Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Showrunners On Pike and Batel’s Choice

This Star Trek: Strange New Worlds article contains spoilers for season 3 episode 3.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Captain Christopher Pike is a unique figure in the franchise for many reasons. A leader who prizes collaboration and teamwork, he’s willing to not only listen to the opinions of his crew but to actively solicit them, even when lives are on the line. Warm, patient, and empathetic, he models a sort of servant-hearted leadership that is … well, let’s just say very unlike many of his predecessors within this franchise. (Not to mention he’s got  really great hair.) But he’s also burdened with the painful foreknowledge that he’s staring down a future that includes radiation disfigurement, paralysis, and physical agony.

Smartly, Strange New Worlds has always resisted the temptation to play Pike’s fate as a straight tragedy. Instead, the show forthrightly embraces the idea that his story is ultimately one of self-determination and hope. After all, if nothing we do matters, then, in the end, all that matters is what we do. For the most part, this philosophy also seems to hold for Pike himself. Heck, the one time he actively tried to change his fate wasn’t even about rewriting his own future, but an attempt to save the Starfleet cadets who are destined to die in the accident that disfigures him. But, in some ways, he’s allowed that foreknowledge to limit the sort of life he’s living. Thanks to an intervention from Star Trek: Lower Decks’s Brad Boimler last season, Pike began to open himself up more to the people around him and the idea of living in the moment. In season 3, it seems as though he’ll finally have to face the question of opening up his heart.

“Pike wrestles with mortality and the fact that he knows when he’s going to die. But the truth is, at a certain point, you either let that stop you from living and loving or you don’t,” Strange New Worlds showrunner Akiva Goldsman says. ”But it’s a fair question—how he gets to that point, and what it means for his journey.” 

Figuring out the person he’ll become as a result of the foreknowledge of his own death is, in many ways, Pike’s life’s work. But in season 3, it seems as though he’s starting to realize that maybe he doesn’t have to figure out what those answers look like alone. 

Former Wynonna Earp star Melanie Scrofano has been playing Pike’s long-term girlfriend, former USS Cayuga captain Marie Batel, since the Strange New Worlds pilot. But it’s only now, when she’s been repeatedly faced with near-certain death, that it seems as though Pike’s willing to fully admit what she means to him. 

“Here is somebody who wants to love, is scared to love, thinks he shouldn’t love—and then almost loses someone and goes, ‘Oh, I love that person. Now what do I do?’” Goldsman says. “That’s not the most unfamiliar experience for human beings, this thing that he’s going through.”

The looming specter of Batel’s potential demise has been a fairly big plot point in season 3—she’s already been infected by the Gorn, nearly killed, and treated with Una’s career-destroying Ilyrian blood to survive, and we’re just three episodes in—and it has had a profound effect on Pike’s emotional state. We’ve seen him not only willing to break rules for the slimmest of chances to save her, but literally get down on his knees and pray. (Something that Strange New Worlds certainly implies he hasn’t done in a very long time.)

“How do you love somebody when suddenly the very existence of that love is threatened?” Goldsman asks. “How does that affect the choices you make?  What’s nice about drama is that we can take these big, scary emotional issues and smush them down into something presentable, so we can work our way through our own nonsense.”

Batel’s condition takes another rough turn in the third episode “Shuttle to Kenfori.” And the solution that might save her life is just as dangerous as any potential cure—using the rare Chimera Blossom to essentially alter her genetic code in a way that will leave her as a sort of human-Gorn hybrid. 

Pike, understandably, is a bit taken aback to learn that both his significant other and several trusted members of his crew conspired to keep the truth of Marie’s treatment from him. (His reaction runs the gamut from genuine hurt to shock to furious determination to find an alternative in what feels like the span of two minutes.) 

“For someone like Pike, he’s so used to thinking about this life in terms of its end,” Goldsman’s co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers says. “He thinks he knows where things are going to go. He never stops frequently to think, oh, someone else’s might be in front of me.”

Ultimately, the choice to go ahead with the procedure that will both save and irrevocably change her life is Batel’s alone. Because the folks behind Strange New Worlds, Batel is not just a romantic interest for Pike; she’s an equal. And it’s a distinction that the show has worked hard to keep front of mind during their interactions since her first appearance on the show.

“I cast [Scrofano] in the pilot because she was so insanely compelling,” Goldsman says. “And, initially, it was a one-off. But she was just so good, fortunately, she said she could stay with us for a season. And what started to emerge over the course of that series was the certainty that this character is the right sort of opposite for [Pike].” 

“The more we brought [Batel] back, the more we thought about the fact that this is a really good relationship,” Myers adds. “More importantly, it’s really something you don’t often get to see in Star Trek: A genuine, long-term relationship between the captain and someone else, someone who has their own life and career and goals.” 

Throughout Strange New Worlds, we’ve seen Pike throw himself headlong into danger, whether in the name of protecting his crew, trying to change the fates of the cadets doomed to die in the accident that disfigures him, or simply because it’s the right thing to do. On some level, that’s the kind of freedom that likely comes with knowing when your story ends—a willingness to take risks you perhaps might not otherwise, knowing that no matter what happens in the meantime, your death is not this day. 

But, for Pike, being brave when it comes to his own fate is something very different than allowing those around him to put themselves in danger. It’s presumably the reason he’s constantly volunteering for dangerous away missions the captain of the Enterprise has no business being on, such as an illegal trip into the Restricted Zone on the hunt for a rare plant. (Not just volunteered for, either. Actively forbidding Spock from going and taking his place.)

“It’s only plot armor in the video game world,” Alonso laughs. ”It’s the kind of thing where, even if it’s true, no matter what you know, you still have to live with it. You know that there’s some kind of an ending that you’re going to have to face at some point. But how do you live your life in the now? That’s the question. That’s the part that’s really fun and challenging for that character.”

And, given Batel’s decision to become part Gorn in a last chance effort to save herself, Pike’s hardly the only captain on borrowed time who’s going to have to start figuring out how to do just that.