I'm not going to lie. Seeing this from Pike's POV sort of depressed me. He sticks with a job he hates for years so that he can be The Captain Of The Enterprise, a ship with which he's already developing a sort of "She's a beauty and she's mine" kind of bond, and on his first trip out he's kidnapped, brain-slugged, and ends up in a wheelchair?

That's... that's seriously uncool.