Paramount+Captain Pike riding a horse. Why is he riding a horse? In the just-released Season 4 trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) is back in the saddle, quite literally. We saw Pike on horseback in the debut episode of SNW back in 2022, and the idea of a space cowboy tackling the frontier was part of the initial marketing of that show, too. But, other than the fact that Pike canonically owned horses in The Original Series (shout-out to Tango and Mary Lou!), depicting Starfleet characters on horseback is one of the oldest traditions in the Star Trek playbook; so old, in fact, it predates the debut of Trek itself. At a panel at CCXP Mexico on April 25, Strange New Worlds Season 4 confirmed its fast-approaching July release date and showed Pike and the crew riding into action with more than a little old-school flair.Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Trailer The new trailer for Strange New Worlds feels very much like previous seasons of the show. We see colorful planets, the crew full of bravery and camaraderie, and a strong sense of classic adventure. Pike makes a joke about the famous idea of boldly going where no one has gone before, and the trailer even ends with Kirk (Paul Wesley) saying outright: “Let’s boldly go.” If Discovery and Starfleet Academy were designed to push the Star Trek format into a world of experimentation, Strange New Worlds continues to be the traditionalist show, and the trailer suggests that the spirit of the series is still very much: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.But, back to the horses. Yes, we’ve had horses throughout many famous moments in Star Trek, so much so that people have even written lengthy essays about this odd connection. Picard (Patrick Stewart) had his own saddle in The Next Generation; Kirk (William Shatner) and Picard rode horses together in Star Trek Generations. And, in the lesser-known Enterprise episode “North Star,” Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) and the crew inhabited a full-on western episode, finding a lost Earth colony that operated very much like the Old West. Is the horse action in SNW Season 4 returning to that planet? Is this a holographic situation? Something else? No matter the case, the western influence on Star Trek is deeper than just Easter eggs or the idea of pitting technology against nature. Back in early 1964, when Gene Roddenberry first pitched the original Star Trek, one of his most famous comparisons was to liken the unmade sci-fi series to that of a western. In countless Trek documentaries, you’ll hear that one of Roddenberry’s more famous pitches for the series was Wagon Train to the Stars, meaning the series would evoke the style of the 1957 western series of the same name, but in a sci-fi setting. Today, this would be like saying “Yellowstone in space.” Richard Boone as Paladin in Have Gun— Will Travel, a show that Gene Roddberry wrote for before Star Trek. | CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty ImagesRoddenberry himself also honed his teleplay writing skills on the popular western Have Gun— Will Travel (1957-1963), which focused on a character named Paladin (Richard Boone) who roamed from town to town, dispensing justice, often on a horse and with a six-shooter. In many ways, the ethical dilemmas faced by Paladin predicted similar conversations between Kirk, Spock, and Bones in The Original Series. Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount is also an avowed horse-lover. So much so, he once told this reporter that “...horses are some of the best actors that you could hope to work with because everything that they think or feel is exhibited on their skin.”But, putting Pike on a horse (again) in SNW Season 4 isn’t just a treat for Mount; it's also a tribute to the DNA of Star Trek itself, and the action-adventure tradition that turned a burgeoning sci-fi show into a cultural legend.Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 will hit Paramount+ on July 23, 2026.Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the WorldAmazon -