I suspect Batel’s fate is foreshadowed in her mindmeld with Spock. The hybridization will give her a Gorn aspect that she can’t live with, but it will also grant her the ability to communicate with the Gorn, and she’ll wind up sacrificing herself.

They are definitely doing this without Starfleet approval. Pike’s ship prioritizes individuals over regulations, an ethos that carries forward when Kirk takes the chair.

When he started snapping to change things I was like oh, okay, I see what this is. I think Trelane did that too, but it became such a trademark of Q that it was hard to ignore the similarity. And then the voice was just delicious icing on the cake. They didn’t make a big deal of it or make some weird tortured commentary to try and tie it into continuity. They just let it be as a story on its own.

I was impressed with their restraint in not mentioning either Trelane or Q by name. I mean they dressed the entity in the same costume as Trelane, and his behavior and MO are identical, so we’re clearly meant to conclude they are one and the same. But they didn’t burden the story with continuity, and that’s smart.

One of the writers talked about it on Open Pike Night and said it was a deliberate choice to give La’an and Erica opposite trajectories from last season, where now La’an is finally able to move on from her trauma with the Gorn while Erica is dealing with it for the first time.

I like to think that wolkite is a predecessor or a component of the viridium patch that Spock tracks Kirk with in Undiscovered Country.

It would be a simple matter for Trelane to make them all forget about him in “The Squire of Gothos” so that he could have more fun with them. I also like the idea that the Q wore the raiment of “energy entities” at this point in history just as fashion.

I have this headcanon now that Boimler met his purple universe self once, and that’s why he started dying his hair.

Wait a minute now, is he actively dying his beard as it grows in? That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? Did he lie in his own personal log about dying his hair, or does the hair dying occur at a follicular level?