Posted in: Star Trek, TV | Tagged: star trek, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Mount Talks Pike's Season 3 Leadership

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount and EP Akiva Goldsman preview Pike's mindset and leadership heading into the third season.

As we draw closer to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three premiere, the bulk of the cast with Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Celia Rose Gooding, Babs Olusanmokun, and Carol Kans along with showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers appeared at the Tribeca Festival in New York for a special season three screening to share some thoughts in the follow up panel on what's to come. Among them, Capt. Christopher Pike (Mount) is trying to balance his personal life with his command, knowing the ominous fate. For the handful of Star Trek fans who don't know, Pike was originally introduced in The Original Series season one episode "The Menagerie," which repurposes the unaired pilot "The Cage" into canon, and found in a near-catatonic state and horrifically scared, able to only communicate through his chair through a series of beeps and lights…because 1966s sci-fi.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Star Anson Mount and EP Akiva Goldsman on Season Three Pike

Despite Pike knowing his crippling fate and all the 23rd StarFleet medical technology, Mount is ensuring he's making the most of it with Capt. Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) and the dangers of Federation life, "Pike essentially learns the journey is the destination, and he continues to learn that lesson as we go along," he said (via TrekMovie.com). "But that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be questions when it comes time to maybe trust somebody other than yourself, or trust your ability to have an experience with another person when you know your time is limited. And what does that mean? And so we get to explore that quite a bit this season. I'm very excited for people to see it."

Batel's fate is left uncertain, left frozen in cryostasis, as part of a cliffhanger of season two, as she's currently infected by the Gorn, whose young gestates similar to the Alien franchise's xenomorphs that kill the victim after it emerges from the host. "[Pike] knows when his career in Starfleet as an active captain is going to come to a close, but that's less important to him than his crew," Goldsman said. "Fundamentally, there are a bunch of great captains. And of all of them and all that we've seen, weirdly, Pike has the least ego. He has built a crew which is, in lieu of family, and to lose any one of them, all of whose fates he has no idea about, would be worse than death for him. So that gives us stakes. Because you can watch Anson wrestling with connecting, and then the potential loss of that connection."

Mount also provided perspective on Pike's leadership and placed greater emphasis on teamwork. "After 'Discovery' [season two], we started talking about this show and we had our initial creative conversation, I said, I know this: I know that when a crew member comes to Pike's office, everything stops, everything that's he's been reading it gets put in a drawer," he said "The most important thing in his world is the person in front of him right now. Because he's smart enough to know that his greatest resource is his crew, because they're a bigger brain together. That's why he leads by 'best idea wins,' you saw in [the season 3 premiere]. They took that and really ran with it."

For more including Peck exploring Spock's more emotional side, including his relationship with Nurse Christne Chapel (Jess Bush); Gooding on Uhura finding her voice among the Enterprise crew and her memorable turn on season two's "Subspace Rhapsody"; Olusanmokun and Kane talking M'Benga and Pelia, you can check out the rest of the complete coverage. Season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which also stars Rebecca Romijn, Melissa Navia, Christina Chong, Paul Wesley, and Martin Quinn, premieres on July 17th on Paramount+.

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