Warning: This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 2 – “Children of the Comet.”
Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) began the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in a state of flux over the future he’d seen in Star Trek: Discovery. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to captain the Enterprise. But then he was given no choice by Admiral April. Still, the trauma of his fate played over and over in his mind, and even though he seemed to have come to terms with it somewhat at the end of the first episode of the new series, it still gave him pause when he talked with Cadet Uhura about where she saw herself ten years down the road.
At the end of the second episode, Number One, Lt. Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), made the supposition that Pike was given a vision of his future so he could make a different choice and save all of those cadets and himself. Her outlook of the future is that things can change, that they aren’t set in stone. (Screen Rant has an interesting take on their conversation and its aftermath.)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would change canon by altering Captain Pike’s fate.
Other series have already changed canon. In Star Trek: Picard, Admiral’s Picard mother committed suicide when he was very young. Whereas, aboard the Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, he had a vision of his mother as an older woman. There was even a picture of her. In addition, Star Trek: Discovery gave Spock a sister in Michael Burnham, a fact that was never brought to light in Star Trek: The Original Series. And Strange New Worlds has already nudged canon out of the way by introducing a romance between Spock and T’Pring when, in The Original Series, the pair hadn’t seen each other since they were children and certainly weren’t romantically involved.
So would it really be so bad to change Pike’s fate? And does it even have to happen? It’s well known that seven seasons seems to be the sweet spot for Star Trek series as shown by The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery is certainly edging close to that magic number.
If Strange New worlds does run for seven seasons, it will end before Captain Pike’s fate comes to fruition which means the series would not have to change his future as it would happen off-screen. Changing what lies ahead for Pike would most certainly change the character as well as over fifty years of history. As mentioned above, though, that hasn’t stopped the producers behind the newer Trek series from shifting canon out of the way.