Not really - it's just a callback to the test that he and Kirk were observing a few days prior.
I know.
Or, something that occurred to me while thinking about your suggestion that the Kobayashi Maru scenario is part of a "grad school" course (as I was going down the stairs on the way to the fridge), maybe the use of red turtlenecks for officers indicates that they are posted as graduate students attending Starfleet Academy?
Certainly possible, as AFAIK they never explicitly explain the color-coding system in dialogue. So the uniforms are somewhat open to interpretation.
Scotty bringing Preston to the bridge has never bothered me; dude was out of his mind with grief. And sorry for the threadjack, all.
It would also have been rather repetitive to have Kirk go down to Engineering every someone is wounded
And in all seriousness he does seem pretty affected by Watkins' death though he admittedly doesn't carry him to the bridge.
Perhaps Spock never had to take the Kobayashi Maru test because he was the one who programmed it in the first place.
Yeah, Beach is the somewhat tired-seeming dude at the science station who delivers the "dominated by craylon (?) gas . . . incapable of supporting life" report, then is later shown to be third-in-command ("let's give them a little more time"). Come to think of it, Terrell, Chekov, and Kyle all seem a little drained too, so perhaps this was part of the point, as in, how could they miss out on how many planets were in the system? If I'm Beach and my job is scanning things, I'm running a quick check on the system including the number of planets, the condition of the star, etc. - they are evaluating its suitability for a life-generating experiment, after all. But I get what you're saying that the non-speaking navigator probably needed to be doing a little head count of the planets in order to know which one to head for. Maybe he (she?) deferred to Chekov as a pretty famous navigator in his own right. Scotty bringing Preston to the bridge has never bothered me; dude was out of his mind with grief. And sorry for the threadjack, all.
I'm not crazy about JJ-Trek making Spock the author of that test. It was done for dramatic reasons, obviously, to put JJ-Kirk and JJ-Spock more directly at odds with each other. But TWOK-Spock says he never took the test, and it's inconceivable that anyone would create a computer simulation and never play it himself, even in the beta testing phase. And I figure that's why you're winking.
While ignoring all the zillions of time he faced a “no win” scenario previously.
One of the other fanon explanations in the 80s was they represented the position one held. Which largely falls apart because Kirk’s never change from ST2-ST6. (I believe everyone’s remain the same over the course of the movies, which also kills the “length of service” theory).
They have to represent something, as all the other emblems and insignia on the Fletcher uniforms had meaning to them. But if they don't indicate years of service or current assignment, I'm rather stumped. Maybe they're some sort of honorific, like citations of merit? That way the more senior officers could have more but they could still stay the same over the course of several years.
Testing a program you created isn't quite the same as taking the test, though. Especially if you're already aware of all the surprises going in. I think Spock could certainly test the effectiveness of the program without technically taking the test himself.
Yeah, the Quinto Spock loses me when they have him lose his shit at least once per movie. Each time they go to that well, it has a little less impact than the time before.
