This past Friday, CBS unveiled some news that made Trek fans extremely happy – Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a brand new series, is on the way. Spinning off from their debuts in Discovery season 2, the show will follow Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Spock (Ethan Peck) and Number One (Rebecca Romijn) on board the Enterprise in the years before James T. Kirk took command.
Of course, if it’s filling in this gap in canon, then it needs to address what happens at the end of it. And sure enough, We Got This Covered has heard from our sources – the same ones who told us months ago that CBS was working on a Captain Pike series – that Strange New Worlds will depict the incident that led to him being confined to a wheelchair. It’s unclear when it will happen – when we last saw him in DIS, the event was about a decade away – but we’re told that the show will tackle it eventually.
In The Original Series episode “The Menagerie,” it’s revealed that Pike became badly disfigured and paralyzed after being exposed to delta-particle radiation, after the Starfleet legend sacrificed himself to save some cadets. He ended up being freed from his physical limitations when he returned to Talos IV to be with love interest Vina (from “The Cage” pilot episode) and was given the illusion of perfect health.
In an intriguing twist, Pike was actually given a vision of his tragic future in DIS season 2, though he was brave enough to go forward despite knowing what would become of him. This vision gave us a glimpse of the incident, but only briefly, and sources say SNW will fully explore what led up to the event. Remember, this happened after he handed the captaincy of the Enterprise over to Kirk, so clearly we’ll be seeing that happen at some point, too.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has yet to receive a release date, but it looks like it could head into production as soon as the TV industry kicks off again. Watch this space for more.
