Great storytelling elevates this Star Trek hero to messiah status

Before Captain Kirk, came a compelling commander

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

The other captain.

Last month saw the release of the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the prequel series that follows the crew of the USS Enterprise before one James T. Kirk took the captain’s chair. Not only does the show have the heady mix of fun and serious subject matter, it also has something quite rare for Star Trek; a messiah figure.

Ever since its first airing in 1966, Star Trek has presented a utopian view of the future. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry created a world where humanity had grown up and had moved past its petty squabbles. In Roddenberry’s twenty-third century, prejudices around race, class or sex were non-existent. There were, however, some groups that could not get a look in. One topic that got very little representation was sexuality, the other was religion.

Representation of differing sexualities would become something that Star Trek would eventually excel at depicting. Religion, however, has not fared quite so well. Star Trek’s staunchly secular universe is clearly a reflection of Gene’s views. What is interesting though, is the way that in a franchise so resistant to even the idea of God, is how concepts related to him seem to seep into the storytelling. The use of a Messiah figure, specifically a character who sacrifices their life to save others is hardly new in Star Trek. At least two captains come to mind. But there is something particularly novel about Captain Christopher Pike.

For those who are in need of a bit of trivia, Pike, not Kirk, was the first captain of the Enterprise to be depicted. In an unaired pilot, Captain Pike is portrayed by matinee idol, Jeffrey Hunter. This captain is seasoned, world weary, and very serious. Perhaps a little too serious as the network at the time didn’t like the show in that form. They did however, take the unconventional step of ordering a second pilot, which was lighter, and more colourful in tone. Reports differ wildly as to whether Hunter quit or was fired, but one way or another, he did not return to reprise the role of Captain Pike when the show went to series. Instead, the character of Pike was replaced with James T. Kirk, played by a young William Shatner.

This then presented the show with a problem. The production company had an entire episode’s worth of footage costing $645,000 (around $6.5m today) that was unusable in its current state. The novel solution to this problem was to write a framing story where Spock mysteriously commandeers the Enterprise and kidnaps now Fleet Captain Pike. When Spock turns himself in for court martial, he presents video footage in his defence. Footage which just so happens to be selected shots from the unaired pilot. There was just one problem with this. Jeffrey Hunter was unavailable for filming, so they had to cast another actor in the role. As the episodes would show Jeffrey Hunter’s Pike on screen, it would make the recasting look obvious. So actor Sean Kenney was slathered in burns makeup, put in a restrictive wheelchair and only able to communicate through a series of beeps, with Roddenberry writing in an explanation of how Captain Pike had been seriously injured in an explosion on a ship saving some cadets, and was now suffering from ‘locked in syndrome’.

When Star Trek: Discovery’s second season came around, they chose to include characters such as Captain Pike (now played by Anson Mount) and Spock (Ethan Peck) to serve as a backdoor pilot for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Rather than steering clear of the convoluted backstory, they leaned into it, having a confident, able-bodied Pike receive a premonition of his own terrible fate. He is told at the time that he can escape if he gives up, but if he goes ahead in completing the mission, it will seal his fate. In that moment, Pike rallies himself by saying:

“You’re a Starfleet Captain, you believe in service, sacrifice, compassion and love. No, I'm not going to abandon the things that make me who I am because the future…it contains an ending I hadn't foreseen for myself”.

Discovery simply had too much plot in it to resolve Pike’s story satisfactorily, so when Strange New Worlds launched, it gave Pike the chance to fully unpack his trauma.

The first episode of Strange New Worlds sees Captain Pike considering retirement from Starfleet. After all you can’t have an accident in space if you never go on a spaceship right? However, he’s drawn back into captaining the Enterprise in order to rescue his first officer, Una, who is trapped on a primitive planet. After saving her, Pike resumes command of the Enterprise. Una is aware of Pike’s vision of the future, and is desperate to dissuade him of walking into a situation that will leave him so disfigured. At which point, Pike tells her he knows the names of all the cadets he saves on that day. “Stay the course, save their lives” he tells her.

In the season one finale of the show, Pike meets a young boy, Maat, who is eager to join Starfleet, and Pike realises he is one of the cadets that he is unable to save. He is about to write a letter to the boy, trying to tell him about his future, when a future version of himself arrives. Throughout the course of the episode, Pike learns that if he avoids his fate and stays in command of the Enterprise, he will inadvertently start a war with the Romulans that will result in Spock’s death. “Every time we change the path, he dies” his future self tells him. This furthers Pike’s resolve to stay the course.

When viewed through this particular lens, Captain Pike’s story in Strange New Worlds is in effect, one long extended Garden of Gethsemane scene. In both cases we see a man, fully aware of the impact his sacrifice will have for the future, but at the same time, still feeling nervous, scared, and wanting to reject the bad hand he’s been dealt. But in both cases, both Jesus and Captain Pike recommit themselves to their mission and their fate. There are no shortage of heroes in sci-fi/fantasy, who sacrifice themselves in the heat of the moment. But a character who has multiple chances for escape, one who has time to consider the torturous weight of his own destiny, and still decides to go through with it? This elevates the character from a simple ‘hero’ to a ‘messiah figure’.

As a result of this, watching Strange New Worlds has now taken on an experience similar to watching The Chosen, the multi-season show centred around Jesus and his disciples. Both shows have an effortlessly charismatic central character who leads those around them with grace and humility, and the more you fall in love with these characters, the more you’re reminded that something absolutely horrendous is going to happen to them. Whilst we know it must happen, it still makes us anxious at the thought of going through it.

Over thirty years since Gene Roddenberry’s death, it’s hard to tell what he would have thought about the evolution of one of the first characters he wrote for Star Trek. On the one hand he might have rejected it out of hand for its parallels with the story of Jesus, a religion he disdained. Or he might just love it for what it is; really, really good storytelling.

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Review

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

11 April 2025

5 min read

Here’s what Death of a Unicorn gets very wrong

‘The unicorn was a Christ-allegory’ and other lies.

Iona Curtius

Iona is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, studying how we can understand truth.

A tapestry depicts a unicorn resting within a fenced enclosure.

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries).

Public domain, The Met Museum.

I don’t do horror or gore. And yet, I just saw the gory creature feature comedy horror Death of a Unicorn. I have not seen such a clichéd movie in a very long time (probably since Don’t Look Up…). Death of a Unicorn gives us a strained father-daughter relationship, the artsy young girl with silver rings on every finger and dyed hair, cartoonishly evil rich people, their creepy but stupid blonde son, the put-upon butler… and… the unicorn. However, the biggest cliché of them all is perhaps the desperate attempt to subvert expectations and tell a new story about a familiar trope… and failing.

Given the title of the film, one would be forgiven for assuming that unicorns play a significant role in it. One would be mistaken. The conceit of killer-unicorn is a fun one. I wish the film had played with it more. Instead, the unicorns themselves barely feature and are not particularly interesting or subversive. The perception of the unicorn that is put forward by the characters likewise is trite and tired.

The film features another classic scene: the ‘plucky young woman digs out her laptop and falls down a google rabbit hole to research paranormal/fantastical phenomenon’. In her research Ridley comes across a set of medieval tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt. These tapestries do exist in real life and are indeed now housed at The Met. The Met’s fictional website in the film informs Ridley that the fifth tapestry in the series ‘The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden’ only survives in fragments (true) and that scholars believe the missing part of the tapestry most likely showed the unicorn going on a murderous rampage (very much not true). From this, Ridley deduces that, since unicorns do indeed appear to be real, the warnings of old ought to be heeded. In the film, Ridley is proved right, the unicorns do turn out to be murderous monsters out for the blood of those who would abuse the remains of their dead foal.

While the real Met website does indeed show us the torn tapestry, it features no such conjecture about the gory violence the unicorn might have inflicted prior to being subdued by the maiden.

In one of her desperate attempts to reason with the megalomaniacal pharmaceutical tycoons, Ridley slips in a sentence about the unicorn serving as an allegory for Christ. This is a claim that is repeated all across the internet in various fora, fan sites, even some old scholarship. But that is exactly what this theory is: outdated scholarship… mixed with a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of paternalistic attitudes towards the past and half-misremembered folklore about Christian symbolism. It is true that medieval art is rich in symbolism. It is also true that medieval European cultures were deeply steeped in Christian religious traditions. However, as Barbara Drake Boehm writes in her recent book on the tapestries ‘the Cloisters Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries have … fallen victim to a tendency to perceive Christianity in every stitch’. The fact that one of the hunters has a scabbard that invokes the ‘Queen of Heaven’ (the Virgin Mary), or that another carries rosary beads, are most likely simply indicative of the fact these were common items ‘within the majority-Christian society in which the tapestries were created’. (A Blessing of Unicorns, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020).

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past.

One doesn’t need a degree in art history to figure out that such an allegorical relation would make no sense either. If the unicorn was representative of Christ and the hunt of his Passion, why does the unicorn fight back? If the untouched maiden in whose lap the unicorn reposes is the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, why does she help the hunters trap and kill the unicorn? The tapestry that supposedly shows the unicorn resurrected and at peace in its captivity does not even appear to belong to the same narrative as the other tapestries. And why would a resurrected Christ-figure be shown in supposed captivity?

This contrived and at the same time lazy interpretation speaks of a deeply patronising and arrogant attitude to the past. ‘Ah, well, back then they were all religious fanatics that believed in silly things like Jesus and unicorns.’ The implication being that in our modern, enlightened state we couldn’t possibly be accused of believing in silly simplistic mythical accounts of the world… Yeah. Not only is this of course false, it also distract from the very real things we could learn from the past.

The film in the end wants to have it both ways. It wants to ridicule medieval people (based on lazy stereotypes) as well as perpetuating some of the most backward attitudes woven into the tapestries. So, what is the real true meaning of the tapestries and of unicorns? I don’t know. I can’t offer ‘real true’ interpretations (because they don’t exist). What I can offer is a careful and close engagement.

What strikes me about the myth of the unicorn is what the unicorn does stand for. Over the centuries the unicorn has been used as a symbol for purity, innocence, humility, and sometimes fertility. In medieval poetry the (male) bard would often cast himself as the unicorn, beguiled by his beautiful lady, desiring nothing more than to rest his head in her lap. Little of this particular metaphor has survived into the modern pop-culture. What seems to have survived is the strong connection with young virgins. This particular trope features heavily in the film too though the film makers attempt to gloss over the sexual implications of ‘virgin’ by speaking only of ‘maidens’ (which still means the same thing but doesn’t have the same sexual baggage for modern ears).

Now, that is indeed an interesting aspect worth unpacking. Why is it that unicorns are so attracted to young women who have not had sex? Why the obsession with virginity and the implied association that – for a woman! – having sex sullies something pure? What does it mean that both the hunters in the tapestries and the rich people in the film use a woman’s body and sexuality to trap the unicorn and commit their violence? Where’s the film that deals with those questions? Until they make that one maybe I’ll stick with My Little Pony, I’m told that has significantly less disembowelment.

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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
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