Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x07 - "Light and Shadows"

Too short a beard to be a true hipster. And too unkempt.
This is hipster Spock

 

My eyes. MY EYES!!!!!

 

So:

 

He eats only craft-brewed plomeek broth and won't stop talking about NPR?

 

Not enough tatts
Should have obligatory sleeve

 

So is Arian going to start going green and sprout mechanical tenticals?

 

He also signed up for an adult Parrises Squares league.

And those Starfleet field rations aren't farm-to-table!

 

Call me crazy, but this I actually want to see in the show!

 

Hipster Spock was the grandson of Gregory Peck before his grandpa was cool. He's into Whole Foods now...up to his neck.

 

Now all he needs is a plaid shirt, glasses and a wool cap.

 

It's the only kind of beard I find in any way acceptable, but that's just personal taste.

 

Not trying to be patronizing here, especially since you mention that you did re-watch those scenes, but just for the sake of clarity in the discussion, here is the dialogue:

AMANDA: Do you know that I used to read Alice to Spock when he was a little boy, before Michael came into the house?
[Burnham has a flashback to Spock coming upon Amanda reading it to her.]
AMANDA [cont'd]: Do you know why I read him that book? Because Spock had difficulties. Human difficulties. Learning, reading, writing. The Vulcans called it L'tak Terai.
SAREK: A temporary complication remedied at the Learning Center.
AMANDA: No. He had no support. Nobody wanted to help a half-Vulcan child with a learning disability he'd inherited from his mother. And in order to save our son, I began to read him a story about how to survive when up is down and left is right.
SAREK: Your obsession with a book about chaos has done a disservice to our children.
AMANDA: [shaking her head] They were the ones who were on both sides of the looking glass. Not you, Sarek. You never truly respected humanity.
SAREK: If that were true, I would have married a Vulcan.
[...]
BURNHAM: My mother said he had a condition called L'tak Terai as a child.
LELAND: I've heard the term. It's a spatial and order dysphasia. Much like dyslexia. Pretty common on Earth. Not so much on Vulcan.
[...]
BURNHAM: L'tak Terai... You must have been so lonely. Knowing you, you made something beautiful out of those mirrored images...​

She flashes back to another childhood memory, Spock helping her learn the traditional Vulcan salute from across the table, pressing his hand against hers like a reflection in a mirror (also, a shadow). As she internally relives the scene from what she imagines to be her brother's perspective—which, as she reiterates in another context in the following episode, she'd always found uniquely "beautiful"—her mind is processing the implications of the new information she has learned about Spock's L'tak Terai. It has now been characterized for her broadly in medical terms by Leland as "a spatial and order dysphasia much like dyslexia" and Amanda's according motive in introducing him (and by extension Michael as well, she too being one who experienced life "on both sides of the looking glass," and in some of the same ways, if not this particular one) to the works of Lewis Carroll was, in her own words, as a guide for "how to survive when up is down and left is right."

Taken in conjunction with the former, Burnham realizes the latter applies more than merely euphemistically in Spock's case, and a crucial piece the puzzle at hand falls into place. Factoring the context of these new revelations about her brother into the equation, she reconsiders his present fixation on the mysterious string of numbers, and reaches the conclusion (or rather develops the hypothesis, to be later confirmed aboard the shuttle) that "the numbers are backwards."

It goes by quickly (this was a tightly-paced one) but to me it doesn't really feel like anything is acutely absent here, as if she were making some more specific reference to something that were cut—although I obviously have no knowledge of whether there was or wasn't, so that's just my own personal take on it based on the released episode.

-MMoM

[P.S. -- I really enjoyed the "mommy and daddy fighting in front of the children" bit here, and all in befittingly understated "Vulcan" manner. I especially liked that Amanda, for all her insight and compassion and devotion and fiery independence, isn't perfect or all-knowing either, and as capable as anyone of projecting her own insecurities onto family members. Nice little followup to Sarek and Burnham's conversation in "Brother" (DSC) about Spock's "reverence" for his mother not necessarily being a total positive, and to her oversimplification of his relationship with his father in "Journey To Babel" (TOS), etc.]