When did James T. Kirk become an actual starship captain? The years between Kirk’s early days in Starfleet and his road to captaincy have slowly been elucidated in the first two seasons of Strange New Worlds. But now, in Season 3, Episode 6, that journey just jumped into high warp. With the stand-out episode “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” Strange New Worlds has written a hugely important piece of Starfleet history, one which probably isn’t quite what fans would have expected.
Back in 1965, when the second pilot episode for Star Trek was filmed, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the idea that Pike was Kirk’s predecessor as the captain of the USS Enterprise was a piece of retcon that had yet to occur. Like 1964’s first Trek pilot, “The Cage,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before” scans as a kind of rough draft of Star Trek, which was only later folded into the overall continuity thanks to plenty of novels and comic books, not to mention the ever-flexible mental gymnastics performed by longtime fans. But, anyway you squint at it, most assumptions about Captain Kirk, or even non-canon stories depicted in the past, have always suggested he did captain at least one ship prior to the Enterprise. And with “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” we actually see that happen for the first time.
