Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Will Put Captain Pike Back in the Saddle, Literally

Captain Expressway is riding a horse. Why is he riding a horse? In a newly released promotional image for the upcoming serial Star Trek: Foreign New Worlds , we see a cowboy in the saddle, looking out at the USS Enterprise as though he'southward fixing to put a bumper sticker on information technology that says "my other starship is a equus caballus." If you're only kind of into Trek , this may scan as weird. Just, putting Helm Pike on a horse, is specifically, very classic. Here's why this seemingly brazen image is actually layered with several Easter eggs. Giddyup!

"Wagon Train to the Stars"

As many documentaries and Treksperts will tell you, Gene Roddenberry originally pitched The Original Series every bit "Wagon Train to the Stars," a reference to a western TV series called Railroad vehicle Train . This anecdote is complicated slightly by the fact that Roddenberry stole that pitch from someone else (Samuel Peeples) and not everyone in the Star Trek production squad (Herb Solow) liked the pitch. (There'south more than to it than that, and — shameless plug — I comprehend this a lot in my forthcoming non-fiction book Phasers On Stun! , specifically in a chapter called "Space Cowboys.")

ANYWAY. Here's the TLDR: Star Expedition: The Original Series was heavily influenced by Idiot box westerns, and Cistron Roddenberry himself wrote for many westerns, most notably the show Have Gun, Will Travel, which is nearly a badass named Paladin who is like The Mandalorian but not in space. Yes, apologies to all of you Favreau stans, but Star Expedition was doing westerns in space fashion before Star Wars . Even the phrase "Final Frontier," was an allusion to the "borderland" of westerns. And then, this is why this new promo has the phrase "the frontier is waiting."

Expressway has always loved horses

The other affair about this image is that it intentionally honors the character and groundwork of Helm Thruway from The Original Series, specifically the thought that Pike, similar Kirk, Picard, and Archer, loves horses! As Mariner said in Lower Decks Season ii, "Yee-ha! A Starfleet classic!"

But why? Well, earlier Pike was rebooted as Bruce Greenwood in 2009, and more recently as Anson Mount in Discovery and now Foreign New Worlds , he was played past Jeffrey Hunter in the outset TOS pilot, "The Cage," later retconned as a flashback in the classic episode "The Menagerie." And, in all versions of the Jeffrey Hunter performance, we learn that Motorway had at to the lowest degree two horses when he lived in Mojave; Tango, and Mary Lou. Important: Tango liked carbohydrate cubes.

Fun fact, like William Shatner, Anson Mount loves horses in real life. Later on his epic work as Cullen in the western Hell on Wheels, it sort of fabricated sense that Mount would play Expressway, another dude who knows how to ride horses. When I interviewed Mount back in 2019, correct before Discovery Flavour 2 aired, I asked him if his Pike would ride horses similar the original Pike. His response at the fourth dimension was, "I wish!" and added that although he loved acting on the Enterprise bridge, he always preferred to "act outside" whenever possible.

Assuming that the epitome of Pike on the horse isn't just a metaphor, it looks like Strange New Worlds will grant Anson Mount his wish. There he is, outside and on a horse!

The Talos IV angle

Okay, and so in addition to the thematic Easter eggs, and the endless argue that is certainly raging somewhere about which canonical Star Trek horse Pike is riding (Mary Lou or Tango????!) there is one other interesting wrinkle here. In Discovery Season ii, we learned that Pike is aware of his future accident which will result in his mind existence cut off from his body. This endgame, which occurs in "The Menagerie," resolves itself when Pike goes to live with the Talosians and exists in a world of telepathic dreams.

This leads us to the strange realization that although Star Trek loves horses, we rarely see REAL horses within the context of the stories. In "The Cage," Pike's horses were telepathic recreations of horses, simply non actually in that location. Ditto the dream-horses Kirk and Picard ride in the Nexus in Star Trek Generations , non to mention the holographic horse Picard rides in "Pen Pals," or any of the holographic horses people ride in "A Fistful of Datas." Basically, other than the horses in Star Expedition 5: The Terminal Borderland ("hold your horse, Captain!") and Archer's equus caballus in "Due north Star," literal horses are weirdly rare in Expedition, even though at that place are horses all over the identify.

This is a long-winded way of proverb that the prototype of Pike on a horse might correspond his future on Talos Four with Vina. If Pike isn't riding a real horse, then that means he's riding a telepathic, simulacrum dream horse. And there isn't anything more classic Star Trek than that.

Strange New Worlds hits Paramount+ on May five, 2022.