Star Trek: 10 MORE Greatest Time Travel Episodes
1. A Quality Of Mercy
The nature of the prequel is its own form of time travel, and there are those for whom the future is already written. Star Trek: Discovery's second season made the wise choice to let Captain Pike in on the secret of his grim destiny. As its first season reached a close, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds told him the fate of the galaxy hung on his every, often hesitant, word.
Trek far enough, you meet yourself… from the future in glorious monster maroon, and then the Romulans from Balance of Terror. A Quality of Mercy could have been a pale copy of the original. Instead, it was the ultimate revisit of a classic, and that down to the music and the lighting of the face. Leave any bigotry in your quarters, Lieutenant Ortegas.
As A Quality of Mercy unfolds, Pike's time travel version of the trolley problem becomes a Kobayashi Maru of one, as his relative indecisiveness has graphic consequences. The new James T., on the contrary, does things the same, differently. By the episode's end, like for temporal paradoxes, like for life, the conclusion is that non-action is often the best that the rest of us can do.