#captain garrovick

[tostrekkiegirl]

I’m finally reading the Autobiography of James T. Kirk, and I really like it so far!

[anghraine]

A detail of probably unintentional continuity in TOS that I periodically rotate in my head like a drunk Dalek:

In "Court Martial," we're told the name of the ship that the young Ensign James Kirk and less-young Lieutenant Finney served on (the Republic). IIRC we are not told the name of their captain at the time, or anything about him, only the Kirk-Finney backstory at the Academy and then their falling out on the Republic, when Kirk's commitment to The Paperwork led to him breaking the bro code by scrupulously logging Finney's mistake instead of shielding his friend from consequences.

However, we actually do know who the captain of the Republic must have been. In "Obsession," Kirk quite clearly states that Garrovick was the only captain he served under from the time he graduated from the Academy until Garrovick's death.

We also know from "Obsession" that Kirk was a lieutenant at the time of Garrovick's death. And we know from "The Deadly Years"—aired and produced prior to "Obsession"—confirming the implication in "Shore Leave" that Kirk was then 33 and is now 34 that Lieutenant Kirk was only 23 when Garrovick died on the Farragut, during Kirk's first deep-space mission.

This means that the whole Kirk-Finney falling out happened before anything to do with the Farragut, since Kirk was still an ensign on the Republic; that he couldn't have been older than 21 or 22 at the time; and that their captain at the time must have been Garrovick, and any resulting decisions or reactions from their captain would have been from Garrovick.

Given Kirk's very rapid rise under Garrovick continuing after the Finney incident (to go by ... everything we hear in "Obsession"), the implication becomes strong that Kirk's prioritization of proper logging over the bro code did not injure him with Captain Garrovick. And the thing that's wild but great is that this completely tracks with how Captain Garrovick is characterized in "Obsession."

Eleven years after Garrovick's death, Kirk still sees him as a model of heroism and nobility as a starship captain. Honestly, it's pretty clear that he was a more present role model in the very young Jim Kirk's life than he was for his actual son, then a child. He sounds like exactly the kind of captain who would look at Ensign Kirk refusing to compromise on proper documentation to cover for his older, higher-ranking friend, even though it destroyed their friendship, and see him not as petty but as incorruptibly principled.

He had already seen enough promise in Kirk to snatch him into his crew right out of graduation, completely bypassing Starfleet's implied practice of transitioning new graduates to teaching before sending them into service in space (mentioned in "Court Martial"; Finney had been kept in the transitional teaching position for much longer than was typical when Kirk was a cadet, for unknown but clearly not baseless reasons, and thus the stakes of his conduct on the Republic were very high). So my headcanon is that Kirk's actions wrt Finney only cemented his place in Garrovick's estimation and, if anything, only further smoothed his rise.