Couldn't wheelchair Pike have had a Betazoid assistant

Discovery confirmed that Betazoids were known to the Federation in the 23rd century--Harry Mudd boasted about robbing a Betazoid bank. Full Betazoids can read exact thoughts, as seen in TNG 'Tin Man'.

Why couldn't a Betazoid assistant be hired to communicate for wheelchair Pike? And Starfleet could ensure the Betazoid isn't making stuff up by asking "Chris, did your assistant accurately convey your message?" and Pike could beep yes or no.

Anything in canon that prevents this? Thoughts?

 

Because they weren't invented yet by the time of TOS.

In universe.... Perhaps Pike didn't like the idea of someone always being able to hear his thoughts. It would mean anything he would want to keep to himself, would still be heard by one other.

 

Betazoid assistant: Commodore Mendez, arrest Lieutenant Commander Spock right now! He's in the process of violating General Order 7!

 

My headcanon has always been that the incident was simply recent enough that the Enterprise arrived at Starbase 11 before Pike's permanent arrangements could've been finalized. Perhaps a chair with a more versatile voice synthesizer was under construction on Vulcan and/or a Betazoid assistant was already dispatched, they just didn't arrive before Spock put his plan in motion.

 

That strikes me as the most logical reason as well. If you take Mendez's line about "subspace chatter for months" at it's most minimal value, Pike only was injured 2 months ago and may have only had the chair just built while more advanced options were still being worked on.

 

It is also possible that the language centre in his brains was damaged. That even via tech or telepathy, he still couldn't have verbally communicated. Granted, telepath could have still helped him to communicate general feelings and desires.

 

I presume that Pike had a form of brain injury that gave him aphasia -- he could understand language, but couldn't formulate verbal thoughts himself. Only the Talosians' mental power was sufficient to overcome this.

Although it's still a reach. The frame story of "The Menagerie" just doesn't hold up to scrutiny, because it was a quickly contrived way to set up a plot that would let them expand the original pilot into a 2-parter and thus avoid falling too far behind their production schedule.

Hey, here's a wacky idea -- maybe Pike's inability to communicate was itself an illusion the Talosians created in order to manipulate events so that Pike would end up back in their clutches.

 

TOS was adamant about telepathy being alien, unknown and rather threatening. Even the fact that Vulcans were telepaths was pretty much unknown to our main heroes! I doubt the Betazoid government would have been any more willing to confess to telepathic powers than the Vulcan one at this point.

Also, melding with folks whose noggin has been damaged may be difficult and dangerous, as in the later spinoffs. If Pike is so incapable of using language to express his thoughts that the doctors can't hook up a voicebox to his brain, then it may be equally impossible to hook up a Betazoid; the "interpreter" would be reduced to making beep-beep noises or saying "He's feeling negative, Captain!" or something equally uninformative.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Talosians presumably read Pike just fine, or the whole ending of the Menagerie is pointless. Are they that much more powerful than Betazoids?

 

I would say that answer to that is pretty bloody obvious! Yes, they're several magnitudes more powerful than the Betazoids!

 

They could create an illusion of Commodore Mendez from parsecs away, so yeah, they're among the most powerful telepaths ever encountered. Why else put a death-penalty ban on their planet and not on Betazed or Vulcan or the Aenar compound on Andoria? Although "The Menagerie" proved that the interdiction on their planet was pretty useless because they can reach across space anyway.

 

Wheelchair Pike probably could have been rebuilt as Airiam was, Robocop-style.

I guess it's a byproduct of the magic space radiation which injured him that he can't and nothing better can be done for him than the beep chair.

 

Im surprised this evil magic radiation hasn't been weaponized by the many Trek villains in over 50 years of Trek.

Delta radiation guns would probably send the bravest Starfleet officers fleeing in terror. Well except maybe Pike.

 

Also, informed patient consent is more of an issue in real-universe conversation than it was when "The Menagerie" was produced and aired. Whether that involves cyber-prosthetics (Airiam), telepathic/empathic interpretive assistance (via Betazoids hired for such work), or other workarounds whether discussed or not.

 

I agree with SJGardner -- it's probably just that it was too early for more sophisticated treatments to be developed. Although that requires ignoring McCoy's rather ridiculous line about medical science knowing nothing about the brain even 3 centuries in the future (if that's so, how come they had psychotricorders that could literally read people's memories?), as well as the episode's assumption that it was impossible for Pike to ever regain quality of life without retreating into a world of illusion.

 

If only Spock had waited til Tuesday.

 

But Spock wanted artificial hurry. The whole point was to get Pike to Talos, like the Talosians wanted; "helping" him was secondary at best, as his own opinion obviously did not matter at all.

Pike lives in a mobile iron lung, Airiam in a patched-up body. It's not particularly difficult to accept that two dissimilar sets of injuries would result in those two dissimilar remedies.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm gonna guess that Ariana's body, nervous system, and bone structure was so badly destroyed in the shuttle crash that maybe the brain was the only organ without significant damage, hence being able to be transferred to what I'm calling the "singularity suit".

Radiation (at least the kinds we know about) can directly attack and therefore degrade the brain itself. Perhaps everything was so melted and melded together that to seperate any part of his brain from his body would be a literal death sentence.

That or the damage to his brain would have rendered even manipulating the singularity suit impossible.

It's totally not a stretch at all that this may have been the only option.

 

Do we have a reason to think that Airiam's body was badly damaged? All we saw was that her skin was redone with plastic plates - underneath, she still was capable of suffocating and freezing to death in the vacuum of space. If anything, it was her brain that was hurt, replaced by a clumsy computer that had trouble with memory space.

In contrast, Pike may no longer have had a body of any sort, just a bunch of artificial organs keeping alive the brain in a roughly head-shaped jar.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Her brain probably still needed oxygen, and the suit...while versatile...was probably still not designed to exist in the harsh conditions of exposed space.

Her, brain was clearly visible during her funeral scene, and removed from the suit.

The "skin" we saw could have just been advanced plastics or some other type of thing.

Either way, none of that takes away from Pike's brain being too damaged to remove from his body imo.