In the real world, this is where William Shatner and Captain Kirk come in, but that’s a whole other story… The Road to Star Trek: Strange New WorldsĪfter the events of “The Cage,” Discovery establishes that Captain Pike and the Enterprise sat out the Klingon War that that show’s first season depicted. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Hunter also jetted away, opting to not return to Star Trek after the pilot was rejected by NBC. But the experience on Talos IV helps restore his confidence in himself, and he jets off on the Enterprise, despite forging a bond with Vina. Vina, desperate for human companionship, is given the illusion by the Talosians that Captain Pike stayed behind with her. Because the Talosians who can read minds and recreate reality didn’t know how to put her back together after her crash. In the end, Pike manages to escape, of course, but learns that Vina’s true form is a physically scarred, um, hunchback. Pike is captured by these cranially-enhanced guys, with their plan being to repopulate their desolate planet by having him mate with a human named Vina who had crash-landed there years earlier. For perspective, that’s two years before Star Trek: Discovery’s first season, and 13 years before The Original Series’ first season.ĭuring the events of “The Cage,” Pike and his crew, including his second-in-command Number One and science officer Spock, encounter the illusion-creating aliens known as the Talosians. Sorry nerds, there’s no stardate in the episode, but we can piece together that it’s the year 2254. Hunter’s more melancholy take on the character is a far cry from the gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip Captain Kirk who would eventually replace him.Ĭanonically, this is also the first appearance of Pike. He was played by Bruce Greenwood, but that’s set in an alternate reality and hence doesn’t count for our purposes here.)Īnyway, actor Jeffrey Hunter played Pike in “The Cage,” where the captain is suffering from serious self-doubt over a recent mission where he lost several crewmembers. (Also, let’s just get it out of the way and say, yes, we know that there was also the so-called Kelvinverse version of Pike from the J.J. He’s also an admiral now on Strange New Worlds. Interestingly enough, the name Robert April would return in the first Trek animated series where we learned he was the captain of the USS Enterprise before Pike. This changed a few times, from April to James Winter and then finally to Christopher Pike. While developing what would become the first Star Trek pilot episode, called "The Cage," Roddenberry originally named his captain Robert April. It all started when a guy named Gene Roddenberry came up with this crazy idea for a TV show set in outer space. We’re gonna approach this mostly from the former point of view, if only because we need to get off the couch more. There are two ways to look at Pike’s story – chronologically in the Star Trek universe, and chronologically in the sitting-on-the-couch watching Star Trek for most of our lives universe.
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