Trek sets an exceptional example of why it’s smart to do this in balance. You want to make sure you’re not so locked in to your initial plan that you ignore or squelch these kinds of organic arcs from developing. At the same time, you need to keep that initial plan in focus, enough so you don’t let these side threads dilute or take over the narrative—at least, not until it’s their time to shine.
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