S01.E01: Strange New Worlds

[John Potts]

I'm assuming those roaring fires in Pike's (giant) quarters are holograms?

On 5/7/2022 at 6:41 PM, benteen said:

Marching into a very preventable life-altering accident is not heroic. If you know the details it can be avoided with ease. This isn't altering the past. The future isn't even set yet.

How does Pike know it's "easily preventable"? He doesn't know the circumstances of how the accident occurred - presumably the Enterprise was doing something that had the engines going critical (how many other lives did that save?). As Picard put it in Cause and Effect, maybe attempting to avoid the accident is exactly what causes it (which, to quote another Trek example, is exactly what happens in Voyager's Now and Again!). All he knows for sure is that in that situation, he sacrifices his own wellbeing to save five people. Sure, he can keep stay in Montana and ride horses - in which case others will probably die. It's similar to the choice Achilles made - he can have a short but heroic life or an uneventful long one. Presumably Pike is an example of the Starfleet officer who wants to make the Galaxy a better place, so he wouldn't chose to hide under a rock (or in a snowdrift!), but I do like the fact that it is a choice he has to wrestle with.