I'm impressed, not gonna lie, you've crossed the line into stuff that even non-Trek-fans know about.
But the Romulan episode is just totally wrong. Totally. I've been tacitly willing to overlook a lot of changed premises to do this show and make it work as a modern show and they've had a lot of successes. Captain Pike is just a totally different person with the same name. M'Benga, Chapel, and Uhura we honestly didn't know enough about to be sure. They redressed the ship and costumes and props to look better on a modern TV show and I was okay with all of that. The point, I think, was to flesh out all of these characters and show that in their own time they all did great.
The point of this episode is that Pike is not the man we need in a pinch and that luckily for the universe he got sidelined before he really screwed everything up. Almost like a time traveller went back and caused his accident to prevent everything from going wrong. Is the point of this show to glorify James Kirk? That's what I'm getting today. I loved seeing the maroon uniform! But it is confusing to my brain (admittedly autistic) to jump forward. I precariously placed this cast as what Uhura, Chapel, and Spock looked like when they were younger, but then you jump to when I knew them and they STILL look like this? And the hopeful, diplomatic style that they've been building on Pike for a season turns out to be a super dangerous thing outside its natural bounds. All through the episode I feel like the solution to this problem is not to blow Pike and a couple cadets up to save the future, but learn how to properly handle this incident, but since they also noticed that they peg on at the end that they looked at every scenario and even having Pike retire won't help, apparently, or calling in sick that week and letting the Farragut handle it. EVERYTHING other than totally sidelining Pike for good leads to Spock getting killed? Even making a change after he has left Enterprise and Spock is Kirk's first officer? I don't buy it and I don't appreciate it. Pike's accident is supposed to be a tragic accident and a heroic sacrifice to save cadets. It isn't supposed to be a power move to save the Galaxy. I don't buy it. And I don't appreciate it.
I have only the mealy-mouthedest of takes.
I haven't seen The Flash, but I have seen the Bob Chipman YouTube video where he talks about how out of touch it is to be making time travel stories in 2023 where the moral is that you can't make the world a better place or improve your lot in life. That seems really obvious to me now, but a year ago, when I saw "Quality of Mercy", I wouldn't have responded to it with any kind of clarity of conviction. I think even now a part of me thinks of it more in terms of, well, I guess they felt some kind of responsibility to this detached living human pancreas they inherited from Discovery that they just have to wheel into the scene on its bloodbag stand every once in a while to remind us it's in the room while they keep it alive with its little fish pump or whatever.
Like, SNW has leaned
hard into the choice to have Pike know in advance, something that doesn't make his future decision to risk himself to save others more heroic, but is the only he can have already made it in a prequel, so it's the only way to get any thematic mileage or plot material about something that hasn't yet happened to him. (Other than like, long, lingering foreshadowing shots of someone else's beep chair, but that's biopic shit, fictional stories have to be a little more subtle about their teleology.)
As much as I like a good "punch destiny in the face with the fist of your heart" kinda story, I was okay bracketing another "you literally can't change the future no matter what you do" story in Trek as just following form, just sigh and move on. Plus, like there are fans out there who have deeply internalized this whole temporal Prime Directive thing, and believe that if time travel was possible in real life and someone sent them back to 1889 Germany, they would be morally correct not to kill Hitler. (Those sorts of folks don't like Janeway very much.) And time travel
is impossible, and accepting our own life history is probably more important to the human condition than fantasizing about being able to change it. So like,
every time travel story is going to become "It's a Wonderful Life" on some level, and it's a slog but I kinda get it.
It was only when S2 like Fero's talking about, and like, as near to literally asking a character to kill Hitler, that it just becomes an actual joke for me.
The point of the episode was to show how dangerous it was to mess with the timeline.
Okay, so if you're not aware, the first thing you need to know is that science fiction math has lied to you about this since childhood. There are time travel stories where avoiding disrupting the timeline is the stakes in an internally coherent way, usually involving the grandfather paradox, Back to the Future 1 is the preeminent example. Disrupting the past will cause our hero or heroes to cease to exist or become the Terran Alliance of space fascists or something. And this makes sense, you really would create a paradox in that situation and that sounds bad. (This is partly ignored in Star Trek, of course - whoever's doing the time travel shenanigans is protected from it effects as a matter of course - but the need to change history back so that Starfleet exists is usually enough conflict for a plot.)
There are also stories where we get to see that thing future Pike alludes to, where the universe is stuck on a particular outcome and nothing you can do will change its mind. I think you get to see that play out in Doctor Who sometimes. This also means we have even less free will than we think we do, because we somehow live in a deterministic universe,
and also there's destiny, a way that things are
supposed to turn out if the normal course of causality in the universe (which includes time travel!) doesn't play out as destiny wants it to. Unlike the paradox thing, this isn't really based on any science speculation or anything, it's just sort of narratively compelling.
Except in some cases, like this one, it's destiny but with spite, and it gives you
two options, and you can save yourself or your friend but not both. That is the wholly unmasked forced situation created in "Quality of Mercy". There's still no "danger" to "messing with" the timeline, Future Pike has messed with it long enough that he could write papers on it, it's just that the timeline is anthropocentric and always extracts a proportionate narrative cost. And he's messing with his own timeline to boot! All his own experimentation at changing his future never worked, so now he can tell his past self not to bother because he can just tell him what he found out. So the timeline is
completely okay with him changing his intermediate present, just not anything canonically
important.
And keep in mind, Pike isn't trying to change his past, it's his future. Literally every decision he makes also equally changes the course of his future. The sequence of events that happened are just one of an unlimited number of possibilities, because that's what life is, even if the outcomes are technically each inevitable and predictable with complete information and could be simulated with the same amount of information as seems to be present in reality itself. The idea that this kind of changing his future is more likely to lead to horrible disfigurements and tragedy than this other kind of changing his future is, is actually completely made up. Insisting that you can't predict the future and than whatever you do could turn out to be the worst possible thing is something you confess to your therapist, not your sci-fi script. Like the future we've seen throughout the rest of Trek isn't the one special only possible way that things in the universe can be right on the basis that it's had a bunch of TV shows about it, except that it absolutely just is.
(If you are magically transported to Germany, 1889, you should also consider your future (I.e. the future of the world from your vantage point) open to whatever change is most appropriate, and kill Hitler, which
will also lead to a somewhat better future for at least some significant period of time. But time travel doesn't exist so this is less important you understand.)
And "except that it is" is the ultimate thematic lynchpin here. Because restoring the canonical timeline that's on the Memory Alpha wiki so all the fans can breathe a sigh of relief, and so that William Shatner's Kirk has will been looked good, is, ultimately, at long last, the true thematic purpose of this episode.
