‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2’s New Captain Anson Mount Cried When He Took the Bridge

There’s a new Captain on the bridge in Star Trek: Discovery Season 2…but he’s also technically the oldest Captain. Christopher Pike was the very first Captain on Star Trek, popping up in the show’s now legendary pilot “The Cage.” After Star Trek was ordered to series, the show was tweaked and Pike was replaced by a slightly more machismo-dripping dude named James Tiberius Kirk. Still, fans have placed Pike in the canon as Enterprise’s Captain before Kirk came on the scene.

Now the prequel series Star Trek: Discovery introduces Captain Pike in the form of Anson Mount, who plays him as a dashing and charismatic leader who is everything the ship’s last captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), simply wasn’t.

“Pike is the leader who realizes, ‘Okay, you know what? I have fifteen brains around me? So why am I just using mine?’ So he’s willing to go, ‘I have no idea what’s happening right now. Does anybody have a better idea, because we’ll do that,'” actor Anson Mount told reporters at a press day last fall. “We’ve never really seen that before! And it makes the interplay on the bridge a lot more exciting.”

Part of that interplay? A flustered, almost swooning Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman), who doesn’t know how to behave around her new boss. As co-star Doug Jones told reporters, “you will be charmed out of your pants over this one in Episode 1.”

“Yeah, he’s so different because he’s so nice,” Wiseman said. “He’s an actual captain who represents some of the values of Star Fleet and we know that because he has to exist in another iteration. So there’s not going to be a big reveal that he’s like a spider monster in a human suit.”

Pike joins the Discovery this season as an acting captain, which embeds him within the crew’s unique and somewhat broken family. It also presents him with a need to redecorate Lorca’s sparse and Spartan ready room.

“There wasn’t a lot going on in Lorca’s ready room, probably by design. There were no chairs, and that’s pointed out. Actually, Pike notices, and he goes, ‘Where do people sit?’ and Burnham says something to the effect of ‘Lorca didn’t want to hear other people’s opinions.’ Pike goes, ‘Oh, that’s going to change,'” Mount said. “He has a luxurious ready room full of lots of chairs, lots of comfortable things, a bar.”

Mount added that the design team added touches to the room to reflect where Pike is from: Mojave, California.

But it’s not all cozy chairs and cocktails. Mount admitted that he actually cried the first time that he sat in the Captain’s Chair on set. “Yeah, I cried. I don’t think it really occurred to me until afterwards Star Trek was my make-believe game with my friends when we were eight years old. I grew up with The Original Series on syndication and I realized later, ‘Oh, this is when I became interested in entertainment.’ So to come full circle and become apart of the thing that I grew up with that first flowered my imagination…it’s just crazy,” Mount said. “It’s almost like poetry.”

Watch Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access