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The third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worldsis arguably the most divisive among the fanbase. It follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the USS Enterprise before the events of The Original Series and was the most widely praised of the third wave upon its debut. Storytelling choices, such as playing with genre or comedy, are often the source of the complaints. However, there is one moment in the Strange New Worlds Season 3 premiere that breaks one of Gene Roddenberry's rules for Star Trek. Captain Pike prays.
Ironically, the Season 3 premiere also started to fix a bigger, persistent complaint about Strange New Worlds and its relationship to Star Trek canon. In the final moments of the episode, Pike visits the woman he loves, recently implanted with a fatal Gorn egg. He then kneels to recite The Lord's Prayer. Diehard fans of Star Trek know series creator Gene Roddenberry was a secular humanist who firmly believed religion would not survive into humanity's future. Yet the canon itself does not rigidly adhere to that view.
Captain Pike's Re-Introduction In Star Trek: Discovery Set the Stage for the Prayer
Fans often forget (sometimes willfully) that Strange New Worlds is a direct spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery, the series that began the third wave on television. The first season of the show deliberately departed from franchise traditions, much as Deep Space Nine did in the 1990s. The second season brought in Pike as a temporary captain, and the second episode made Discovery "real" Star Trek.
The ship travels to a planet inhabited by pre-warp humans, transported from Earth by the mysterious "Red Angel" during a deadly World War III attack in circa 2053. Over the next 100 years, these survivors and their descendants constructed a religion around that event. The USS Discovery crew embarks on a classic away-mission trope, hiding their identity as space travelers from the natives.
Earlier in the episode, Pike and Michael Burnham talk in the ready room about her foster brother Spock's disappearance. He reveals he understands difficult "family dynamics," explaining his father was a science professor who also taught comparative religion. He stresses they "didn't agree" on a lot of things.
This creates a direct connection between Discovery and Strange New Worlds' stories. In Season 2's crossover with Lower Decks, Pike reveals to Boimler and Mariner that he planned to isolate himself on his birthday because he would be a year older than his father ever got to be. He planned to spend the time remembering his troubled relationship with his father, which presumably involved conflicts over religious belief.
Later in Discovery Season 2, Captain Pike's most fateful moment happened when he saw a glimpse of his future. Specifically, he witnessed the accident that confined him to a full-body wheelchair, which only allows him to communicate via a blinking light, as seen in The Original Series episode "The Menagerie."
His encounters with time travel, the inevitability of his canonical fate, and other experiences during this time have challenged his beliefs. Faced with the death of the woman he loves, Pike does what desperate humans have done for likely tens of thousands of years. He sets aside rationality, reason, and doubt to appeal to an unknowable cosmic power transcending all notions of being and non-being for a miracle. And, at least temporarily, he gets one when Batel wakes up seemingly healed.
Gene Roddenberry Strongly Opposed Religion, but Star Trek References Persist
When creating Star Trek in the 1960s, Roddenberry imagined a future where humanity evolved into its best possible selves. Nationalism, poverty, bigotry, and dogmatic religion were all shameful relics of the past. One of his most controversial Star Trek ideas came in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" when Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew encounter a powerful alien who claims to be Apollo.
The episode is the first of many stories in this universe that pose that "gods" are just alien beings so advanced they seem like magic. However, in that same episode, Kirk tells Apollo that "mankind has no need for gods," but adds, they "find the one quite adequate." (Emphasis added.) There's also a "chapel" on the ship used for weddings and funerals.
Still, Roddenberry wanted the Star Trek crew to meet "God," only to reveal that the monotheistic religions also worshipped some advanced alien being. Many of his episode ideas and even movie pitches revolved around that theme. When developing The Next Generation, he doubled down on the idea that humanity had abandoned religion. Captain Picard shows disdain for it more than once.
After his death, Deep Space Nine introduced the Bajoran religion, but it also revealed their deities, called "the Prophets," were just non-corporeal aliens who did not experience linear time. Enterprise's alien doctor, a Denobulan named Phlox, tells the crew he studied human religions on Earth, suggesting they weren't gone from the planet in the 22nd Century.
The story in Discovery continued this idea by introducing a new colony of humans from before the Vulcans first made contact. The survivors of the WW III attack took refuge in a church, and the Red Angel (a future Michael Burnham) transported the entire building to the new planet.
While they developed a religion built on this event, a stained-glass window in the building featured an image depicting symbols from multiple human religions. Their faith was an amalgamation of myriad beliefs blended with a new mythology based on the Red Angel encounter. Despite what objections Roddenberry may have had, Pike's prayer doesn't actually break with what canon establishes.
Religion is Cultural and not Dogmatic in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
In Deep Space Nine, Captain Sisko's mission was, primarily, to convince Bajor to join the Federation. In the pilot episode, he met the Prophets and became their "emissary." Even though he knew they weren't "gods" but simply advanced beings, it didn't affect their faith.
The oblique references to religion in Star Trek: TOS andthrough the second and third waves of the universe reveal thathumanity never quite left it behind. Whether centered on Vulcans, Klingons, Bajorans, or even humans, the persistence of religion was not necessarily about dogmatic belief.
Rather, these ritualistic practices were cultural expressions. In fact, earlier in the episode, when Pike tells the crew to "make us shine like the sun" to attract the Gorn, that line could be a reference to the Christian hymn "On Eagle's Wings." It's something he would have picked up from his father.
In The Final Frontier, Kirk and company don't meet "God," but rather a manipulative alien being trapped by an equally powerful species on the planet Sha Ka Ree. From Kukulkán in The Animated Series to the multiple members of the Q Continuum, gods are portrayed as just powerful alien beings worshipped by people who cannot understand such things.
The Prime Directive, introduced in The Original Series, is an extension of this understanding. Revealing themselves to societies less advanced than the Federation could interfere with their development, and it could lead to Starfleet captains and ships serving as the foundation for a new religion. A key tenet of Star Trek is that, for all of the Federation's advanced knowledge, they don't know everything.
While never stated explicitly, fans can assume the disagreements between Pike and his father aren't about whether the Bible is fiction or nonfiction. Rather, especially through comparative religion, the conflict likely stemmed from the way people mythologize concepts and powers they lack the capacity to understand.
"God" is just a metaphor for something unknowable or, possibly, an expression of individual will that the modern vernacular calls "manifesting." By praying for Batel, Pike isn't being "born again." It is a cultural expression connecting him to both his late father and a foundational human response to helplessness.
