Indeed it was, but my point is that far from being a revamp their overall pattern of behaviour is almost exactly that of the Talosians in The Menagerie. The summary I gave could literally be transplanted from one episode to the other and work just as well. I do wonder when he talked about them being hostile and scary friend @johnnybear meant The Cage, but even there they were motivated by curiosity and a very alien form of compassion, not malice.
They do look more like Vians. It's the color of their garments and the shape of their heads. They should've gone with silver clothing instead of gray, and made the head prosthetics a little bit rounder.
Add in the super dark sets, and I think the art department really did confuse "The Cage" with "The Empath". Eh, at least they look like they came from TOS.
Exactly so. The endless arguments about which flavor of not-at-all-real-looking is more real looking get pretty ridiculous sometimes. The casting of women as Talosians was a clever idea. I liked the look of the Talosians in the new episode, but the actors' performances really made no impression at all.
Ask an expert software engineer to rebuild a clicking hard drive made by an alien civilization. Its been made pretty clear the physical stuff is something the Talosians have been struggling with for quite a while.
Heck, it's something us puny humans still struggle with in that fictional era - DSC shows invalids of all sorts wearing innovative prosthetics, and TOS had poor Leighton miss an eye and poor Pike miss a body. If Vina's condition in "The Cage" could have been improved upon with human medical means, Pike probably would have dropped a mention. But straightening of spines isn't particularly doable in general... Timo Saloniemi
Given the psychology of the Talosians as it was described by Vina in the original episode, having them fuss about the cosmetic details of repairing one of their specimens would have made little sense. To them, illusion was preferable to reality, and easier - why worry about the physical when an individual could look and feel any way they wanted with much less effort? They just didn't care. STD finessed this bit of continuity anyway, and I rather liked that. In "The Cage," Vina tells her story as: "They found me in the wreckage, dying, a lump of flesh. They rebuilt me." Whereas in "If Memory Serves" she simply says: "This is how they found me after the crash."
Wouldn't the ability to recreate someones' pristine body be just peachy? Maybe using a device that existed for the purpose of breaking down and reconstructing such a body, possibly elsewhere? One that kept a record of the original in a memory bank? You could call it a "mover arounder", or a relocator. You could call the memory bank a duffer, or a fluffer, or.....what's that word? Then they could make use of some of that brain transplanting stuff McCoy managed under his own steam. Amazing though that they can literally tear someones' body apart and rebuild it as a different species, or did they transplant their consciousness into the body of a different species? I'm a little confused there, but seemingly they can't repair the kind of damage we're well on our way to managing now in the 21st century.
I predict they will invent one in the 24th century. Back in TOS, though, there's no manipulation ability involved, nor a record being kept... As far as we can tell. Do McCoy's salt shakers operate on the transporter principle, perhaps? (Do phasers?) Whatever they do, it never amounts to anything particularly visible, such as setting straight something that once was bent. What damage might that be? Replacing the missing eyes bit is already pretty impressive, and perhaps Leighton was just waiting for the surgery to take, at which point he could unbolt his eyepatch. But we really have no idea what had happened to Pike's body from the neck down. Today, we aren't on our way to repairing radiation damage of any sort - we haven't even been able to recognize the required path, or the crossroads offering the selection of paths. Those folks of tomorrow probably know a thing or two about that stuff, but Pike's injuries are literally a black box to us. Timo Saloniemi
I was referring to a transporter, with its' handy transporter buffers. Seems well within their means to recreate someones' physical form and either physically transplant their brain (either manually or by transporter), or to do...whatever it was the Klingons did to Voq/Tyler. Wouldn't work for Vina because we know those patterns are short lived for some reason, but well within reason in many cases. Sure, but I was referring to Vina. Plastic surgery is already way past the point where the extent of her burns could be alleviated. As for the deformed spine, medical science which can remote control someones' nervous system or reattach a brain (bear in mind McCoy was bereft of the Teacher for much of the procedure and operated alone in far less than ideal conditions purely on his own knowledge), shouldn't really be viewing the idea of realigning a spinal column as being at the very least worth a well informed attempt. After all:
Perhaps Vina didn't want to go back and be fixed physically. She's been on the Talosian Mind "Drug" for about a decade at that point, that's a pretty long time to be a junkie and not something one can just step away from. Pike was only on it for a few days and in the end (after his "accident") was willing to spend an entire lifetime using it.
And I was postulating they'll invent that shortly before Picard's adventures. There's nothing "handy" about the device in the DSC/TOS/TAS timeframe yet. Voq needed Tyler to donate a body. Few would be likely to volunteer. And while multiple techniques exist for creating android bodies in the TOS timeframe, we get no hint that "someone's physical form" could be created with the tech that makes uniforms for Burnham or burgers for Number One. And it explicitly is there in the DSC/TOS/TAS timeframe. But Pike probably had good reasons to think that taking Vina off the planet and having Boyce wave his trusty dermal regenerator over her pretty face would not be doing Vina a service. I don't quite get this. McCoy was adamant that he couldn't do whatever he did if not for the Teacher. That the device didn't stay hooked on all the time but was of a fire-and-forget type doesn't mean that Starfleet doctors would be capable of reattaching a brain - heck, even McCoy lost that ability with the "forget" bit. Working brains like that is an alien ability explicitly not available in the DSC timeframe. Whether it becomes available in the post- "Spock's Brain" one can be debated (apparently, McCoy couldn't take another dose of it), but that wouldn't much concern poor Vina. As for remote control of nerves, and muscles via them, I've tried it out a couple of times. It wouldn't have fixed my spine. Or, say, Christopher Reeve's. Timo Saloniemi
You're not much fun are you? You do know I was (initially at least) engaging you in a little banter, but ho hum. Yes the technology to recreate someones' body does exist in the 23rd century. It exists in the 22nd. It's called a transporter. It keeps (at least short term) records of the precise configurations of bodies transported. What I'm suggesting is that given we know such a body can be recreated (see transporter duplicates, delayed transfers, aliens hidden in pattern buffers, etc, etc) AND we know a consciousness can be transferred into such a body then it becomes only a matter of refinement to essentially transfer someone into a pristine, uninjured version of themselves. Of course it's not "handy", but a certain semantic inaccuracy tends to be a given when someone is being flippant or whimsical, which I'd assumed was obvious. Never mind.