Captain Pike, explained
There are both in-story and behind-the-scenes explanations for the character starring in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”
Back in the 1960s, the original “Star Trek” was kind of a hard sell. When it was first proposed, the board of Desilu Productions thought it would be too expensive, that even if a network picked it up it would lose money for the studio— and in the short term, they turned out to have been absolutely right. But Lucille Ball, who had taken over sole control of Desilu following her divorce from Desi Arnaz, overruled the board.
The normal process for getting a TV show on broadcast television is that you submit a proposal to the network. The network gets many such proposals each year, and it chooses a certain number to fund pilot episodes. A pilot episode is a sample episode of the show. If the show is picked up, the pilot episode usually — but not always — airs as its first episode.
Since the pilot is produced many months before the other early episodes, sometimes there are changes between that first and second episode. In the pilot episode of “The Golden Girls,” for example, the ladies had a gay cook. The network liked the show but not the gay cook, so if you started watching the show from the beginning, the cook mysteriously vanished after the first episode, and it’s established that Sophia cooks for the women. If the changes the network asks for are too drastic, or if parts have to be recast for some reason, the pilot may not air at all.
The original pilot for “Star Trek” was titled “The Cage.” It starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, with Majel Barrett (creator Gene Roddenberry’s future wife) as the stoic first officer, “Number One.” Leonard Nimoy appeared as Spock, pointy ears and all, but he wasn’t completely emotionless and gives a big grin at one point.
The story has Pike taken captive by mind-controlling aliens who can control what he sees and hears and make him think he’s in any sort of surroundings.
