Born On This Day, 2 Star Trek Legends Who Are Arguably Even More Important A Century On

No matter how far Star Trek boldly goes into the future, it will always be beholden to its past. Both the Kelvin movie timeline and the wonderful Strange New Worlds looked backwards for new stories, and Picard scored its highest wins by fully embracing its role as a Next Generation legacy project. Quite where the future takes Trek fans with Paramount’s renewed focus on the IP is anyone’s guess, but the oldest of old school fans will always be drawn to the past. And it’s that feeling that has made two of Star Trek’s oldest characters so iconic even in 2025.

Both Khan Noonien Singh and Captain Christopher Pike have had big years: the former’s legacy has been expanded both by the Khan audio podcast series and by Strange New Worlds, and Pike’s place at the heart of that show is a huge part of its success. And in a delightful case of coincidence, today marks the anniversary that the actors who first brought the iconic characters to screen were born. More than 100 years ago, Ricardo Montalban was born on November 25, 1920, while Jeffrey Hunter was born on the same day in 1926.

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Khan and Pike Both Made Impressive Returns

Star Trek has always struggled to meet the villainous high-point of Montalban’s Khan even with decades to try. The Borg Queen and Q are probably the other two members of the top table, but there’s still something deeply compelling about Khan. He was always a dark inversion of Trek’s intrepid spirit: a man defined by conquest rather than exploration, who used science almost as a perversion of nature. Montalban’s performances as Khan, first in The Original Series and then in The Wrath of Khan, were a high point for the genre, let alone just the franchise.

Montalban, of course, returned after Khan’s first appearance in the second Star Trek movie as a direct response to the first movie’s disappointment. Producer Harve Bennett believed the key to surpassing that movie was bringing in a strong villain, and the idea to bring back Khan was born. So keen was Montalban to play the part again that he took a lower fee than he was initially offered. More shocking was his return in Star Trek Into Darkness, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the rebooted timeline, but it was somewhat inevitable given his importance to the Kirk era.

Captain Christopher Pike’s return was far more tragic than Khan’s. Played by Jeffrey Hunter in TOS‘ first pilot “The Cage,” Pike didn’t continue when Hunter turned down the opportunity to shoot a second pilot, making way for William Shatner’s Kirk. In canon, Pike was promoted away from the Enterprise, and only returned for “The Menagerie,” which revealed the tragic accident that confined a disfigured Pike (now partly played by Sean Kenney) to a wheelchair, without the ability to speak.

Given that fate, his reappearance in Discovery, played by Anson Mount, and the subsequent spinoff of Strange New Worlds in 2022 felt particularly surprising. But then, Pike always deserved more of a story, and Mount’s succession to the level of Trek main character delivered on Roddenberry’s dream (even if Mount’s performance is very different to Hunter’s).

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