Spoilers Strange New Worlds General Discussion Thread

All they have to do is development a treatment for his condition, sometime after season 2 of TOS. Then they can return to Talos and fix him and Vina up properly.

 

That would be nice if he got his happy ending.

 

Curing Pike would have to take place years after the show is set, at least at the outset. It seems unlikely to occur in SNW.

 

Pike and Vina got a happy ending in "The Menagerie." They got to be together... and live a life unencumbered by their physical conditions.

 

Yeah, the whole stated point of SNW is that it builds up and leads to TOS and doesn't rewrite those adventures so Pike won't get an out. He'll end up in the wheelchair with delta radiation poisoning just as both DSC and TOS have shown.

 

If developing a treatment were a prospect, why did Spock act? And with such haste, too? Pike was sitting inside a futuristic iron lung, rather than walking around in an Airiam-suit. Had his treatment supposedly only recently begun (we hear of "months" having passed since the accident) or was the chair the best he could ever hope for (there perhaps being no body left, but OTOH no medical knowledge to allow for the still working internal squishy parts to be cut away and incinerated and replaced by more ergonomical machines)?

Pike ending up in the chair seems to be because he grabbed that crystal. Either it put a spell on him so that he will seek this specific type of worse-than-death, unconsciously or consciously, or then it merely is an unerring prediction device that has already anticipated all the dodging Pike will try to undo his fate. If moving to an Orion colony, changing his profession and/or getting his face reworked to that of a 1960s movie star won't help, then what chance would Federation medicine stand in avoiding that fate? Either before the fact, or afterwards?

Timo Saloniemi

 

He gets his happy ending in TOS once he’s on Talos.

 

But now we have to fix it! The audience is too dumb to understand that Pike got a happy ending and the current writers need something to write about, because God knows they don’t have an original idea.

 

Strange New Worlds is unique amongst Star Trek shows, and shows in general, in that five of the nine main cast members have discernible fates. They *will* survive the series and go on to the TOS era relatively intact.

To a certain extent, all shows with heroes have this, but there is a level of uncertainty. What if Mary Wiseman leaves for a movie career? What if Jack Quaid has a salary dispute? What if Santiago Cabrera decides that Patrick Stewart is the worst, and they will never work with each other again?

With most shows, the sky's the limit on how to handle a character exit. With this show, and these five in particular, their hands are tied pretty tightly into reassignment. M'Benga, Chapel, and Uhura probably do work best if they're reassigned and come back at some unknown future period, but Spock (Peck) and Pike (Mount) are series enders, in a way that no character leaving in all of Trek could have been.

The amount of "safe" characters in SNW is an intriguing challenge for the writers and viewers alike. Of course, the show is also centered around a man who knows his own fate. Playing with fatalism and predetermination is baked into the premise in a way that I've never seen before.

 

IOW, like 99% of Trek regulars in all the TV shows and movies.

Even the ones who die, usually come back.

The SNW characters with fates "unknown?" Until one dies it's reasonable to assume that they will be alive at the end of the episode even if their atoms have been scrambled.

 

It exists at the end of TOS season one; it's called Omicron Ceti 3.

 

They’re not going to change his fate.

 

That isn't going to happen but if it did it would be awful, awful writing and make the Pike's choice in 'Through the valley of shadows' absolutely meaningless. Pike accepted his fate in order to get the time crystal and he is not the type character who will now try to avoid that fate. He's too heroic and noble for that.

 

Well, no. He’s whatever type of character the writers make him.

 

They've invested too heavily in the "this is the backstory to TOS" narrative. They're not changing anything except some aesthetic properties of technology and uniforms.

 

Most of what they've done on TV since 2001 has been "this is the backstory to TOS."

They change whatever suits them.

 

If Mount is wildly popular as Pike, they simply aren't going to write him out of the universe.

 

Pike: Is my transporter double ready?

M'Benga: He's ready to go Chris. And everything you and he witnessed on Boreth has been specifically erased from his mind. Your double's on the bridge as we speak giving orders and no one's noticed. You leave now and take your well earned retirement. Try not to have too much fun on Orion.

Pike: Energize (beams away)

M'Benga (stares at camera): If anyone ever finds out about this, I'm never going to be chief medical officer again.

 

He has already been written out. That doesn't mean they can't do 7 or so seasons of Pike stories set before his final fate. I hope they don't change a single line of it. The moment where he he saw his fate and accepted it for the greater good was the moment where he became one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise. I wouldn't want to take away from that moment.

 

After all, over at that other Star franchise we got 7 seasons of a tv show and 4 movies (and even a series of shorts and countless video games, novels, and comic books) featuring Anakin Skywalker with the audience knowing full well what was going to happen to him.