Warning! The following contains spoilers from the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode “New Life and New Civilizations.” Stream the episode with a Paramount+ subscription and read at your own risk!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds closed the curtain on Captain Pike and Batel’s relationship, with her ultimately sacrificing herself to prevent the Vezda from escaping into the greater universe. The good news is they got to live out a whole lifetime together in a pocket reality, but does this conflict with Pike’s eventual ending in The Original Series?
It’s a question I had to ask, after being relieved the Trek series didn’t bring back the body horror elements with the Vezda. Fortunately, co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers had the answers about why they pursued a romance storyline for Pike with Batel, and The Next Generation episode they looked to for inspiration to pull it off.
Why Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Didn’t Worry About Pike’s Future With Vina
Captain Pike might’ve spent the past three seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in a romantic relationship with Captain Batel, but that’s not who he ends up with in his limited appearances in the original series. As fans know, Pike undergoes a horrific training accident after handing the Enterprise over to James T. Kirk, and is left with limited capabilities, confined to a machine, and unable to speak.
In “The Menagerie,” Spock helps his former Captain and delivers him to Talos IV, remembering the planet from their visit in the original pilot for Star Trek, “The Cage.” There, Pike can be free from his physical body and live a normal life alongside his love interest, Vina, whom he met when they originally visited the planet.
The issue now is that Strange New Worlds takes place between “The Cage” and “The Menagerie.” As such, it’s hard to imagine Pike is so thrilled about living out the rest of his days alongside a woman he had a casual fling with once, after living out an entire lifetime with Batel between those meetings. Akiva Goldsman understood what I was getting at and had the following to say regarding why they weren’t too concerned with Vina when setting up the Batel storyline for Pike:
I think the Vina thing is interesting and it is clearly architectural in terms of canon, although, it’s different with the Pike of The Cage and the Pike of The Menagerie. The actual reuse of footage starts to fuck with canon, to be honest with you. Let’s assume that there is a life of the mind available for Christopher Pike, after he loses some of his more typical function. If that’s the case, we’re not gonna get a lot of time to explore that, whether it be Vina or whether Vina turns out to then be Batel …there are many ways one could imagine ones oneself into that future, but it’s not one we’re gonna work with.
It’s hard to argue with that logic, and Goldsman makes a good point. If we’re going to complain about canon, perhaps we should start with the fact that Star Trek characters are watching footage from a Star Trek episode inside of its own world in “The Menagerie.”
Additionally, with Strange New Worlds set to end with Season 5, it doesn’t sound as though the series will get the chance to recreate Pike’s ending or change what is established in TOS (even with a spinoff). As such, they opted to work on what they could control, which was a romance established and concluded within the confines of their show.
Strange New Worlds Sought Inspiration From The Inner Light For Season 3 Finale
Even if Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wasn’t concerned with getting Vina back, it still had to play out and resolve the Batel storyline in a way that didn’t have her still around when the original series started. So, why even have her in the series at all? Akiva Goldsman explained why the show brought her into the story, and how they looked to The Next Generation in an attempt to close out the arc between her and Pike:
We, who are the current stewards of Chris Pike’s experience, wanted him to have true love, and we knew that we didn’t have a real-time possibility of it. So as Henry would say, we, we relied on ‘The Inner Light’ structure to give us an opportunity to enrich him and then, as we are wont to do, snatch it away from his clinging fingers.
For those who haven’t seen it, “The Inner Light” is generally considered one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. After being put into a coma by an alien probe, Jean-Luc lives an entire lifetime as a farmer named Kamin, experiencing what life might’ve been like had he never been involved with Starfleet.
It’s easy to see how the same concept was used in “New Life and New Civilizations” in which Batel and Pike were able to live out a lifetime together despite having little time passed at all in the real world. One might see it cruel, showing Pike a life he never actually had, and would never have.
Another might see it as a gift, given his fate is sealed and he would never have that life anyway. Even if this encounter with the Vezda never happened, there was never a guarantee that Batel and Pike would last until the fateful day of his life-changing accident. In hindsight, maybe this was a blessing and a chance for him to live a life he never would’ve had otherwise, similar to the TNG classic.
With that episode, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is still doing post-production on Season 4, and according to Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, filming on Season 5 is set to begin in late September. For the foreseeable future, the cast and crew have their foot on the gas until the series is finished, so here’s hoping they get a chance to breathe in between days of shooting and editing.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 is now available to stream in its entirety on Paramount+. Here’s hoping the wait for the new season doesn’t last too long, and that by this time next year we’re enjoying new episodes of the upcoming Trek season.
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