eva_sieve

"Tacky Cardassian fascist eyesore!"

By my accounting Pike has four chances to walk away from his fate. Chronologically:

1. The very scene this quote is from in Discovery, where Tenavik gives him the option to take the time crystal or walk away from his bad future. He chooses the former, but to downplay his decision a little it was his personal future versus everyone's bad Skynet future.
2. Lift Us gives us the Majalans, whose medical tech is a "maybe" for fixing Pike while keeping the timeline intact. Pike walks away (from Omelas) because he can't abide by how their society works.
3. Quality of Mercy gives us Future Pike and subtle hints that the Romulan War has been going on about 20 years. That plus offloading his suffering to Spock makes Pike stop trying to tinker with the timeline.
4. TOS' The Menagerie of course, gives us the Talosians, who have mellowed out a bit from their original appearance and offer Pike a mental paradise with Vina, who they're also helping. Aside from a spot of insubordination on Spock's part, there's nothing wrong here so it becomes the good ending of his story.

Basically it's a story of principles. He won't let others suffer for his personal comfort, and even tells Spock (via beep chair) not to risk his career for him.

"Vulcans will choose whatever serves them best and insist it is only logical." ~N'raj, Reunification III

"It seems like a reasonable response to me. As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. "

"So, I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the Ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of Barclay on 'em. 'Give me five Barclays for a quarter,' you'd say. Now, where were we?"

One might even say... context is for kings?

...Is this a meme or a cry for help?

Don't think they're including shuttlecraft. It's a bit hard to read but I can't see the Cerritos' Death Valley scanning through that area of the alphabet. I do note that Discovery is there in both original and -A format, which might be contentious since the ship is its own refit.

For me the Prodigy and Lower Decks theme songs are among the best in the franchise because they're versatile. You can have a slow, tender violin motif from the LD theme such as when Tendi was telling Mariner that the Beta shifters were her family at the end of season 2. A slightly different part gets a brassy remix as the swelling Crisis Point theme music for the Cerritos.

Not all Trek melodies do this. Voyager's got a lovely melody that feels appropriate for a grand trip homeward, but they tried using it at some big plot moments and it just felt wrong. Disco and TNG have the opposite problem where their themes are CONSTANT INTENSITY, so you don't often see them used in softer moments. (The latter is very weird to me considering we have heard softer variations of the theme, maybe I just can't think of any such uses in the series offhand).

Look, the man also directed First Contact (the movie, not the episode) and Those Old Scientists, which are generally well received. I think we can begrudge him one ghost-fuckin' episode.

Dunno what you're on about, that's Captain Sonya Gomez.

Ensign Gomez was indeed not seen again.

(yes, I know this is still inaccurate)

You might want to see a doctor about that. But have fun!