#me just like 'this wouldnt have happened on pike's bridge'

[squireofgeekdom]

im watching more tos because it is my right to be weird and feral about star trek and occasionally i run across things that’s like ‘gosh, was this just nice serendipity or were the folks writing on discovery and snw looking back at spock in these episodes and thinking about the fact that he’d served with pike for eleven years four months and five days and pike earned spock’s noted intense loyalty to him and how therefore who he is as an officer is shaped by that service’ 

like, obviously, the menagerie is an intentional call forward, but there are things that could just be serendipity that i really appreciate

i just watched the Galileo Seven and a) im gonna fight everyone who is mean to Spock and b) there are two things that Spock does that either he says are illogical or others frame as something illogical / emotional / human. (both of them make perfect sense but) 

He and the six officers he’s in command of are crash landed and stranded on a planet with large men in hairy sasquatch outfits who are of course meant to be aliens. One of the aliens has killed one of the officers, and the rest of the shuttle crew are insisting that they should go and kill the alien to get the aliens to leave them alone. Spock says this is logical, but he cannot move forward with such disregard for life, and oh man. It’s certainly a Vulcan value but contextually that is also so so very Pike, to have this unknown quantity that’s attacked you and to still say, no, we give them a chance, we don’t just go an eye for an eye and kill in return even if that might be strategic. So he gives orders to only use warning shots to scare them off, ‘fear will be sufficient for our purposes’.

(Then of course when the aliens do come back and attack again spock is like ‘that’s illogical, they should have recognized our superior weaponry and stayed away’ and everyone else is like ‘well this could have been prEdiCteD by anyone with fEeEEeeLIngs they got Angry and came back to attack us’ and like im sorry would they not have gotten ANGRIER if you had killed one of them. were you emotional lot not the ones arguing for the killing. hmm. you’re just going to get mad at spock for not being your narrow definition of sufficiently human no matter what he does aren’t you. fuckers.)

The second thing is when they finally manage to get the shuttle back up in orbit, but they don’t have enough power to stay in orbit long. Their comms are still not working, and after they’re in orbit there’s no indication that the Enterprise has seen them, so spock ejects a portion of their fuel and ignites it as a signal flare, to the anger of everyone else in the shuttle. which. which. guys.

ejecting bits of much needed fuel when a shuttle is in an emergency situation is what pike does in the time rift (to the anger of the other person in the shuttle) - an old test pilot trick, the kind of trick pike would feasibly have talked about. 

guys. he got it from pike. guys.

(and it makes perfect sense as a move when you’re out of options! everyone is like ‘that’s a human emotional move and you won’t admit it and we’re all going to laugh at you’ and i’d fight them just for laughing at him but also They’re Wrong.) 

Just. it just. they’ve done what seems to me to be so far a really good job, down to little maybe-just-serendipitous details, of building out pike as a character in discovery and snw where it makes sense that he was the officer spock served with for eleven years four months and five days. and im emotional about it.