"...I took over the Enterprise from him...": An Observation

[Timo]

...Unless we assume that Mendez that day was feeling the weight of his own years particularly heavily, and thus thought that the somewhat graying Pike of STXI and the somewhat balding Kirk of "The Menagerie" both fell in the same age pigeonhole, two steps below the depressed (but well preserved) Commodore himself.

As far as the "altered timeline" thing goes, we can assume that everything that precedes Nero's first attempt at interference would stay the same between the two timelines. Thus, Pike and Kirk's relative ages would supposedly remain the same, even if their later joint history went differently from how Ziggy remembers it. And it does seem that this could be the case, at least if we squint a little - so no minus points to Abrams for that, yet.

Just as a side note, the dialogue in "The Menagerie" has the predominant characteristic of being very clipped - from the part of Mendez, apparently because he is so bothered by what he knows of Pike's fate and condition, and from the part of Kirk, probably because he catches on to the strange mood of the Commodore. Thus, even though the phrasing might suggest that Kirk only met Pike once before and didn't really know him, we don't need to follow that suggestion: hints at a longer relationship would be erased by the terse tone of the discussion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[hammerhead]

On the point of Fleet Captain, TOS was always a little fuzzy on how it mentioned Starfleet and it could mean Pike was promoted to Starfleet Captain from Commander (i.e a normal captain) rather than Fleet Captain, so the bar brawl meeting could be when Pike has just being promoted to Captain, he doesn't strictly need to be a Fleet Captain (there were no braids that denoted this rank anyway).

 

[Timo]

Indeed, all we have is just a single verbal mention of that rank, in the entirety of Star Trek!

(No, "Whom Gods Destroy" does not carry a mention of that rank. Rather, our heroes twice use the expression "starship fleet captain", apparently trying to convince the crazed Garth that he is not just any skipper, but a captain in the prestigious starship fleet, with the associated responsibilities.)

So it could well be that Kirk originally first met Pike when the latter got his regular |:| braid for O-6 rank. And even the Nero-corrupted timeline might feature Kirk and Pike meeting right after Pike earns the |:| braid. The "fleet" part in Kirk's utterance in "The Menagerie" could be free of any practical meaning, or perhaps some rarely used way to separate people of Captain rank from people of captain position and therefore very handy in case of somebody who perhaps made captain long before making Captain.

On a related vein, other utterances in TOS would have us believe that Kirk either never served under Pike for any appreciable time, or at least served under other COs for the early years of his career. So far, spoilers on this movie do not seem to contradict this: Kirk is not one of Pike's underlings in the "cadet era" scenes, he is a stowaway. And when Kirk proceeds past cadet, we have good reason to assume that Pike is gone, one way or another.

So yeah, it's quite possible that a certain Garrovick was Kirk's commanding officer from the day Kirk officially left the Academy.

Timo Saloniemi