Just how old is Capt Pike? (based on 1 line in Saints of Imperfection)
- Thread starter Yistaan
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If anything, I thought DSC made Vina younger than "The Cage," given that she said she was "young" during the crash, while Number One implied that the 32-year-old Oliver wouldn't pass for whatever her real age was, and her real appearance had a lot of age makeup applied. DSC showed hardly any aging aside from giving her dry hair. I always figured Vina was, like, 50 or 60 for real during "The Cage."
Imagine him with his own bridge crew. Forty-five seconds earlier, he was standing next to a woman who was at the station with the printer.
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Pike's sexist line in the Cage was bad. He's also been saying some rough things to Tyler too. While it seemed at first that Pike was blaming him only for things Tyler was in control of (going with L'Rell after the war), he later said a line like, "I can believe that of you," to Tyler regarding the possibility of Spock killing someone when not in his right mind, even though Pike knows full well Tyler's brain was completely overridden by Voq at that time.
So it seems like there is a bizarre consistency to Pike saying just jerkish, awful things on occasion.
Susan Oliver was 32 in the Cage, while Melissa George is 42 as of Vina's Discovery episode. Vina was very much not made younger.
The Cage--Number One: Well, shall we do a little time computation? There was a Vina listed on that expedition as an adult crewman. Now, adding eighteen years to your age then.
Say Vina was 21 in 2236, she would be 42 in Discovery in 2257. It seems the casting of Melissa George, age-wise, is just right.
I don't care how hard your spaceship crashed, Vina did not look 40 at the end of "The Cage." DSC describing Vina as "young" at the time of the crash, and 40-something now, and making the main difference of her true form into some TV-friendly facial-scarring and skipping a couple shampoos fits with the text of the earlier episodes, but visually, "The Cage" left me with the impression Vina was closer to Pike or Number One in terms of age at the time of the crash, while DSC makes it seem she was more the Colt or Tilly of the Columbia.
Even if Vina was 18 (the youngest age to be adult in real world America--she was stated in dialogue to be an adult as of the Columbia crash in 'The Cage') in the crash in 2236, she would still be 39 in Discovery in 2257. It all still lines up roughly to Melissa George's actual age of 42.
If you want to go younger than 18 as of the crash, you would decanonize the "Cage" line that Vina was an adult as of the crash.
If she was a lot older than 40 it would really weaken up the Talosians' plans to breed a new race, unless human biology somehow delayed menopause in the 23rd century or the Talosians had ways of reconfiguring/upgrading reproductive organs or something.
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This is a good point, i think you'd have trouble arguing she's much older than 40 in "The Cage". Considering they could barely put her back together, i doubt the Talosians could have done much with her reproductive organs, unless they had immediately frozen some of her eggs at the time of her surgery.
I think you have to assume the Talosians were planning on some fairly ambitious interventions regardless of her age, given her physical condition and the fact that they intended to eventually have a human population large enough to restore and rebuild the surface, a project lasting centuries, at least. You're not getting that from any two people doing things the old fashioned way. Doesn't matter if they're sixty, forty, or twenty.
I actually think the Talosians' medical work coming across as fairly half-assed cosmetically counts in favor of their medical acumen. They apparently made multiple basic misapprehensions about human anatomy, and still fixed her up enough to live independently for at least thirty years. Normally, you wouldn't expect someone to get very far if they couldn't figure out that the leg bone connects to the foot bone, but the Talosians apparently had such great ability they could be completely wrong about what they were trying to do, and it'd still work.
Is it reasonable that Talosians could not repair any reproductive damage in Vina, given their poor understanding of human physiology?
In which case the whole Talosian plan for Pike and Vina was never going to work. They would be among the most clueless Trek aliens ever faced if their plan was doomed before they even started to implement it, they just didn't know it. Here's a laughing Romulan
(he's laughing at the Talosians, not anyone here)As someone pointed out, even Pike and Vina wouldn't be enough for a whole slave race. The Talosians would have been better off advertising their world as a pleasure resort and then the whole crew of the Enterprise would beam down willingly and never want to leave.
Well, maybe except Spock, they could just hold him prisoner until his Pon Farr finally happens in 13 years. And Number One could be convinced to stay with hamburgers maybe and a shot at Pike (who the Talosians revealed she had a crush on, in an often forgotten line).
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If they had been a success it would have been simple enough for the Talosians to lure more human ships to Talos. They had a ship full of potential slaves in orbit had they broken Pike.
I can't find it, but I think it was Timo who once suggested that the Talosians were just beaming down dozens and dozens of more suitable slaves while playing around with Pike's mind and toying with the Enterprise crew and wiping their minds of the kidnapped crew.
Maybe they took over half the crew (430 in TOS, 203 in Cage and Discovery) with no one the wiser.
I tend to doubt that idea because Star Fleet knows how many were on the ship. The family members back home would know folks were missing. It would take a scale of long term mental control over vast distances that Discovery makes unlikely to believe.
Yeah, I think it would only work if they did all their mind wipe powers, only for Pike to learn half the crew was gone at the next briefing far away. Then Starfleet would realize how strong these telepaths were and issue their uber-uber-quarantine order.
But Discovery shows us that that didn't happen (GO7 not in use, Pike not salty with the Talosians, the 203 number cited again), so the theory is dead in the water.
I can see the chat at some Star Base.
'Captain Pike, may we direct your attention to the ship's galley and replicator records. breakfast, 430 served, lunch 203 served. What in the name of sanity did you serve for lunch, captain?'
Why would the Talosians need to kidnap people? Just because Pike and Number One are addicted to work doesn't mean his entire crew is. Quite a few might want to join willingly (like in the episode 'This Side of Paradise' when they were all hit by spores). I thought the reason the Federation banned Talos IV is because they were afraid people would run off to illusion world and not come back.
Your guess is as good as mine. In "The Cage", Pike believed they wanted to breed a slave race of humans. Two hundred would give a much better genetic diversity than just two.
