At some point, the adventures of Captain Pike on the USS Enterprise morphed into the adventures of Captain Kirk. Because both pilots of Star Trek: The Original Series begin with the mission of the Enterprise already in progress, a true origin story of the classic Trek era remains oddly elusive. But through the mega-popular prequel series Strange New Worlds, Trekkies have been given the next-best thing; the machinations of Pike and company on the Enterprise in the years leading up to TOS.
But ever since Anson Mount’s Pike, Ethan Peck’s Spock, and Rebecca Romijn’s Number One appeared in Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 — which led to Strange New Worlds — fans have all wondered the same thing: Could all of this just morph into a new version of The Original Series? Comments from the showrunners combined with a very recent filming update suggest we could start to see a lot more TOS canon sooner than anybody thought.
Strange New Worlds Season 4 will film next year
Although Strange New Worlds Season 3 hasn’t been released yet, and likely won’t hit Paramount+ until the spring of 2025, Paul Wesley (James T. Kirk himself) recently revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that Season 4 will start filming in February. As TrekMovie pointed out, this is earlier than expected, since Anson Mount previously said Season 4 would start filming in the spring of 2025.
But beyond the start time of the new season, something that Wesley said might suggest that Kirk has an even bigger involvement in Season 4 than he has previously. “I’ve accounted for that time, and I’m committed to that,” Wesley said in reference to taking a break from his whiskey business, Brother’s Bond. So is this Wesley’s usual commitment to a season of Strange New Worlds, or will Kirk have an even bigger role?
When will James T. Kirk become captain?
While the individual episodes of Strange New Worlds are open-ended, the overall arc of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) is set in stone. At some point, he will step down from commanding the Enterprise, and Kirk (Paul Wesley) will take over. The most recently aired Strange New Worlds season took place in 2260, five years before Kirk became a captain. He’s still Lt. Kirk at this point in the timeline, serving on the USS Farragut. Wesley appeared in just three episodes of Strange New Worlds Season 2, which created a kind of running in-universe joke that he kept popping up on the Enterprise even though he’s not part of that crew. Overall, Wesley’s younger Kirk has only appeared in four episodes of Strange New Worlds in total, and in two of those — the Season 1 finale “The Quality of Mercy” and the Season 2 time-travel romp “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” — he played a Kirk from a different timeline.
Technically, the first Prime Universe version of Kirk in Strange New Worlds didn’t happen until the Season 2 episode “Lost in Translation” in which Kirk teamed up with Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and met Spock (Ethan Peck) for the very first time. (Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto’s Kirk and Spock exist in a different timeline.)
Right now, we don’t know how much Wesley’s Kirk is in Season 3 of Strange New Worlds, but it sounds like Season 4 is a fairly big commitment. Assuming Season 4 is set in 2261 or 2262, we’re getting dangerously close to Kirk becoming captain of the Enterprise. The backstory of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” suggests that, at some point during his time as a lieutenant, Kirk went back to teach at Starfleet Academy, which has either happened off-screen before Strange New Worlds or could happen in a future season. Season 2’s “Subspace Rhapsody” also established that Kirk’s girlfriend Carol Marcus is about to have a baby, a character we know who will grow up to be David Marcus, Kirk’s estranged son in The Wrath of Khan.
Earlier this year, Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman made it clear in an interview with Collider, saying: “Left to our own devices...we’ll keep going into the TOS era.”
This statement seems to indicate that there’s every reason to believe that a gap in Trek canon could be closed by Strange New Worlds, specifically the moment when Kirk takes over captaining the Enterprise from Pike. And while it may not happen in Season 4, it does seem possible that more Kirk in Season 4 could set up that moment. On top of all of that, there’s an entire year — 2265 — that is almost completely unaccounted for in Kirk’s first five-year mission on the Enterprise. 2265 is the year he takes over, but the only canonical onscreen adventure from that year is “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” with the rest of The Original Series and The Animated Series taking place from 2266 to 2270.
So even if Season 4 doesn’t see Kirk getting transferred to the Enterprise, it could very well see him get promoted to captain of a different ship. In Gene Roddenberry’s original conception of the character, Kirk would have captained a smaller “Destroyer-class” ship before taking over the Enterprise. Right now, Strange New Worlds still is giving us Lt. Kirk, but in a year or two, he could finally be Captain Kirk.
