“A Quality of Mercy” or “Tomorrow’s Enterprise”
“Stone walls do not a prison make,
nor iron bars a cage:
minds innocent and quiet take
that for a hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love
and in my soul am free,
angels alone that soar above
enjoy such liberty.” – Richard Lovelace
Influences: “Balance of Terror” (TOS), “Obsession” (TOS), “Et in Arcadia Ego” (PIC), “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (TNG), “Endgame” (VOY), “These Are The Voyages” (ENT), Star Trek: Early Voyages, “In Harm’s Way” (New Voyages), Doctor Who: “Turn Left”
“In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.” – Leonard McCoy, “Balance of Terror”
Strange New Worlds has not really established a mode of operation other than “Let’s just go fucking nuts”, and this would upset me greatly if it were the only Star Trek currently in production, but we’ve got half a season of Prodigy coming, and they’ve already finished filming season three of Picard and I think they’re already working on season five of Discovery and there’s at least two more shows in preprod right now? So okay. One last time before the break, let’s go fucking nuts.
This episode mines the continuity and the metatext hard, and it mostly works, on pretty much every level and so much about it is lovely. A few things are unlovely, but that’s okay too. Starting at the end, it’s very weird and wild that the arc-lite series made entirely of stand-alone episodes does the first proper season-end cliffhanger we’ve had in a long time. It’s more of a Season 2 teaser than a traditional cliffhanger – not unlike the last-second appearance of the Enterprise in the Discovery season 1 finale – but it differs from Discovery in that it is a continuation of an ongoing character arc, and that the events leading up to it were part of the episode beforehand. Obviously, he was busy with other things, but one wonders why Pike didn’t ask Future Pike why he never sprung Una in between rewriting the destinies of strangers. It’s also very uncomfortable that it comes off like Una is under arrest for being Ilyrian. That’s super gross. They’re going to lock her up, apparently in solitary, no visitors allowed, for a decade at least, for her very existence. I’m not saying this is inconsistent with the treatment of augments we’ve seen elsewhere, but ick. I mean, also, if she’s Ilyrian, and Ilyria isn’t part of the Federation, wouldn’t repatriation be a more normal thing to do? Now, if she’s being arrested for falsifying records to get into Starfleet – and potentially on suspicion of espionage – that’s different, but it comes off much more like, yeah, she is an Inherently Illegal Person, which is super super gross. (Now, aside here; the Ilyrians in Enterprise are not named on-screen, and everything else about them comes from novels and comics. So I’m wondering now if the SNW Ilyrians aren’t actually meant to be an alien species, but rather an offshoot of humans?)
Before that… They explained the thing. I didn’t actually think they would, and they were nicely subtle about it. I think I mentioned a long time ago that there’s this one gap in the continuity from the original pilot to the rest of TOS that is sort of curious. In “The Cage”, Spock is a very junior officer who has a pretty limited role in the story and barely interacts with Pike directly. Many years later, he risks his own career, possibly the careers of his colleagues as well, and maybe even his own life, to take Pike to the Talosians. This is a big deal, and to be entirely honest, there is nothing else in Spock’s history that explains why he would do this. “He’s fiercely loyal to his old captain,” is convincing as a surface-level cliche, but Pike and Spock don’t seem nearly as close as Kirk and Spock. Yet I don’t think we can comfortably imagine Spock would go to the same extremes for Kirk. Heck, there’s a whole big point in Star Trek IV that “Break a bunch of laws, almost start a war, and get yourself branded an outlaw to save a friend” is a very Kirk thing to do but not at all a Spock thing to do. So why did he do it? Finally we have an answer. Spock sort of has the gist of it now, and perhaps will learn the full details in time, but it appears, through the contrivances of the angry and vengeful gods of continuity, that Pike traded his life for Spock’s.
Pike started the season haunted by the idea that he couldn’t avoid his destiny without dooming the cadets he was fated to save. What this episode has done – and this feels maybe a little contrived, since there’s no real logical connection, just mysterious larger forces – is to revise that and reveal that Pike can avoid his destiny, but the cost will be Spock. We see one way, and Future-Pike implies that the Timekeepers have revealed that this always happens. In every universe where Pike avoids his accident, Spock is sacrificed instead. This is a big heavy thing that probably needed a little more scaffolding than it got, but I can in this case accept it. Actually got a little teary-eyed for that last scene of Spock and Pike in Pike’s office when I realized the full meaning of it. Oh. Oh. That’s why. That’s why Spock would put himself out like that. Because Spock knows that Pike marched willingly into that fate for him.
It is so interesting that what sets Pike down this path is meeting Maat – one of the future cadets he isn’t going to save. The step he’s about to take was simple enough that he could’ve done this at any time. He has held back from trying to alter the future because he doesn’t want to endanger the people he’s going to save. It’s only when he meets, as a child, one of the ones he doesn’t that it’s time to say “Fuck it” to the inexorable plans of fate. I mentioned back when Pike originally had his vision that part of Pike’s tragedy is that he sacrifices himself to save a room full of cadets and he doesn’t even save them all. He is, in the end, fated to be The One Who Almost But Not Quite Pulled it Off.
Which is, as it turns out, also what this episode is about. As Pike starts writing a letter to the young Maat, warning him to avoid the engine explosion, a movie-era version of himself manifests to tell him of the terrible peril should the sacred timeline be disturbed. (Like the NuTrek implementation of the movie-era uniform, btw, though they don’t go as far with it in the direction of making it look like something a person could actually wear to work every day as they did with other uniforms). Another point that needed more scaffolding, but things are bad enough in Future-Pike’s timeline that the Timekeepers have gotten involved. I wonder if this will be expanded upon in the future, because, yeah, there’s an ongoing war with the Romulans, but it’s hard to see that alone as justifying this level of “Yeah the whole timeline is in danger.” I don’t really get the impression that Future-Pike comes from a place that is bad enough to merit pulling a Sam Beckett and Setting Right What Once Went Wrong. I do believe that things could proceed from there to this hypothetical “end of everything” sort of bad future, and that the Timekeepers foresaw this and convinced Future-Pike of it. Future-Pike very clearly knows more about the fate of the universe than his own perspective should allow. He’s been shown that things Spock won’t do for another century yet are the only path to lasting peace with the Romulans. If they (or, indeed, some other NuTrek) revisits this in time, I look forward to them tying the pieces all together.
You know, just writing it down makes it sound a little overwrought, doesn’t it? Pike from the 2270s travels back to the 2250s to send that Pike forward to the 2260s because Spock needs to make it to the 2380s to protect the timeline so that Vulcans and Romulans can reuinify in the 2600s or thereabout.
But anyway, The Future! Past! Present! Whatever! Future-Pike zaps Present-Pike into the body of Slightly-Less-Future-Pike, right smack into the TOS episode “Balance of Terror”. Like, right into it. “Balance of Terror” opens with Kirk officiating at a wedding, and Pike has to quickly recover and cover when he comes to himself halfway through the benediction.
What follows is in many places a close retelling of the TOS episode. I wish they’d done a bit of redecoration of the Enterprise sets to help convey this being a different time, though. We’re almost a decade in the future but the changes on the Enterprise are subtle. Possibly this is meant to be unnerving, because it’s just a bit askew from both SNW and TOS. Uhura is still there, now a Lieutenant. Spock is Pike’s first officer, and he refers to himself as “Number One”. Ortegas and Mitchell are still flying the ship, but they’ve swapped seats. M’Benga seems to still be CMO, and Chapel is there, but wearing a uniform now. We neither see nor hear the name of the Enterprise’s engineer, but we do hear a somewhat overblown Scottish accent from off-screen. Even Sam is still on the Enterprise.
But there are changes. Everyone seems a lot stiffer, Spock especially. The arc of Spock’s personality is something I’ve been troubled over before. The Spock of Strange New Worlds seems more in touch with his human side than the Spock of TOS, which is fine, but the catalysts for his evolution as a character haven’t fallen in the right order so far, with the implication that Spock rejected his humanity multiple times in his life, but all of them prior to the time period of this series. Possibly this is where the arc with T’Pring is going, since we know that he’s deeply insecure in his relationship with her specifically over his humanity. Will he reject his humanity in a doomed attempt to protect the relationship? Or will he accept the failure of the relationship, remaining in the engagement only out of duty, and reject his humanity as a coping mechanism? But that’s a discussion for another season. Like I said, everyone seems stiffer on Enterprise now, and while Spock carries the heaviest part of it, Ortegas is upsettingly hostile here. Like, downright unlikeable. She even gets her racism on against Spock, who she has worked with for a decade now, because she is being slotted into the role Lieutenant Styles played in “Balance”. I just, ugh. Not Ortegas. Why Ortegas? You had a perfectly good one-off TOS character you could use here. Put him in Mitchell’s seat.
We finally get an overt, confirmed-in-dialogue statement that no human has ever seen a Romulan before, which is very mildly annoying but okay (I’ve always preferred the idea that it was, in fact, known by the higher-ups, but the fact that Romulans look like Vulcans just wasn’t widely publicized specifically out of fears of racism tearing the nacient Federation apart). What’s more interesting is the speculation that the Romulans leaked this deliberately at this particular moment in history, in the hopes of sowing bigotry. A bit weird that the Romulans in this episode are Northerners, in light of this, since when you add the brow ridge, it’s no longer nearly so clear to say that Romulans and Vulcans look alike – they look about as alike as half a dozen other species look to humans. Also, how the fuck do you remake Balance of Terror for NuTrek and not get James Frain to play the Romulan commander? Heck, you do that, and you can slap a brow ridge on him and it still totally works. Probably works better. “Hey Spock, is it just me or does that Romulan commander look like your dad? I mean, other than the brow ridge.”
Significant parts of the episode play out as before. Hansen Al-Sallah dies in the attack on the outpost (He’s wearing a different badge than the Enterprise crew, though the Farragut crew wears the usual arrowhead. Looks like they are going with what I believe is the original intent here, that the insignias are not ship-specific, but specify something else, with most starship crews wearing arrowheads, and certain other duties wearing something different. I think Al-Sallah’s badge is slightly different from the one “Commander Hansen” had in TOS. Similar, but more obviously a variation of the arrowhead), the Enterprise is damaged, they shadow the Romulans, Spock suggests attack rather than restraint based on his knowledge of Vulcan’s history, the Romulan commander is open to negotiation but his second sends a transmission against orders because he wants to get his war on. They try the same failed gambit with the comet’s tail, Enterprise loses phasers to the plasma weapon. Also, there’s a lot of shots which do that “Face in shadows except for the eyes” thing on Pike and Spock that TOS did a lot for effect but which is not really part of modern cinematic language.
Given that they made a bunch of new Romulan models and the new model for the Farragut, I’m sad that the Enterprise also isn’t outwardly different. From the magazine that came with the Eaglemoss model of the Discovery Enterprise, I learned that one of the ideas that went into its Discovery redesign was the possibility that later refits might bring the Enterprise closer to its TOS look – the runway behind the shuttle bay and the extra bits on the nacelle pylons are things that could be removed later. Also, a shame we don’t get a furtive glimpse of Admiral Pike’s Enterprise-A. (I’m actually imagining a whole alternate version of TWOK now with Pike, which perhaps I will write out at length later).
One of the large metatextual elements here is that it’s the same Pike we’ve been watching all season going through these events. It’s not the Pike of an alternate-2260s, who has ten more years of experience. And yet, he’s expected to do what the Pike of this timeline would have done: he is not here to fix things, but to witness why he shouldn’t be here. Pike seems to forget this at times. You’d expect this to be a major part of the episode, Pike struggling with self-doubt, whether each decision he makes is the one that leads to the bad timeline his future-self wants to prevent. Or struggling with his desire to fix things by avoiding that mistake. Instead, Pike just plays it straight, approaching the situation as himself. This is very odd, and I find myself wondering why they played it this way instead of having 2250s Pike here purely as an observer, watching 2260s Pike but unable to interfere.
The climax of the battle changes things up because the Romulan warbird isn’t alone, though. A Romulan armada appears. And… This part I’m not crazy about. The original “Balance of Terror” is pretty amazing for the care with which it establishes the Romulans as not simply Scary Aliens That Are Kinda Supposed To Make You Think of Cold War Enemies in a Vaguely Racist Way. There’s a real sense that the Romulans are a different culture with a different but still valid system of values. The way that they value strength and duty is a big part of it. But… I dunno, especially after playing this multiple times with the Gorn, doing the whole thing where they very publicly blow up the warbird to “cull the weak” and make themselves stronger comes off as just “They’re gratuitously nasty space-thugs”. It somehow feels more racist and less nuanced than the forty years or so from “The Enterprise Incident” up through Enterprise where the whole of the characterization of Romulan culture was pretty much just “shifty”. Where I thought they were going was that the Romulan Praetor would blow up the warbird and offer a very over-the-top faux-pology for the actions of its “rogue” commander who they had just executed for his unauthorized attack, and both sides would stand down and save face, but it would mark the beginning of a period of escalation that put them on the inescapable path to war. Instead, the Romulans are just like “We strong; you week. War now.” Meh.
The biggest divergence from “Balance” is that Enterprise isn’t alone either, though. In this timeline, Pike presumably turned down promotion and remained on the Enterprise, and kept the old gang together. But meanwhile, the USS Farragut is still out there, captained by Jim Kirk, and it shows up to help. And here is where I largely forgive this episode its other shortcomings.
First things first: I do not like Paul Wesley’s portrayal of Kirk at all. Even a little bit. Just doesn’t work. However, the writing of Jim Kirk in this episode is perfect. It is so easy to fall into parody with Kirk. Pike even fears that Kirk is a brash, impulsive, rule-breaking firebrand who is going to start a war…. And he isn’t. Kirk and Pike disagree, but Kirk respects the difference of opinion, respects what Pike is trying to do, and defers to him. He doesn’t go behind Pike’s back or disobey his orders in an act of heroism or glory-seeking. This is a Kirk written by someone who gets the actual, canonical Kirk, rather than the pop-culture Kirk. My favorite detail here is the one time Kirk gets angry with Pike. Because he hesitated. A slight delay in firing on the Romulans because he didn’t want to hit the Farragut. They remembered. They remembered that this is the thing James T. Kirk is hypersenitive to. That this is the thing that makes him Kirk. That he’s haunted by the time he hesitated and people he cared about died.
Also, La’an is Kirk’s first officer, looks like. That’s a nice and understated “Time has gone wrong” irony – that destiny would team him up with the niece of the man who, in the proper timeline, should be his greatest enemy. We know in the Kelvin timeline, the recovery of the Botany Bay went very differently. In this timeline, if those events happen at all, we can imagine that regardless of whether it is still Kirk who does it, or if it’s still the Enterprise, either way things would unfold very differently, as we’d have to imagine the conflict would evolve differently with Khan’s kin on-board, or those who’d worked closely with her. And one wonders whether Khan would’ve been able to conceal his identity at all if anyone one board had researched Khan in depth. That is all well beyond the scope of this story, but hey, maybe we’ll see this timeline again someday. Also, again, how did they miss the obvious opportunity to kill her off so Kirk and/or Pike could scream “Laaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!!” in their pain?
One of the really good misdirects that “A Quality of Mercy” does here is that once it introduces Kirk, it immediately starts trying to kill him. Or more specifically, it immediately starts making us worry about him. This must be it, we think. This is where time breaks. Pike lives, Kirk dies, the universe goes to hell.
This episode is very similar to the plot arc in the comic series Early Voyages. In that version of events, Pike, just as in canon, receives a vision of his future. To mess things up a bit more, Colt – a character from the pilot that NuTrek hasn’t revisited – is zapped into the future herself. In the alternate future, like here, Pike remained on the Enterprise and avoided his accident. But because of Colt’s absence, a young Jim Kirk was assigned to the Enterprise as a junior officer, where his personality clash with Pike ultimately saw him out of Starfleet.
But Kirk makes it. The Farragut is destroyed, and there’s one last group left to beam over… And they make it. He departs in a shuttle for an unspoken backup plan. It turns out to be a very classic-feeling Kirk-Bluff: he brings a fleet of automated mining drones which Pike tells the Romulan armada is a fleet of attack ships – the Romulans have no idea what modern Starfleet warships looks like. But he has to cover the Enterprise’s escape, nobly sacrificing himself to – nope, wait, they beam him out right as they skeedaddle. James T. Kirk will live.
Because – and this is the point where the show pushes it right up to the edge, but ultimately wins me – Pike, as we know, is not the hero of destiny. And neither is Kirk. We spend a big chunk of this episode expecting the message that Pike is the tragic, doomed mentor who must ultimately accept the necessity of sacrifice to save The Chosen One, the Child of Destiny, the man whose narrative gravity must shape the universe. The One True Hero of Star Trek, James Tiberius–
record needle scratch.
It’s not him. James T. Kirk is not the chosen one, who must be protected. James T. Kirk is gonna be fine either way.
It’s Spock. In every timeline that Pike avoids his fate, Spock eats it. Horribly. Missing leg, face-melting radiation burns, brain damage. Beep Beep.
Oh, um, a bunch of other people die too, including Lieutenant Martine, who was the bride earlier. In the prime timeline, it was the groom who died, and he was the only casualty of the battle on their side.
Now, this is…. It’s not perfect. There’s a strong sense of “Mystical forces of time are punishing Spock for Pike’s defiance,” and “Really the Chosen One is neither Pike nor Kirk,” is stronger if the next part is, “Actually it’s some third person you never heard of,” than if it’s the guy whose name comes second in the credits.
It couldn’t actually be a nobody, I guess, in order to give it the proper weight. It has to be someone we know does something important in the future. It could perhaps have been Uhura, that would be cool. But ideally, it would be something very left-field. The problem is that we don’t have a whole lot of —
Oh, shit, duh. I know who it should’ve been. Will Decker. There are some extraordinary reasons they certainly don’t want to revisit one of the two major guest characters from a TOS movie who ends the film being permanently removed from their home and taken to another and very different world after saving the Earth from an impossibly powerful machine creature linked to stuff that happened in the audience’s native time, played by one of the parents from Seventh Heaven. But still, the ideal thing here would be that we have a very minor character in SNW – a junior officer whose identity hasn’t had attention called to it. Someone along the lines of Mitchell or Chief Kyle. Then, ten years in the future, they die horribly in these events, and this is meaningful and moving for Pike because he cares about his people, and cares about the ones who’ve gotten character focus as much as the ones who haven’t. And then the audience puts it together that, hey, this was that one-off character in TOS or the movie era who saved the day at one point. I picked Decker just now because TOS doesn’t really have a lot of examples of one-off characters saving the day in a critical moment. Later Trek is good for that; episodes where a one-off character death isn’t just canon fodder but a noble sacrifice.
Anyway, Spock is a good choice too, and has all this bang-on stuff where it justifies “The Menagerie”. Just a little less powerful than you’d hope.
The other thing which I feel needed more scaffolding, though, is that Pike isn’t just sacrificing himself. The episode calls this out at the beginning, makes it a trigger. But it sort of forgets it at the end, reducing it to just a plot device. Maat Al-Sallah is going to die. Pike chooses the universe where Maat Al-Sallah dies, in order to save the millions who will die in the second Romulan War, but really to save Spock.
That’s a little yikes.
Maat’s dad dies either way. Dude is fucked. Pike does not know this, of course; he knows Hansen dies in the bad timeline, but his fate in the prime one might be different. However, Pike knows that in the prime timeline he will fail to save Maat Al-Sallah. We know that six months after burying his son, Commander Al-Sallah is going to die as well. We can speculate, of course. Did he spend his last few months comforted that his son died alongside his childhood hero? Did he resent the cadets Pike did save? Did he feel guilty over the injuries Pike received in the failed attempt to save his son? These are not questions the episode is interested in. The fact that Pike is not just sacrificing himself to prevent the Romulan War timeline is not something the episode is interested in. Maat? The adorable child who’s a Pike fanboy who Pike wants to save but if he does he’s dooming-
Oh.
Oh shit.
I get it now.
I… I feel… Respected?
I did not know successful television could have subtlety like that.
This isn’t Pike’s Kobyashi Maru, and it’s not his Yesterday’s Enterprise, and it’s not just a reenactment of the decision he already made back on Discovery.
This is Pike’s Omelas. They never actually say it. They never call attention to it at all. In fact, they call attention away from it. But that’s what this is. Pike has the chance to save the kid. He made his peace with his own death, but then WHAM, there’s this kid. He can save the kid. He wants to save the kid. But the cost is war with the Romulans. And Spock.
Holy shit. That’s the through-line for the season, isn’t it? We deal with child-death or endangerment in what? “Memento Mori”, “Lift Us Where Suffering Can Not Reach”, “The Elysian Kingdom” and “All Those Who Wander” all revolve around child-murder, and the good guys have complicity in three of those. Plus “Children of the Comet” is literally called “Children of the Comet”. That’s at least as many episodes aimed at child-murder as there are dealing with the more straightforward motif of whether one can – or should – change what one is fated to become. How did we find ourself in a Star Trek whose dominant themes includes, “Sometimes you just have to kill children”?
What are y’all doing?
