Matt Gurney: Anson Mount saved Star Trek
The American actor showed up to work and from the very first moment, showed us that he knew what a Starfleet captain was supposed to be.
By: Matt Gurney
Summer is here. It’s a great time to celebrate good things, even if the news cycle has been a little bit, uhh, a lot, lately. So I want to lighten things up here, even if only just for a couple of minutes, and celebrate a very good thing. Specifically, a very good actor and a very good casting decision. Because Anson Mount saved Star Trek. And I’m not afraid to say so. In fact, I’m here to shout it from the rooftops: thank you, Anson Mount. You were just what we needed.
I’m gonna need to explain this one a bit for the readers. I get it. I’m going to assume you all know almost nothing about Star Trek and try to present this to you in the big-picture sense that allows you to jump in and understand. So strap in, friends. This is going to take a minute.
The original Star Trek show, the one with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, ran in the late 1960s. It was cancelled after three seasons but became very popular in syndicated reruns. After the Star Wars franchise proved how lucrative science fiction could be, Star Trek was almost brought back as a television series before being relaunched as a series of movies with the original actors returning to reprise their roles. The movies were successful but became more expensive to make as time went on. And the actors weren’t getting any younger or cheaper. So Paramount, which owns Star Trek, decided to bring in a new set of actors to play a new set of characters in the same fictional universe.
This was (the somewhat literally titled) Star Trek: The Next Generation, a television show that premiered in 1987. It was set 75 years or so after the first series and was enormously successful. It spawned two spinoffs that ran at roughly the same time. There were some crossovers between the various series, with either characters or plot lines making appearances across different shows. When those shows wrapped up after a run of 13 years, there had been a total of 21 seasons of television as part of that second era of Star Trek. And it wasn’t quite finished: Star Trek: Enterprise, a prequel to the original series, ran for four more seasons.
And then Star Trek basically went away for a while. Because it needed to.
The four shows referenced above — TNG, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and then the prequel — combined for 25 seasons of television produced between 1987 and 2005. That’s just a massive amount of output, and that was back when TV shows typically did between 22 and 26 hour-long episodes a season. There were also four more TNG movies! There was a remarkable degree of stability and consistency among the creative professionals who made the shows possible. Writers, directors, producers, set decorators and costume designers — people spent huge parts of their careers only working within one franchise. This had tremendous advantages in terms of fostering onscreen consistency and generating talent, but it also meant, by the time Enterprise was cancelled in 2005, that the franchise had gone really, really stale. Star Trek needed a break, desperately. And so, it went off TV. Some people wondered if it would ever come back.
It wasn’t a total break. J.J. Abrams produced a trilogy of Star Trek films, recasting Shatner, Nimoy, and all the rest with a younger group of performers, and setting his stories in an alternate universe created by accidental time travel. That was actually a pretty clever way of telling new stories that weren’t overly weighed down with decades of canon, guarded by some of the most fanatical nerds in the known universe. But by 2016 or so, the streaming era of television had created incredible demand for content. Content, content, content, content all the time. CBS, which now owned Paramount and the Star Trek intellectual property, wanted to start its own streaming service and turned to Star Trek to serve as the tentpole of this new television adventure.
It didn’t really work. But it is how we start getting to the core of this column.
Star Trek: Discovery, the first Star Trek show of the streaming era, premiered in 2017. It wrapped up its five-season run, delayed as it was by Hollywood strikes and the pandemic, a few months ago.
To say that Star Trek: Discovery was polarizing would probably be an understatement. The show had a passionately committed fan base and performed financially well enough to spawn another era of spinoffs — a next generation after the next generation, as it were. But it was also heavily criticized by some critics and many fans for perceived failures in its writing and an overly “woke” tone.
I honestly don’t even know how to begin to assess whether or not the show was "too woke," though I was dismissive of the early claims of same. How does one objectively quantify a culture war skirmish? It certainly ticked a number of diversity boxes: a black woman was the lead character, women were heavily represented in all on-screen positions of power, Star Trek's first openly gay couple was introduced, as were trans actors and non-binary characters. There’s undeniably a segment of the population that would say that’s woke on the face of it and would have been biased against enjoying Discovery based on those creative decisions alone.
I don’t belong to that segment. I would’ve happily watched a Star Trek show about a ship populated entirely by gay women of colour who had been born biological males if I had found the show itself interesting. And I didn’t find Discovery interesting. I made it through two and a half seasons before I realized at the end of one episode that I did not know the names of many of the characters, including ones that had been on-screen since the beginning. Their characterization was wafer-thin. There were a few well-developed characters, but everyone else basically served to exist as an exposition delivery system. I began wondering what the hell I was doing investing an hour or so a week in this, and then, in the very next episode, a group of those characters proceeded to give a melancholy toast to a character they believed had either died or transitioned to some alternate reality.
And that’s when I gave up on the show. Because the character they were toasting was a genocidal war lord who literally enjoyed eating sentient aliens, which she considered a delicacy. It was the Star Trek version of them all gathering around the table and going, “Yeah, Hitler wasn’t perfect, but we’re really gonna miss him, what a quirky fellow.” It was inconceivable, and that’s saying a lot for a show in which people fly around faster than the speed of light and beam places. I can accept that. I can’t accept bad writing, though. I have limits. That was my limit.
As one friend of mine quipped, as he also gave up on Discovery, the show had tons of emotion — characters always shouting at each other or crying — but it had no heart. Bang on.
But Discovery did do one incredible thing before I tuned out: it gave us Anson Mount.
I have to give you a bit more context here, and I appreciate your patience. I know it’s been a lot already. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery showed real signs of promise, but it was a creative mess. The behind-the-scenes problems were well-documented, but the show’s original showrunner spent an enormous amount of money setting up a vision of the show that was quickly abandoned after he suddenly exited and was replaced after the first few episodes, leaving the two new co-showrunners with shockingly expensive sets and costumes and no coherent plot. Those showrunners were able to bring the season to a reasonably competent conclusion, and then they immediately exited, too. It was clear to anyone paying attention to both the on-screen content and the off-screen drama that if Discovery was going to last long enough to have any chance of recouping its enormous financial investment, the second season (helmed now by a fourth show runner) was going to have to start getting a lot of big things right.
And it … didn’t. The second season still had some real creative problems. But it was a marked improvement, thanks mainly to a much less rambling, more coherent storyline. In it, our cast of characters, the crew of the Federation Starship Discovery, are dispatched to various points through the galaxy to identify the source of mysterious signals that have been received by the United Federation of Planets, the democratic galactic union of which Earth is a founding member.
Discovery is set approximately 10 years before the original Star Trek series. This meant that all of the original series characters, like Kirk and Spock, were available to be used by the writers. And that’s exactly what happened. As the Discovery travels across the galaxy trying to solve its mystery, the crew discover that a very young Vulcan Lieutenant Spock is somehow wrapped up in it all. They briefly encounter the Starship Enterprise, which is badly damaged and in need of repairs and cannot assist. The captain of the Enterprise, Christopher Pike, transfers onto the Discovery to take command of the mission.
And Christopher Pike was played by the American actor Anson Mount.
Pike is a legacy character, of a kind. Explaining the character’s origin and the original actor’s backstory would take more time than we really have here, but the Pike character, briefly seen in flashbacks during the original series, was the man who captained the Enterprise before James T. Kirk. Mount was therefore stepping into an unusual role. Pike is an important character in the Star Trek canon. But the character had less than an hour of screen time. He was spoken of by other characters, meaning we knew some things about him, but we never really saw him. Mount had to therefore portray a character that had to be created from near-scratch in terms of his performance but that would also be plausible as a man who would be a legend to the later characters in Star Trek. (As a tiny example, later iterations of Trek established that the Federation’s highest honor for valour is named after Pike.)
Mount absolutely crushed it. From almost the very first moment he is on screen, he was perfect. He stepped into the role of Christopher Pike and immediately understood the assignment. Mount is himself a confessed Trekkie, and that might have helped him to understand what a Starfleet captain is supposed to be. But whatever the explanation, he completely stuck the landing. Pike, as portrayed by Mount, is intelligent yet flawed. Brave and vulnerable. Funny but sometimes sad and lonely. He’s a capable combat leader but also has the heart of a Boy Scout. He is devoted to crew but also struggles with the lonely agony of knowing with absolute certainty, thanks to a vision of his future bestowed on him by an alien artifact, that he is doomed to a grim fate: a slow death after a gruesomely debilitating injury.
Amid the uneven offerings of Discovery’s second season, it did not take long for fans, even fans who were lukewarm on the show, to begin demanding more of Mount as Pike. In the final episode of the season, the Enterprise, its damage repaired, returns to service, and Pike returns to commanding it. He leads the ship into a desperate battle during which we see other characters on the Enterprise, as well as an absolutely gorgeous modern adaptation of the bridge set first seen in the 1960s. The moment I saw that set, knowing that it would’ve cost a fortune to design and build, I knew exactly what was going to happen. It took some time before it was official, but sure enough, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, with Anson Mount leading a new Star Trek show set on the Enterprise in the years before Kirk takes command, was announced in 2020. It premiered in 2022.
Strange New Worlds is the best Star Trek that we have seen in a generation. It isn’t perfect; no TV show is. A few of the episodes have been clunkers. It had a musical episode that I enjoyed but clearly divided the fandom, as I suppose any big swing ever would.
But Strange New Worlds is getting back to what Star Trek has always supposed to be about. It’s an ensemble show, based around a likable, relatable cast of characters, showing a group of people dealing with both lighthearted interpersonal drama and galaxy-spanning crises day in and day out. Along the way, they get to explore those strange new worlds, keeping us entertained but also providing opportunities to comment on topical issues of relevance to the audience today.
It’s exactly what a lot of fans wanted Discovery to be, in other words.
And it only exists because Mount was able to take what was planned as a single-season guest-starring role on Discovery and so thoroughly crush it as Captain Christopher Pike that no one — not the fans, not the producers, not the people making the financial decisions that underwrite the entire franchise — could deny that the next logical — ahem — place for the franchise to go was a show where Mount got to be Pike, sitting on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise like he was born to do nothing else. He’s the kind of leader I’d actually want to follow off into the unknown, and I’m notoriously bad at following anyone.
Discovery wrapped up its run after five seasons, after a somewhat sudden cancellation that seemed to catch the cast and crew by surprise. Strange New Worlds has aired two seasons so far, and production work continues on the third, and it has already been renewed for a fourth season, before a minute of the third has aired. It is my understanding that, from a financial perspective, the show has been a success, and that even as TV undergoes wrenching contraction as the golden age of streaming comes to an end, that Strange New Worlds is set to remain a key part of Paramount’s TV strategy going forward.
And that’s good. But what’s better, to this fan, is that it has reestablished what Star Trek is supposed to be. Individual episodes may miss the mark, but in the big picture sense, we have that most wonderful of things: a great actor playing a great character, supported by great actors playing other characters, including a mix of legacy characters and new creations, all set in a format that allows Star Trek to be what it can be: gritty but optimistic, funny but dramatic, smart and playful.
And fun. That’s the best part. Strange New Worlds is fun. It’s fun tuning into each week. I wake up excited on days when there will be new episodes and watch each at least twice. The first time, just to get the excitement out of my system, and then again to actually soak it in.
It has been a long time since I’ve felt that way about new Star Trek. I was a fan of Star Trek: Picard, which brought back the now frankly elderly TNG characters for a final hurrah. (I was a fan of most of it, anyway — the second season, disrupted by COVID, was appallingly muddled.) But Picard, as heartwarming as it was, was fundamentally a retrospective. It was a reunion and a commentary on aging, and on the friends lost and found along the way.
I enjoyed it! It had some wonderful moments. But it couldn’t carry a franchise. Picard was about making peace with the past and saying goodbye to old friends, but Strange New Worlds is where the adventure can (and hopefully will) continue.
It’s Star Trek. Good Star Trek. It’s the Star Trek the franchise desperately needed after the polarizing Discovery, which might have been able to thrive if not for having been born under the bad sign of so much behind-the-scenes drama.
And Strange New Worlds only exists because Anson Mount showed up to work one day and showed the world that he knew what Star Trek was, and what Starfleet captains needed to be.
He saved Star Trek. And I can’t wait for season three.
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I think the "woke" aspects of Discovery were jarring because there seemed to be a presumption that those aspects of a character were sufficient to define the character and make them compelling. Original series Star Trek writer David Gerrold wrote about this in his book "The Making of the Trouble with Tribbles": the power of Star Trek's diversity wasn't because a character is *a* Black or is *an* Asian or is *a* woman, but that you had characters who *are* Black, *are* Asian, *are* women. The assumption that identity is paramount is a quintessential feature of intersectional thinking, and that's what made Discovery "woke".
One of the things I've loved about Strange New Worlds is they haven't been slavishly set on previously established canon. Instead, they tend to make sure it rhymes with what's been previously established, giving them a lot more room for stories and characters. They even seem to have brilliantly set up an explanation for the deviations by linking it to plotlines about temporal cold wars from previous series: in the Season 2 episode "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", La'an Noonien Singh and an alternate version of Kirk end up in 21st century Toronto trying to thwart a series of attacks that would change the future. In the end, a frustrated enemy agent notes that despite numerous attempts to change history, the best they're able to do is shift *when* key events happen. Suddenly there's a compelling explanation for why the Original Series talked about Eugenics Wars happening in the 1990s that isn't reflected in *our* history or the history of the later shows.
Characters, events, and technologies look different in SNW than TOS, but it's less jarring than the contrast of Discovery. We see many familiar characters, but they're given slightly different characterizations and spins than we got used to. Frankly, the new Kirk has been a real treat, sweeping away decades of a Kirk caricature based more on an impression of William Shatner and replacing it with a character much more like the serious, brilliant, charismatic officer from the Original Series.