Why the Change?

Watching the color/black & white hybrid of "The Cage" today on Blu-ray, I noticed that Pike refers directly to Colt and Number One as "two Earth women". Yet, for the last thirty years, fans and novels and comic writers have come up with convoluted back stories about Number One being a alien.

Was there any reason why the explicit line from "The Cage" was ignored?

 

First I'm hearing that people have claimed number one was an alien

 

I've heard of it. But it's one of those fringe fanboy things.

 

maybe they mix her up with a certain lady from betazed - there is a certain similarity

 

She's Ilyrian in the current novels, IIRC.

 

Was there a reason to make the topic title so nondescript? This one's so vague as to be meaningless. Nouns are your friend.

 

Couldn't figure out how to cram the entire question into the subject line.

 

In the first Disco novel Number One is described as an alien.

 

the big pike - number one - alien - conspiracy?

 

Like I said, fringe fanboy things.

 

The Cage - Number One, alien or human? The Truth Is Out There

(sorry, i'm a bit jazzed about X-Files coming back soon)

 

Earth does not necessarily mean human.

 

Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri comes to mind. Domicile need not imply species.

 

The weird thing about the novels making her an Illyrian is that she looks nothing like Illyrians.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Illyrian

 

Apart from Spock I've always assumed that Pike's crew were all human! Number One being a woman who has had a mental enhancement or something!
JB

 

She's human. Retconners should be boiled in their own pudding! (putting a holiday spin on it )

 

Number One is non-human in Peter David's New Frontier novels, but she's hiding it so Pike's statement would be true as far as he knew. I think a lot of fans went with this because Number One is more Spock-like than Spock in the pilot, being calm and logical.

Some have speculated she might be Centauran, a race Cochrane himself was thought to have been prior to First Contact - human analogue.

 

Sorry, I don't see a resemblance.

 

She was human, but raised by the Illyrian ambassador after her parents were killed in an attack by Illyrian extremists.

 

As I understand it, the novels first described her as an Illyrian more than a decade before we ever saw an Illyrian onscreen in ENTERPRISE. (I think it was D.C. Fontana, no less, who first described Number One as "Illryian" way back in 1989, long before ENTERPRISE was a gleam in UPN's eyes.)

And there's some wiggle room as to whether "Illryian" is a species or a nationality. It could be that some "Illyrians" are simply humans descended from colonists who settled in the Illryian system generations ago. For myself, I assume that she's a different kind of "Illyrian," possibly from a different planet in the same system, than the ones in that ENTERPRISE ep.