A look at some of the most fascinating facts about Star Trek's first captain.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Ah, Christopher Pike, the one who started it all, the first captain of the Enterprise.
00:06That's if we don't count Robert April.
00:08The first one on screen.
00:09Well, that's if we don't count the fact that The Cage wasn't actually aired for
00:13quite a few years after it was made.
00:16Listen, that's not important right now, because these are all things we might discuss
00:19in this article.
00:21With that in mind, I'm Sean Ferrick for Trek Culture, and here are 10 things you didn't
00:26know about Captain Pike.
00:2910.
00:30His horses.
00:31In Equality of Mercy, the finale of the first season of Strange New Worlds, Pike encountered
00:35his future self, who came to warn Pike not to prevent the injury that left him paralysed
00:40and disfigured, in order to protect the future of the Federation.
00:43To convince Pike that he was telling the truth, his counterpart told him about how their first
00:47horse, the creatively named Sir Nasalot, broke his leg in a rainstorm and had to be put down
00:52when Pike was a child.
00:53Pike was heartbroken and cried for a week over his loss, but never told anyone, explaining
00:58that it's hard to give a tragic backstory with such a silly name.
01:01Earlier, we also saw Pike riding one of his horses in the snow near the start of the first
01:05episode.
01:06Something that you may not have noticed is that Pike's love of horses was actually
01:09a small callback to The Cage.
01:11When the Talosians were trying to get him to fall in love with Veena, they created an
01:14illusion of Pike's old home in Mojave, complete with his two beloved horses, Tango and Mary
01:20Loon.
01:219.
01:22His medal.
01:23Pike was such an important figure in Starfleet's history that one of their most impressive
01:25medals was named after him, the Christopher Pike Medal of Valour.
01:29The medal was granted to officers to recognise remarkable leadership, meritorious conduct
01:33and acts of personal bravery.
01:34Admiral Ross awarded this medal to Captain Sisko in the DS9 episode Tears of the Prophets
01:39for retaking the station and fighting back against the Dominion.
01:42Several episodes later, in Take Me Out to the Holosuite, the Vulcan Captain Solok bragged
01:46to Sisko that he had just received his second Christopher Pike medal.
01:49The medal featured an image of Pike's face and a ribbon in the original series' red,
01:53yellow and blue colour scheme, but unfortunately we didn't get a good shot of it in the show.
01:57Still, it's cool that Pike was still being recognised for his service well into the 24th
02:01century.
02:028.
02:03His days in security.
02:04After working as a test pilot straight out of the Academy, Pike had a brief career as
02:07a security officer.
02:08Near the beginning of the Strange New Worlds episode Children of the Comet, Captain Pike
02:12told his senior staff a story of one of his most embarrassing moments as a security officer.
02:16Apparently, Pike, still an Ensign at the time, got into an altercation with a Nausican.
02:21Somehow, during the fight, the Nausican ended up pantsless, and the young Ensign Pike ran
02:25after him, phaser in hand, only to trip and get caught on the Nausican's discarded pants,
02:30allowing him to get away.
02:31After the mishap, Pike's lieutenant pulled him aside and told him that security may not
02:34be the best fit for him.
02:36In the scene, he never mentioned whether or not he took his lieutenant's advice.
02:39It's possible that Pike learned from this experience and remained in security for years
02:43before serving as Robert April's first officer aboard the Enterprise.
02:477.
02:48Veena's Pike illusion.
02:49The story of the cage was retold almost exactly in the two-parter The Menagerie, but there
02:54was one detail that was changed, causing a bit of confusion among fans until recently.
02:58At the end of the cage, there was a scene of Veena and Pike running off together and
03:01holding hands.
03:02In that episode, the Pike in that scene was meant to be an illusion of Pike, created by
03:07the Talosians to keep Veena company after Pike and the Enterprise left.
03:11In The Menagerie, the same scene was used to show the real Pike running off with Veena,
03:15his injuries cured by the Talosians' illusions.
03:18In the Discovery episode, If Memory Serves, in between the cage and the Menagerie, Veena
03:22used the Talosians' powers to speak to Pike again and finally cleared up some of the confusion
03:27about what happened to the illusory Pike.
03:29She explained to him that the Talosians allowed her to live a lifetime with the illusory Pike,
03:33created from the part of him that lived on inside her mind, and told him how her relationship
03:37with this reconstruction helped her stay sane and tethered to what she once felt.
03:42Despite this, she always knew that he wasn't real, but the illusion of him was enough to
03:46fight her loneliness until he returned in The Menagerie.
03:496.
03:50The Alternate Pike's Differences
03:52The version of Pike from the alternate Kelvin universe led the exact same life as the Prime
03:56Pike until the two timelines were split by the arrival of the Narada and the destruction
04:00of the USS Kelvin.
04:01This happened in 2233, around the time that he graduated from the Academy.
04:06Because of the divergence, the alternate Pike wasn't paralysed by Delta radiation, though
04:10he was confined to a wheelchair at the end of the 2009 film because of his torture at
04:14the hands of Nero.
04:15In the next film, Into Darkness, he's still recovering from these injuries, but is able
04:18to walk again with the help of a cane.
04:20The alternate Pike was killed in Khan's attack on the Daystrom Conference Room, never
04:24getting the chance to return to Veena on Talos IV.
04:26In fact, it's possible that Veena and the rest of the crew of the SS Columbia never
04:30crashed on Talos IV either, given that the crash happened in 2236 in the Prime timeline,
04:35three years after the timelines diverged.
04:385.
04:39Why He Missed the Klingon War
04:41When the Klingon War first began in 2256, two years after the Cage, Pike was leading
04:45one of the Enterprise's five-year-long deep space exploration missions.
04:49During the war, Starfleet ordered the Enterprise crew to continue their mission, which Pike
04:53was not too pleased about.
04:54He and the rest of the crew wanted to help defend the Federation, but command chose to
04:58keep them away to use as a last resort.
05:00They didn't want to risk losing some of their most talented officers until they had
05:05no choice, but Discovery was fortunately able to end the conflict before the Enterprise
05:09needed to get involved.
05:10The Enterprise was also pretty far from Federation space at the time, seeing as the point of
05:14their five-year mission was to chart unexplored space.
05:17Even if they were ordered to help fight in the war, their journey would take months,
05:21if not a year.
05:224.
05:23Meeting Kirk
05:24Kirk and Pike were probably never particularly close.
05:27In fact, Kirk wasn't even aware of Pike's delta radiation poisoning until he met the
05:31man again in the menagerie.
05:33Near the beginning of that episode, Kirk mentioned that the first time he met Pike was when he
05:36was promoted to Fleet Captain, a small detail that could give us an insight into the second
05:40season of Strange New Worlds.
05:41It's already been announced that Jim Kirk will become a recurring character in the second
05:45season.
05:46An alternate reality version of him already popped up in the Season 1 finale, Quality
05:50of Mercy, but there's no canon issues since this future never technically happened.
05:55However, continuity problems arise if Pike isn't promoted to Fleet Captain before meeting
05:59the Prime Kirk in Season 2.
06:01If Kirk's remark from the menagerie was canon, then Season 2 would show the promotion of
06:05Pike to the rank of Fleet Captain before meeting Kirk, which may mean we'll get to
06:09see him command an entire fleet of starships on some large-scale mission.
06:133.
06:14The Four Pikes
06:15In the cage, and in the reused footage in the menagerie, Captain Pike was portrayed
06:19by Geoffrey Hunter.
06:20After the series was rejected, Hunter moved on to other projects, and by the time the
06:24writers decided to bring Pike back, Hunter declined and Sean Kenney was brought in to
06:28portray the disfigured and retired Pike.
06:30Kenney already looked strikingly similar to Hunter, and his heavy makeup was used to cover
06:34any noticeable differences.
06:35Decades later, we got to see an alternate version of Pike in the rebooted Kelvin timeline,
06:39portrayed by Bruce Greenwood.
06:40This version was able to avoid his fate from the Prime timeline, but ended up dying anyway
06:44way sooner at the hands of Khan, as we discussed earlier.
06:47Lastly, Anson Mount joins the cast of Discovery's second season as the Prime Captain Pike in
06:52between the episodes The Cage and The Menagerie.
06:54Mount turned Pike into one of Starfleet's kindest and most compassionate officers, a
06:58welcome change from Captain Lorca from Season 1.
07:00Immediately after taking command of Discovery, Pike made it clear that he was a different
07:04kind of leader by cracking jokes with the senior staff and learning all of their names.
07:08The fans loved Mount's Pike and the other returning characters from The Cage, and it
07:12was actually one of the main reasons why Strange New Worlds was greenlit.
07:162.
07:17The Military Pike Code
07:18In an interview with Star Trek.com, Sean Kenney, who played the wheelchair-bound Pike in The
07:22Menagerie, was asked about his experiences meeting the fans when he dropped a really
07:25interesting fun fact about Pike's legacy in the real world.
07:29According to Kenney, a couple of F-16 military pilots once told him that they had a secret
07:32Captain Pike code that they used when flying over Iraq.
07:35They explained,
07:36All we say is that a one-beep or a two-beep Roger?
07:39A question that only a real Trekkie would know how to answer.
07:42It's really amazing that Kenney's portrayal of Pike was able to become so iconic, despite
07:46not having any lines of dialogue in the entire episode he appeared in.
07:50It's not known how widely used this Captain Pike code was in the US military, but it's
07:55fascinating that it was used at all.
07:571.
07:58The Discovery Pin
07:59Most of Star Trek Discovery's second season was classified by Starfleet Command after
08:02the crew travelled to the future to prevent the destruction of the Federation.
08:06Because of this, Pike was rarely given a chance to remember the friends he made while briefly
08:09commanding Discovery.
08:11One way that he kept the knowledge of Discovery's crew alive was by wearing a pin dedicated
08:14to them on Starfleet Remembrance Day in the Strange New Worlds episode, Memento Mori.
08:19The official report stated that Discovery was destroyed, along with its entire crew.
08:22While Pike was aware that they probably continued to live on in the future, he was ordered to
08:26never disclose the true story, so this pin was his only way of paying his respects to
08:30Discovery publicly.
08:32Interestingly, every character in this episode wore a remembrance pin for a different ship.
08:36Spock's was dedicated to the USS Congo, Chief Kyle's honoured the USS Shenzhou, and La'Anne's
08:41pin named the SS Puget Sound, the ship that she was aboard as a child when the Gorn killed
08:45her family.
08:46That's everything for our list today, folks.
08:48If you think we missed anything, let us know in the comments below.
08:50Don't forget you can get in touch with us over on Twitter at TrekCulture, or over on
08:53Instagram at TrekCultureYT.
08:56You can catch myself at seanferric on Twitter, or at sean.ferric88 on Instagram, or at seanferric
09:01on Hive.
09:02Thank you very much, everyone.
09:03You are all awesome.
09:04Make sure that you look after yourselves until I'm talking to you again.
09:07Make sure you live long and prosper, have a wonderful day, and make it so.