By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Creatively speaking, Strange New Worlds is in a weird place right now. Fans have been griping about the show getting sillier and sillier over time. The more serious episodes about boldly going to the titular strange new worlds are mostly gone; now, the show oscillates between metaphysical goofiness more at home in Doctor Who (like when the crew has to fight the ancient embodiment of all evil) and high-concept goofiness more at home in an ‘80s comedy (like drunken misadventures and even weird puppet sh*t). Because of this, some fans are worried that Strange New Worlds has already ruined its reputation.
You see, most of Season 4 has focused on silly episodes, leaning even harder into the lighthearted plotting than Season 3. Now, the fifth and final season is rapidly approaching, and it’s going to be the shortest season yet. That’s enough to make many wonder if Strange New Worlds will continue to get goofier and end on a note of pure, unadulterated farce. However, one fan theory claims that Season 5 will stick the landing with the most shocking revelation of all: that Pike’s impending horrific accident is driving him crazy and that all the added wackiness of the past seasons is just in his head.
Has Captain Pike Got Space Madness?
From the very beginning, the whole idea of situating an entire show around Captain Pike has felt pretty crazy. That’s because, as longtime fans know, his fate is sealed. He might be a strapping, happy-go-lucky Starfleet officer right now, but he’s going to get into a horrific accident later that melts his face and confines him to a space wheelchair where all he can do is beep at people. While that leads to a kind of happy ending (he gets reunited with a lost love on a planet where telepaths make him think he’s young and healthy), it’s still wild that each episode brings us closer to Pike’s horrific, disfiguring accident.
Interestingly, Star Trek has decided to lean into this idea. Pike learns about his horrific fate in Discovery, but he decides to stay the course because of the lives he will have a chance to save. That happens again in Strange New Worlds, when a visit from his future self explains how many people (Spock included) will die if Pike tries to avoid the upcoming accident. For the most part, this newer series has mined plenty of good drama from the doomed captain’s fate. Or at least, it did, before SNW became a sitcom comedy. However, one fan thinks the lighthearted episodes are setting us up for a heartbreaking reveal.
A Mind Unraveling
Over on the subreddit r/startrek, user Aggressive-Delay-420 wrote (in a now-deleted post) a theory that Captain Pike is secretly unraveling as he gets closer and closer to his impending doom. Like anyone, he doesn’t want to face horrific reality, so he lets his mind wander to happier (or at least more distracting) matters. According to the theory, this is why we are getting progressively sillier episodes, especially in Season 4. Instead of thinking about his face melting off, Pike is imagining things like crewmen punching dinosaurs, turning into puppets, and even visiting planets where, like his favorite movies, everything is in black and white.
The theory claims that all of this will be revealed in Season 5, most likely in the final episode. If done well, this would effectively recontextualize all of those goofy episodes that fans have been griping about for years because they’ll no longer be just silly filler stories; instead, they will be artifacts of an unreliable narrator whose brain is doing anything it can to avoid facing reality. Of course, this would come at a high cost because it involves turning the steady and reliable Captain Pike into a secret schizophrenic. It would also mean Paramount was cool with annoying fans for years, all in the name of an ambitiously artsy final reveal.
For these reasons alone, I don’t think this theory holds water. However, it’s undeniably exciting to think about. How fun would it be if we were all getting played by the Star Trek show we keep dunking on? For that matter, how humbling would it be to find out that, on his way out, hated NuTrek guru Alex Kurtzman managed to secretly outsmart us all? Unfortunately, that leads to the main reason why this theory is just wishful thinking: simply put, the writers who gave us a goofy puppet episode likely aren’t capable of thinking that far ahead!
