Star Trek has boasted a whole host of memorable starship captains who command fan-favorite Starfleet vessels to boldly go where no one has gone before. However, none compare to the Starship Enterprise, and when audiences first tuned in to the original series 55 years ago, they were greeted by William Shatner's James T. Kirk as the ship's captain. Yet, both in-universe and behind-the-scenes Kirk wasn't the first person to captain the Enterprise. Initially it was Christopher Pike, played by Jeffrey Hunter, sitting in the captain's chair.
Gene Roddenberry's first pilot for Star Trek, titled "The Cage," had a troubled Pike lead his crew to investigate a distress signal on the planet Talos IV. Pike was kidnapped by the native Talosians for further observation, where he was forced to live out his dreams and unresolved trauma through telepathically induced visions. Ultimately, Pike would free himself and continue his expedition across the stars on the Enterprise, however the network passed on the pilot. Desilu Production co-owner Lucille Ball, of I Love Lucy fame, who produced the pilot, convinced NBC to make the rare move of commissioning a second pilot, titled "Where No Man Has Gone Before." The second pilot, however, faced one major hurdle: it needed to recast its lead actor.
Hunter withdrew from the series during preproduction on the second pilot, citing a disappointing experience with his past television work starring in the western Temple Houston, a distaste for the long commitment required to lead a television series and his interest in returning to feature film work. Roddenberry took the opportunity to introduce a completely new set of characters, save for Leonard Nimoy's Vulcan Science Officer Mister Spock. This included Captain James T. Kirk, the role for which Shatner was cast. The second pilot impressed the network, which decided to commission the series, and the rest is television history.
While Chris Pike wasn't the protagonist of the original series, the character and his history were added to the overall mythos of the show, including his mission to Talos IV with Spock. The two-part episode "The Menagerie" revealed Pike suffered a horrific accident sometime after Kirk took command of the Enterprise that left him paralyzed and disfigured. Footage from "The Cage" was reused as flashback sequences and archival footage in the episode, and Pike was portrayed by Sean Kenney in a silent performance.
More recently, the Kelvin Timeline featured Bruce Greenwood as Pike, who recruited Kirk to enroll in Starfleet Academy in 2009's Star Trek before he was murdered by Khan Noonien Singh in 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness. In addition, the second season of Star Trek: Discovery further explored Pike's role in Starfleet, with Anson Mount portraying the character as he served as interim captain of the Discovery before returning to helm the Enterprise in the season finale.
Christopher Pike may not have played a prominent role in the original Star Trek series but the character has certainly earned his fair share of fans decades after the franchise's first pilot was rejected by the network. In that time, actors like Greenwood and Mount have breathed new life into the venerable Starfleet officer while making the character very much their own across the franchise's two different timelines. And now, with Mount's version of the character taking center stage in the upcoming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the increased visibility fulfills the initial promise of Pike sitting in the captain's chair for an extended tenure.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount, Ethan Peck and Rebecca Romijn. The series has yet to receive a premiere date.