Written by Kirsten Beyer & Davy Perez
Directed by Eduardo Sanchez
Logline
Returning to a planet that dredges up tragic memories, Captain Pike and his landing party find themselves forgetting everything, including their own identities as he confronts a ghost from his past.
My headcanon is that the radiation had already begun affecting his decision-making.
It’s a stretch, I know.
I don’t think it’s a bad headcanon.
We do know that the first landing went wildly wrong quickly. It’s possible that the judgement and short term memories of Pike and Spock of that landing were affected by more than trauma and shock.
There was individual variation in how rapidly the effects presented. We saw that La’an experienced some early tinnitus shortly after the shuttle landed.
On the ship, Spock wasn’t necessarily correct in his inference given he was already experiencing some cognitive impairment by that point.