When Paramount+ announced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds back in 2021, the pitch was simple. We were finally going to spend serious time with Captain Christopher Pike, Number One, and a young Lieutenant Spock aboard the Enterprise in the years before James T. Kirk took the chair. Five years before The Original Series. A clean, episodic, planet-of-the-week show built around a captain we had only glimpsed in “The Cage” and “The Menagerie.” That was the promise.
Three seasons in, the show has quietly become something else. It has become a Kirk show with Pike features.
