Vulcan axe brave frontier
The key point of difference, however, is the guy sitting in the Enterprise hotseat.
This is a retelling that reflects 2022 much more than 1966. ‘A Quality of Mercy’ manages to be simultaneously faithful and subversive, and when it does wilfully change the setting with updated uniforms, visuals and more diverse crews (on both Starfleet and Romulan vessels), the changes all feel welcome. That the episode never feels like a spoof, however – this definitely isn’t a comedy episode in the vein of Deep Space Nine’s ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ – is testament to a script that celebrates Trek history while riffing on accepted canon with the relish of JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie. Ethan Peck presumably dials down Spock’s response because Leonard Nimoy’s original eyebrow raise is so over-the-top that people might have assumed Peck was shooting for parody. It’s one of many clever allusions to the plot of the original, including recycled lines of dialogue – whether spoken by the same character or given to someone else – and an almost shot-for-shot redo of the moment the crew realize that Romulans look a lot like Vulcans. Ortegas, for example, is sitting in the navigator’s chair occupied by one-off crewman Lt Stiles in ‘Balance of Terror’ and, in her strange, new, wisecrack-free guise, has inherited her predecessor’s shoot first/ask questions later attitude to Romulans. While Spock and Uhura occupy the roles they did first time out, the bridge crew looks slightly different to Kirk’s Enterprise line-up. There’s a lone Romulan Bird-of-Prey (complete with the overly literal hawk-ish motif on its belly) using a powerful plasma weapon to blow up Federation outposts a sequence where the Enterprise mirrors the enemy weapon’s moves to avoid detection a close encounter with a nearby comet and the Federation’s first-ever sighting of an actual Romulan. And even though the timelines quickly diverge, there are plenty of signposts to remind you exactly what happened during the first run-through. As in the earlier episode, the ship’s captain finds himself officiating a wedding that’s quickly interrupted by the ship losing contact with a string of starbases.
For anyone who’s seen ‘Balance of Terror’, Pike’s flashforward plays out like a sophisticated cover version of the original material. We’re transported seven years into a future where Pike did send the letter, and he’s commanding the Enterprise on the five-year mission originally overseen by Kirk.