From Lorca to a Codenamed Captain to Pike
Mount actually came close to landing the role of Discovery Season 1’s captain, Gabriel Lorca, though that job eventually went to Jason Isaacs. But the actor says that, in a funny way, not getting the Lorca gig was the best possible outcome for him.“I had actually spoken to them prior to Season 1 about Captain Lorca and they very wisely hired Jason Isaacs,” recalls Mount. “Then when it came to Season 2 they gave me a call and said, ‘Hey, how about this captain?’ But the captain was codenamed, and I had no idea what it was they were talking about until they made the offer, and then I realized it was Captain Pike. And you know, I grew up a Trekkie. I was turned onto the show by my mother about the time I was eight years old, so I knew exactly what that meant, and it was quite the surprise. It was quite the honor and it was, how do I put it? It was a bit daunting.”
Of course, now Lorca is dead -- as far as we know -- and Pike is still appearing in Short Treks.
“I mean, given my choice between the two captains, I obviously would've chosen Pike,” laughs Mount.That said, the deal Mount made with CBS originally was just for that one season as Pike. The character was never intended to stay onboard the Discovery beyond that.
“It was clearly a one-year contract because the lead in the series is Sonequa Martin-Green, and she needs to be the lead, and that character needs to go places that a continual captain cannot provide,” says the actor.
Return to Talos IV
One of the more surprising aspects of Discovery’s second season was that it didn’t just return to Talos IV, the strange, telepath-inhabited world from the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage,” which starred Jeffrey Hunter as Pike, but it also revisited the entire concept of Pike’s character being essentially doomed to suffer a tragic accident someday that will render him disabled and mute (as was revealed in The Original Series two-parter “The Menagerie”).Discovery back-fills canon by establishing that Pike has a vision of the future where he sees what is going to happen to him, and he’s given a choice to change that future… at a cost. But the captain makes the decision to accept his fate because it’s for the greater good in the here and now.“In terms of actually touching on Pike's storyline, I thought the writing was kind of brilliant because it took a story point that had always seemed rather tragic and turned it into something heroic,” says the actor. “As a fan, I liked that. As an actor, I was challenged by it. I thought it was really smart writing.”
Mount says that the way he sees it, Pike didn’t really have any other option than to do what he did.
“Even the first time I read the script, I knew that it's not a choice,” he says. “It might be daunting, but it's like if somebody said to you, ‘Okay, it's you or it's this school bus full of kids.’ You're going to immediately be shocked that you have to die, but most morally centered adults would say, ‘Take me, not the school bus full of kids.’”And yet, since these events took place in episode 12 just as the season was heading into its breakneck final two episodes, neither he nor Pike had a ton of time to consider the ramifications of the decision the captain made.
“From my perspective in terms of my character in the two episodes after that, what they did very well is that there's just no time to dwell on it,” says Mount. “I mean, those last two episodes, there's just no time. There's barely time to breathe, because it just moves, and moves, and moves, and moves, and moves. Now, if there were some opportunity in the future to see what's beyond that, I think it would probably have to begin with the question of how do you move forward knowing what your destiny is? I don't think that that's an easy thing to write about, because it just doesn't happen.”
Captain on the Bridge (of the Enterprise)
Of course, by the end of the season, Pike had returned to the bridge of his ship -- the good old USS Enterprise. The Star Trek: Discovery team spent a lot of time and effort to recreate and yet redesign the bridge of the ship for a modern television audience, but one of the funny things to come out of that was a recurring joke among fans about what the color scheme of the iconic set really is.“Well, first of all, it's not orange, it's red!” laughs Mount. “But I tell you, it's so hard to move forward and still pay homage to what's come before, especially in terms of just film technology. There's so many decades that have passed. I thought they did an amazing job, and I'll tell you this -- and I'm 46 at this point [and] I've been doing this about 20 years -- and some of this is maybe because that set is so 360, but I've never worked on a set where even between scenes I felt like the show was happening around me. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I'm also a fan. I even remember at one point turning to [Spock actor] Ethan Peck … Because every day we'd say to each other, ‘Can you believe this?’ But in that instance it was like, ‘Do you feel like we're in the show right now?’ You know? It just felt like I was in, it was like somebody had just picked me up and thrown me into the screen.”As for the future of Captain Pike, beyond his appearance in the current Short Trek, it remains an open question. “I wish I had something to tell you, honestly,” says the actor. Still, Mount does have some ideas of what a potential Pike TV show could be like if it ever happens.
“This is why I'm not a writer,” he laughs, “Being a fan, there's so many things that pop up in my mind, and in general I'd love to do something episodic with Trek rather than serialized, because I think that Pike as a traditional character, it just feels like something episodic would be the way to go. Because that's Trek, you know, it's episodic. Not to say that Discovery... everything they've done I think is something I probably would've made the same choices in terms of going serialized and getting deeper into the characters. But I think I'd like to do something episodic, which actually I've never done before as a regular. … [And] there are a couple of the Federation races we've not really delved into before. You know, like the Andorians, we haven't really delved deeper. I mean, we've gone very deep into the Vulcans and we haven't really explored the other foundational races.”
We’ll see what the future holds for Anson Mount’s Captain Pike, but in the meantime Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 is out on Blu-ray this week, and the Short Treks episode “Ask Not” is available now on CBS All Access. Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
