By James White | Posted 9 Apr 2018

If you watched all of Star Trek: Discovery's first season, you'll know that a certain, slightly iconic vessel shows up at the end of that first run of episodes. Now we know who will be playing the captain on the (spoiler alert if you've yet to catch up!) Enterprise, as Anson Mount has been cast as Christopher Pike.

Mentioned by name in the Discovery episode Will You Take My Hand?, Pike was the captain of the ship before one James Tiberius Kirk took over. He appeared in the original pilot for Star Trek, called The Cage, played by Jeffrey Hunter and the footage was used in the actual series for an episode titled The Menagerie, where a badly scarred Pike (with Sean Kennedy appearing in the bookend scenes) revisits the earlier mission.

Pike also appeared in the first two of JJ Abrams' Trek movies, with Bruce Greenwood in the role.

There is no information as to how Pike and his crew will interact with the Discovery, but there's a tricky line to walk given main Discovery character Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green)'s connection to Spock, a fact not mentioned anywhere in the original series or films.

Mount most recently pulled sci-fi duty as the lead on Marvel's Inhumans, but given the reaction to that series, the lack of any announcement about a second season and now this casting news, we'd have to speculate that the show is probably not coming back.

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