Thanks! I just came up with it in my last post, but the idea is really growing on me.
Everything she says fits into that.
- Mentions the rendezvous - Will he express frustration?
- Permission to speak candidly... and then never has anything really candid to say, as if she wants him to be candid
- "It's an honor to serve with you." - sycophantic and a possible opening to talk about his famous history fighting the Klingons.
- When he says you piloted well, instead of just saying thank you, she says she's always wanted to break the space dock speed limit like that. - They both break the rules. Maybe he'd be open to disobeying orders on this mission.
Great analysis and justifications! You're certainly convincing me!
I do think the script writer may have been going for showing she was looking for allies of the conspiracy or dirt on people not in the conspiracy.
I have no idea if it's what Meyer and Denny Martin Flynn intended. Heck, I wonder if Meyer remembers himself at this point. Even if he didn't, he might just say "Sure, let's go with that," if you presented him with the theory. He has a story in his book about
A View From Bridge about a fan justifying his anachronistic "bringing out the cannons" sequence in TWOK by the fact that the
Enterprise was operating on only partial power at that point in the movie.
So she stuck with the dirt she got, either through recording herself or pointing the Klingons to the log records.
Well, we know from Valeris' altering the logs that showed whether or not the
Enterprise fired the torpedoes that she's a talented hacker. I think she just hacked into the Captain's Log to find incriminating excerpts to use against him in his trial.
But Kirk being smart, remembered the exchange and probably cogitated it in prison, where he told McCoy "you and I are nothing," and that the conspiracy to disrupt the peace mission was still in motion. When he got back to the ship, Spock said he had reason to believe conspirators were aboard the Enterprise. Kirk says, "I had a thought about that." I think the writers meant to indicate Kirk suspected Valaris.
Oh, absolutely Kirk has figured everything out by that point. He has a look of surprise on his face as they play the "I've never trusted Klingons, and I never will" clip from his Log during his trial, not just over his own words being used against him, but because he's wondering how the hell Chang got his hands on it. And as you say, he had a lot of time to think while he was in prison. He narrowed down the possible suspects, and the only one who had both the means and opportunity was Valeris. He shared his suspicions with Spock, who agreed, "It's possible." And so the two of them decided to lay a trap to see if their suspicions were correct.
