I’m a Captain Pike guy, and I don’t even know why. The original version of “The Cage” was unearthed and broadcast when I was a relatively new Trek fan, barely a month before the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s second season. Since that night, I’ve watched that episode… probably a hundred times. From an initial feeling that it was a fairly wonky start to the Star Trek universe, I’ve gone on to think it might be my favourite episode (of the original series, certainly) of all time. At the very least, it’s the most Star Trek to ever Star Trek, mouth-feel-wise. It’s the prime article, and everything subsequent — every episode of the Kirk show; every second of “The Menagerie” — is just a copy of a copy. Replicative fading.
“The Cage” has those weird singing plants. The away team crew jackets. Future-state Mojave (with horses, and a picnic). The tossed-off mention of a prior mission involving slave women. Vina dissolving before our eyes into a misshapen, scarred person, too dysmorphic to even meet her lover’s gaze. Big, pulpy shit. Space Hornblower, in all the ways Roddenberry ever meant it.
And at the middle of it all is Jeffrey Hunter’s stolid, stalwart Captain Christopher Pike, who’s not… actually a very nice person. There’s no reason I should like this guy. He’s Sean Connery-level brutal with women, terse and abusive, and he doesn’t even know if he should even be in Starfleet anymore, or if he should just retire back to Mojave (with horses, and a picnic), or even better, go make a deal with the slave women. Captain Pike’s an asshole, on his way to a monster. I think that might be why I love him.
Captain Pike, as a premise, is honest. I don’t mean “the premise is that he’s an honest man.” I mean: Captain Pike is, maybe, a more honest version of the “hero” Roddenberry had in mind for his shows, than any of the ones we subsequently got. Pike’s a male fantasy in a brusque, unapologetic way; and after several decades’ worth of grappling with the allegation (of which I have no evidence, and little doubt) that Roddenberry sexually assaulted multiple women during the production of Star Trek, I feel more and more like Captain Pike shows the inner workings of the Great Bird to a greater degree than (heroic womanizer) Kirk ever did, or certainly (revisionist history) Evolved Celibate Picard ever could.
Anyway. Pike’s back in the New Star Trek Cinematic Universe (whateverthefuck it’s called), now played by Anson Mount, and New Pike is nothing like the old Pike. New Pike has yet to prove that he’s better than the old Pike (although, if only by dint of screentime, he will easily eclipse the old Pike in density and detail). But I’ll tell ya one thing: they made a hell of a good decision, writing him.
The decision they made (it actually dates back to Star Trek: Discovery, one of the worst Star Trek series, or television series generally, ever produced) was to give Pike foreknowledge of a fate that fans of the Original Series are already aware of: that Captain Pike ends up disfigured and immobilized, alone in a life-sustaining wheelchair.
I really haven’t a clue why they preemptively tackled that gruesome outcome on Discovery, besides their fetishistic and fanatical need to dot every canonical i and t, regardless of relevance to the actual storytelling at hand. (Pike learning what would happen to him a decade later had nothing to do with the story at that moment on Discovery, or anything to do with the character as written for that series.) (Storytelling is, beyond question, Discovery’s Achilles’ heel.)
What I can say is that the decision to build upon that decision in order to frame Pike for the new series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, might be the defining characteristic that both turns Pike into a great captain, and turns Strange New Worlds into both a great “throwback Star Trek” series (the premise of the show is to return to the “adventure of the week” model that the first five Star Trek series were based on) and a great 2022 interpretation of Star Trek.
The latter, because now we have a Star Trek series whose hero is a person with certain knowledge that the worst possible thing is coming, unstoppable; and has to choose to live optimistically and forward-thinkingly in the meantime, nonetheless.
That feels very 2022. That feels like, somehow and miraculously, NuTrek finally found a gear that allowed them to do something that no one since Deep Space Nine has done in any meaningful way: made a Star Trek series that is very fundamentally of its moment, rather than a reflection of whatever else is going on (read: popular) in pop culture at the time.
I dunno. We’ll see if it goes anywhere or means anything. I have been burned, repeatedly, by the new live-action Stars Trek, from Abrams’ reboot giving way to Into Darkness, to anything good that ever happened on Discovery or Picard leading to… well, two of the worst shows I’ve ever seen. The same thing can absolutely still happen with Strange New Worlds, which is (as of this writing) two episodes in, with a lot of room to grow and miles to cover before I’d dare to rate it on the Star Trek scale.
But I’m encouraged by the spirit of the thing, and how “now” the spirit of the thing feels, which is not a sensation I get a lot from the various “rejuvenate the IP!” projects underway in various corners of the streaming universe. And I don’t need a captain in an existential crisis for Star Trek to be good, by the way. It’s just nice, if an existential crisis is theoretically mandatory, to find one that feels like it lends itself to vital contemporary storytelling, and not nonsensical navel-gazing about why the Federation is theoretically really great. Who gives a fuck? Sisko never did, and he was the best captain ever!
Useful right now
- Roslyn Talusan, a writer who challenges a lot of my status-quo thinking, had a great assessment of Wanda’s sociopathic heel-turn in Multiverse of Madness here.
- If you’re curious, here’s my current MCU rankings, as of Moon Knight and Strange 2.
- Isn’t it neat how each one of those Marvel rankings is basically a fingerprint? No, really. Isn’t it??
- I shot through Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski’s Binge Times this week, hoping it would be a streaming-era Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It isn’t; but, it did make me think a hell of a lot about that Netflix stock drop and whether it means anything for the future of media. You know that feeling where you see a documentary and you realize when it’s over that they slightly missed the golden timing of their project? That, with this.