A Quality of Mercy

Paramount+ | Air Date: July 7, 2022

8.0	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 4 Ratings

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utkarshbansalAug 8, 2022

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Balance of Terror is one of my top 3 original series episodes, so the retread was entertaining, with the highlight being the Pike-Kirk dynamic. But this one sci-fi trope really doesn't work for me, where a character has to learn that even though someone is facing death (or a terrible fate) and this character can save them, they must not, because literally every one of the infinitely many ways this could be done would lead to a timeline where much worse things would happen. I didn't like it in "The City on the Edge of Forever" either, but at least there, there was a connection between saving that life and dooming the world. On the other hand, in A Quality of Mercy, the already flimsy connection between lifesaving and war only drew the link to Pike's own survival, not to the kids he's now choosing not to save. The latter we just have to believe, even though the plot does nothing to make us believe. The implied fatalism, the easy acceptance of the inevitable, fundamentally clash with how I see the world. I'm more into the Infinity War/Endgame approach, where heroism is trying out 14 million possibilities so you can find one that rejects the supposed inevitable. The analogy isn't perfect; after all, the problem there was finding an alternative at all, as opposed to finding one that isn't worse than the one given, but I hope it conveys my point, which is my appreciation for stubbornness in the face of determinism. I'm okay with Pike failing to find a better alternative, what rubs me the wrong way is him so easily accepting that any alternative will be worse. I guess the show found it easy because they framed it as Pike sacrificing himself for Spock, but it becomes a tougher pill to swallow when he's sacrificing himself and two kids for Spock and world peace. Like the other two Pike centric episodes, this could perhaps have worked if it was a season long arc instead of a single episode. But those, as Trekkies know better than anyone, come with their own pitfalls.

EDIT: The one lens through which Pike's arc here does work is "old man needs to learn to make way for the next generation." Pike is stuck in his ways, and if he holds on to life too tight, that can doom a future that needs Kirk's fresh ways of approaching problems. That said, this doesn't save the episode in my mind, because the choice Pike has to make is less about whether to save himself than it is about whether to save two kids.… Expand

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