Captain Pike Sets a New Tone for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 (Non-Spoiler Review)

Slight correction: “The Cage” was three years before this, not one.

@2/writermpoteet: Right. A lot of people assume that Pike was supposed to be this brooding, maudlin guy all the time, but they’re missing the point of “The Cage” — that we meet him at his lowest point, after he’s lost his personal yeoman and several other crew members and is going through a crisis of faith as a result, and his experiences on Talos IV help him find his confidence again. It’s basically the same as Sisko’s arc in DS9: “Emissary.” Sisko was depressed and despairing when we first met him, but he worked through his issues in the pilot and was a happier guy thereafter, mostly.

Although from what I’ve seen in the trailers, I do wonder if they’re overcompensating a little here, making this Pike a bit too cheerful and friendly for the sake of the contrast from Lorca.

Oh, and one thing puzzles me: the review calling Pike the “new main character.” Michael Burnham is the lead character of Discovery. That hasn’t changed, has it?

@4/Twels: The truth is, first-season Kirk is just Pike with a name change, and McCoy is just Boyce with a name change. Kirk starts out exactly like Pike — a serious, driven, disciplined commander who struggles with the burdens and responsibilities of his job, yearns for a beach to walk on, and is uncomfortable having a female subordinate (as he comments about Rand in “The Corbomite Maneuver”). Roddenberry just changed the character name but wrote the exact same personality, and it was only the change in actors that led to the characters being distinct, with later scripts being written more with Shatner’s personality in mind. Indeed, if you look at the writer’s bible, a lot of the text of Kirk’s character description is cribbed directly from Pike’s character description in the pilot prospectus. So we do basically know what Pike’s personality was originally intended to be.

@24/Twels: “… is there actually anything that says that Pike couldn’t have passed the Enterprise on to Number One in the interim?”

“The Cage” took place 13 years before “The Menagerie,” which is at least a year into Kirk’s command. Spock said in “The Menagerie” that he served under Pike for 11 years, 4 months, 5 days. That makes a maximum of about a year that Pike can be off the Enterprise, unless Spock becomes a regular on Discovery too, which is unlikely.

“For that matter, is it ever stated onscreen that Pike is Kirk’s immediate predecessor as captain of the Enterprise?”

Yes. Kirk explicitly says “I took over the Enterprise from him” in “The Menagerie.”

@27/Twels: I often see people speculating about a Pike spinoff, but I don’t see the point of one. It would basically be a rehash of TOS. Pike is the exact same character Kirk was before the writers started tailoring the role to Shatner’s personality. Boyce is the exact same character as McCoy. Number One’s personality was folded into Spock. And Tyler and Garison were just nondescript white guys. Part of the reason NBC rejected “The Cage” is because the ensemble cast just wasn’t that interesting (and was all-white at a time when networks were actively seeking to court minority buying power by diversifying their casts).

@30/Falco: Yeah, but that’s pretty much my point. People are curious about Pike because of the novelty/mystery factor, but what I’m saying is that if we actually saw a Pike series, it probably wouldn’t be as interesting as what we imagine. As a wise Vulcan once said, “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

@32/Sunspear: Kurtzman is using the word “canon” a bit oddly. “Canon” is just a nickname for the primary work as distinct from its tie-ins and fan fiction, so whatever new Trek CBS makes is the canon, by definition. Kurtzman seems to be using the word to refer to pre-existing continuity, which means that what he’s saying is quite self-evident and elementary — that a new show is going to introduce new ideas and story elements rather than just rehashing previous information.

The problem with the word “canon” is that people get so irrationally obsessed with the label itself and which things it can be appended to that it blinds them to everything else. The word just gets in the way of having intelligent conversations about continuity and creativity.

@34/Sunspear: I don’t believe there are “gatekeepers” in the sense fans often imagine. Continuity is not a straitjacket or a dogma imposed from on high; it’s merely a facet of a story, one tool in the kit, and it serves the needs of the story rather than the other way around. As a storyteller, you try to preserve the illusion of consistency so as not to pull the audience out of the story, but finesse it or revise it as needed when other storytelling priorities outweigh it.

Really, when Kurtzman says in interviews that “we have people in the room advising us on Trek canon,” he doesn’t mean there’s some CBS Canon Supervisor handing out lists of thou-shalt-nots; basically, he’s talking about Kirsten Beyer, who’s a junior member of the staff but knows more about Trek than just about anyone else in the room, so she’s become the person the other staffers ask when they have questions about Trek continuity. It’s not a formal or authoritative position, it’s just that the others respect her knowledge of the material and know they can turn to her if they have questions.

@36/Twels: Sure, it’s conceivable that any idea can be executed well. I just think the interest in a Pike series comes more from our sense of mystery about the characters than from their actual potential, and I wonder if audiences’ fascination with Pike would wear off once they saw more of him. It’s kind of weird to want to go back to the failed first draft of a thing and expect it to be as successful as the improved version that replaced it. It’s like how they did that comic-book adaptation of George Lucas’s first draft of The Star Wars. It has value as a curiosity, perhaps, but it’s no rival to the real thing.

@38/Sunspear: “In retrospect, the somewhat troubled first season showed why its important to have as many people familiar with the lore involved as possible. Less knowledgeable creatives may use the pieces (characters and concepts) and shuffle them around, but they may get the context or tone or implications wrong.”

I don’t buy that at all, because the thing about knowledge you don’t have is you can learn it. Hell, just about any new job a person gets will require study and training to learn stuff they didn’t already know. It’s astonishing to me how many people out there assume that writers are somehow incapable of that. Good grief, research is one of the most fundamental tools of writing!!!

When Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer were hired to make the second Star Trek movie, neither of them was very familiar with it. But do you know what arcane, complicated method they used to compensate for their lack of knowledge? They sat down and watched the show. I mean, seriously, come on. It is not that hard. The only thing that makes it challenging for Trek producers today is that TV producers are busy people and there are more than 500 hours of Trek content to get through. But there’s always Memory Alpha to consult, and no shortage of other online information, plus there are the Trek continuity experts at CBS Consumer Products, the people who keep the books, comics, and games consistent with the show. Aside from research, one of the other fundamental tools writers use to learn stuff they don’t know is to ask experts. A writer doesn’t have to be an expert in a subject themselves as long as they’re in contact with someone who is.

@40/Sunspear: The conflicts Berg & Harberts had with the other staffers were about their particular personalities and issues. They cannot justify a generalized statement that authors are somehow incapable of doing something as simple and basic as researching a project when they’re hired for it. It is absolutely nonsensical to assume that lack of knowledge of a franchise is somehow an incurable condition.

When I was signed up to write a Spider-Man novel, I only knew the character from TV animation and from a few years of the J. Michael Straczynski Amazing Spider-Man run. I had very little knowledge of the comics. But I bought a DVD-ROM collection of the entire ASM run, borrowed every other Spidey collection I could find from the library, and found online summaries of the issues I couldn’t find, and when my novel came out, reviewers praised it for its encyclopedic grasp of Marvel continuity. Anything can be learned. Fandom is beside the point, because fandom is just recreation. Professionals do actual work, and that includes the work of studying and training for whatever job you’re hired to do.

As for Abrams, you’re forgetting that he didn’t work alone. His “Supreme Court” consisted of a mix of non-fans (himself and Bryan Burk) and longtime fans (Lindelof, Kurtzman, and Orci), so between them they could tailor something with both audiences in mind. Just as research and learning are something very basic to doing a job, so is teamwork. The reason teams exist is so that people with different skills and expertise can share them with each other, so that each individual member doesn’t need to know everything. Did Kirk need to know everything about science, medicine, engineering, flight control, and communications? Of course not, because he had crewmates whose job was to know those things. Come on! This is not hard to grasp!

@42/Twels: “I guess that assumes “The Cage“ is an artistic failure. I actually think it’s one of Star Trek’s finest hours – and certainly the best of any of the series’ pilots.”

No, I agree that “The Cage” is a success — indeed, it’s the one really good thing Roddenberry ever wrote solo, as far as I’ve seen. But that doesn’t mean the ensemble was a success. After all, it was very heavily centered on Pike and Vina, with a little development for Number One and Boyce, but not much for the rest of the cast. As I said, part of the reason NBC rejected the pilot was because they didn’t think the ensemble it presented was strong enough to carry a series, regardless of the merits of the individual story.

“As a character, he’s fascinating partly because he is WAY more conflicted about the conflicts and consequences of command than we ever see Kirk being.”

I think he’s exactly as conflicted as Kirk was often shown being. Writing-wise, they were initially the same character, with essentially the same description in the writers’ bible. And as I think I already mentioned, “The Cage” was meant to show Pike at his lowest ebb, not to represent his typical state of mind (another reason why it worked better as a standalone movie than as a demo reel for an ongoing series).

@44/Sunspear: “But just because you’re diligent about it doesn’t automatically make other writers so.”

It’s basic competence. It’s not even about writing, it’s about basically any job — if you need a certain kind of knowledge to do a job, you learn that knowledge. What’s bizarre to me how so many people seem to think that writing professionally is fundamentally unlike doing anything else professionally.

“Abrams was proud of his lack of Trek knowledge and almost religious/fetishistic about Star Wars.”

Again: he took care to assemble a team consisting of both Trek experts and non-fans, in order to satisfy both audiences. That is how teams work. Kirk did not need to know science, because he had Spock. As long as you talk about Abrams as if he made the films alone, then your argument is sheer nonsense.

@55/roxana: People like to criticize things by saying they weren’t “necessary,” but that’s a nonsensical standard when talking about works of entertainment and creativity, where everything is optional. Is it necessary to include familiar characters in a prequel to the extent Discovery did? Of course not. Enterprise only featured a handful of familiar characters, like Zefram Cochrane, T’Pau, and Surak. But Discovery is not Enterprise, and creativity is about choice, not necessity. All that should matter is whether the choice paid off. As I’ve said in other threads, I’m of two minds about DSC, because on the one hand I think it’s relied way too much on continuity porn to the point of undermining credibility (what are the odds that Discovery would encounter so many of the same things and people that the Enterprise would encounter a decade later?), but on the other hand I think its new insights into the Sarek/Spock family have been its greatest accomplishments so far.

@60/Jana: As I already said, though I would prefer it that ST focused on new things, I think DSC did its best work so far with its revisits of established characters, Spock’s family. The problem with blanket generalizations is that there are always specific exceptions, so you can’t validly judge a specific case without seeing it. Even if you don’t care for a general practice, a specific instance can be done so well that it works as an exception, and I think that’s the case here.