By my accounting Pike has four chances to walk away from his fate. Chronologically:
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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?”
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 https://youtu.be/wykudfjTw1Q.
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).
In fairness, Adira does have a weird moment where they seem reticent about switching pronouns. But I’ll defend Disco’s representation because I think it’s just written with a different lens of how to treat queerness. The themes feel more modern, and more willing to explore what queerness is rather than treating it as something to be tolerated.
I’ll never forget my first watchthrough of Season 3 where Stamets refers to Adira as his child. I was floored because I’d mentally joked that Staments shoulda adopted them by now, but here the narrative was coming out and saying it. The writers dove deeper into themes like found family rather than retreading old ground. It’s heavy-handed at times, but it feels like queerness written for queer people.
If it makes you feel better, Captain Chakotay had normal pips by the time the Protostar was commissioned. Guess Janeway just didn’t want to grant ranks away from Starfleet proper.
It’s pretty impressive since pure capsaicin tops out at 16 million, guess they started putting crazier spice moulecules in. Also makes Boimler’s pain in that episode less of a gag and more of a “how are you legally allowed to have this on your table?”