1. What happened to the original captain of the Excelsior, Captain Styles? I don't think he would lose command just because Scotty sabotaged his ship. By TUC, we see that Sulu is the Excelsior's captain. Where did this guy go? What was the Excelsior doing between TSFS and TUC?
There's a gap of about 8 years between those films, and we know Sulu had been captain for at least 3 years prior to TUC. So Styles could've stayed on as
Excelsior's captain for up to 5 years. (Indeed, the recent novel
Excelsior: Forged in Fire shows how the command of the ship passed from Styles to Sulu.)
2. Why can't Bones perform the Vulcan Neck Pinch with Spock's katra inside? Because he was loony and trying it from the front or because he was human? I swear I've seen non-Vulcans perform it on-screen (no specific examples come to mind). And in TOS, Spock several times mentions teaching Kirk it, so that leads me to believe that humans are capable (otherwise why would Spock offer?).
What Spock actually said was that he had tried to teach it to Kirk, clearly without success. So it can't be easy for non-Vulcans to pick up, and maybe most humans just don't have whatever attributes it takes. Archer was able to do it when he was carrying Surak's
katra, but he was younger and stronger than McCoy and more trained in combat, so maybe he was better prepared physically to manage it. After all, it takes muscle memory and training to master a physical skill; even if you know how to do it, that doesn't mean your body does.
As for the claim that it requires superhuman strength, I'm fairly certain that was never explicitly stated onscreen. Memory Alpha calls that speculation. The
Star Trek Concordance does assert that in its lexicon entry on the nerve pinch, but some of its material came from behind-the-scenes references and not from onscreen dialogue.
We've seen the nerve pinch performed by the following non-Vulcans: Data, Odo, Seven of Nine, Archer, and probably Picard (though it's debatable whether the move he used on Tim Russ in "Starship Mine" was really a Vulcan nerve pinch or a similar pressure-point attack). Of those, the first three have superhuman strength, and the latter three had direct access to Vulcan knowledge and memory (Seven from assimilations, Archer from carrying Surak's
katra, and Picard from his meld with Sarek). Picard, like Archer, has had combat training. (And note that if it was a Vulcan nerve pinch rather than a pressure-point attack, it took far longer to work when Picard did it, suggesting only partial mastery.)
