I just watched the Season 3 finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the series on Paramount Plus, which as you no doubt know if you're reading this, tells the story of Captain Christopher Pike, a character from a two-part episode of the original Star Trek series ("The Menagerie"), along with the story of Spock, James Kirk, Uhura, Chapel, Scotty younger than they were in TOS, as well as characters we didn't meet in TOS.
Now, if by chance you haven't seen the first season of TOS, you might not to want to read any further, because there will be a huge spoiler ahead ... Although, maybe not. How's that for a spoiler warning?
But what I'm getting at is we see about ten minutes of among the best Star Trek TV, movies, and streaming I've ever seen, tender and heartbreaking and beautiful, the story of Pike not getting disfigured which was the basis of "The Menagerie". Instead, we see Pike and Batel happy together for the rest of their long lives (until Batel is on her deathbed), raising a family, with all the good things life has to offer.
The question is (or, my question is): did this really happen, was it a glimpse of a real alternate reality, or was it an illusion in Pike's and Batel's heads? The rule of parsimony would make it an illusion. But I'd like to see the makers of Strange New Worlds make it a reality. The tragic brilliance of "The Menagerie" hinges on Pike being severely injured in a training accident. But with the super-potent powers in the universe we humans on Star Trek from time to time encounter, might not one of them, seeing what happened to Pike in the accident, prevented him for being in that place at the wrong time? What that would do is make "The Menagerie" a compelling Star Trek story that we know about but ultimately did not happen, but the rest of Star Trek corpus would remain intact.
In fiction, in general, prequels are always hostage to stories we already know, the stories that came first to our awareness but come from a time later in the overall narrative. But I would argue that science fiction has a special permit to diverge from this, if need be, because the essence of science fiction is our encounters with different realities, including those in which a future element in a story we know could be changed by something in the prequel, with the result that we have a more satisfying story.
Actually, The Next Generation at least once already sort of did this, in "The Inner Light," in which Picard experiences his entire life on another planet, only to wake up still Captain, same age he always was, on the Enterprise. What happened to Picard was not a dream, it really happened.
Whatever happens from now on with Captain Pike and Strange New Worlds, "The Menagerie" deserves even more credit than the warranted kudos it's long been receiving. It generated in the Season 3 finale of Strange New Worlds a signally important episode among the best in the Star Trek series since TOS and TNG.
See also Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.1-3.3: Gorn, Spock & Chapel, and The Walking Dead ... 3.4: Lots of Laughs and Serious Business ... 3.5: Endearing Pseudo-Science ... 3.6: Chris and Jim ... 3.7: The Medium and The Message ... 3.8: Pike's Hair and Spock's Smile ... [Note: I didn’t review 3.9 because, though it had a few good moments, I didn’t have enough worth saying about it.]
And see also Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1.1-1.2: Great Characters, Actors, Stories ... 1.3: "Instead of terraforming planets, we modify ourselves ..." ... 1.4: The Gorn and the Wub ... 1.5 Going to the Chapel ... 1.6: Two Stories ... 1.7: The Kiss ... 1.8: Ends of the Continuum ... 1.9: Momentous! ... 1.10: Everything!
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