"I can't get used to having a woman on the bridge"

As far as braid goes, both Lieutenant #1 and Lieutenant Spock wear the TOS-appropriate single solid braid, and Pike's exact rank is never given, so we're at liberty to postulate a small and low-ranking command crew where minor casualties would leave Spock as the legitimate top dog. But if we don't assume actual top officer casualties (deaths or mere sidelining due to injuries sustained), how come Spock gets to be Acting Captain?

Number One could easily have named Spock her successor, over the heads of Lieutenant Commander O'Greasy down at Engineering and Lieutenant Harsh at Security. But there's no story opportunity for her to do so: she thinks she's beaming down with Spock when leaving the ship in the hands of somebody she trusts.

So we probably have to disbelieve in O'Greasy and Harsh after all. Or then decide that O'Greasy is fine with this arrangement by default, and Harsh is out cold even though not dead.

The alternate tack would be to disregard both the rank braid and the dialogue, and to decide that Pike likes to call his trusted lieutenant "Lieutenant" even though her rank is that of Lieutenant Commander and in fact has been that ever since she first welcomed Ensign Spock aboard. And possibly that Spock already is a Lieutenant Commander, too, considering he is Spock, and in order to give back some credence to the braid scheme.

Basically zero chance, then, that Pike wouldn't have had Number One on his bridge for ages already. But of course we do know that she's different.

Timo Saloniemi

 

FWIW, in the first draft (9/8/64) Spock is identified as a lieutenant and Number One as the executive office.

 

Spock's "first lieutenant" position was mentioned in Roddenberry's series outline but had become science officer in the pilot script. Whether that would have been next in line of command is an open question; in navies the line of successions after the XO goes through the qualified officers by seniority, regardless of their job. Today the senior department head is almost invariably the operations officer, though.

 

I don’t think he really meant that line. It was a bad joke.
Anyway it’s all irrelevant as the Cage isn’t canon. The Menagerie is and that clip wasn’t shown.

 

Do you have a link for that?

 

The Menagerie is "more" canon than The Cage since the Cage's ending was changed, but everything else occurred the same except some "non-relevant" scenes/lines were "not shown" in the Menagerie's telecast. YMMV .

Thinking about the star system names...what would Federation Cartography call star systems that they find inhabited by another people? Would they adopt a name change from the old Earth naming system to rename stars with the name given by the inhabitants? I think they would, so for example, if we find Vega inhabited by the "My Place" people and they call their star "My Place", then the Federation would call that star "My Place". This now frees the old name of Vega for other use on their charts. Then, a Federation Colony is set up in uninhabited star system Xc83dio!!, but the colony wants to call it Vega, so, now it is Vega. Same with other star systems like Rigel, etc. New Rigel may be close to New Vega but during the transit, the Enterprise intercepts a radio beam from the Talos system that is 18 lys away. Works for me.

 

That must be where I got it from.

 

They're both canon. Only the Menagerie is in continuity, though.

 

The Talosians offered Kirk their version of "The Cage"; doesn't mean Pike's adventure happened any differently from "The Cage" despite this propaganda. Also, the Talosians recycled scenery from the end of "The Cage" to portray a different situation altogether in "The Menagerie"; again this doesn't mean both situations didn't exist, separate and very different. Recycling of footage isn't the exclusive right of Desilu there...

Well, the Universal Translator would process the alien language, and would specifically have to be told not to translate this native name into "Earth", which the literal translation basically invariably would be.

But being told to do exactly that is no doubt a default setting. So we get Bajorans rather than People, and Bajor rather than Earth or Peopleplace or whatever.

Of course, the Vega Colony could be a place founded by the Vegans, just like Earth has plenty of Earth Colonies (or at least two).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Vega Colony must have a substantial Federation base/outpost since Pike says, "because we're going to stop first at the Vega Colony and replace anybody who needs hospitalization" which means Vega Colony has trained crew members ready to be reassigned to the Enterprise when it shows up. Just a thought.

 

The endings aren't incompatible. There's no reason why Vina couldn't have had an illusory Pike to be with all those years or at least some of the time while she waited for the real one.

 

The hard part of returning injured Pike to Talos IV is explaining it to Vina. "You know how you've been married to your dream man for 13 years? Well, that was just a dream. Sorry. The real guy is here now, his current mind and personality obviously won't be a match for the illusion we've been generating, and you'll just have to start from scratch with him."

Of course, that's assuming Vina is still alive, and the Talosians don't keep the two of them in separate dream worlds.

 

That's assuming she doesn't figure it out, whether right away, quickly, or over a period of time, or already know from the get-go that she's been interacting with an illusion. On some level she would know that it must necessarily be at least partly an illusion no matter what: her body isn't the way it looks, so whenever he touches her in those places, that would have to be fake.

 

Vina's not stupid. She knew the real Pike returned to his ship. That she decided to be happy with her illusion of Christopher Pike until he returned shouldn't be much of an issue.

Or the other interpretation is that the Talosions gave Vina her perfect version of Pike as an illusion; and gave Pike his perfect version of Vina.

 

That would make the greatest Star Trek sketch in Saturday Night Live history.

 

I think it's pretty clear from context that in the world of "The Cage" (and remember, a lot the background worldbuilding we think of for Star Trek had not been decided upon yet; the USS Enterprise is a United Earth ship, Spock clearly has and expresses emotions, there's something called the "time barrier" that's been broken since the Columbia crashed, they never established what century it took place in, etc.), women had only recently become commissioned officers of the space service (remember, they didn't decide to start calling it Starfleet until about a third of the way through TOS Season One) and Pike was not yet accustomed to their presence.

This was Gene Roddenberry simultaneously being more progressive than others of his era (women weren't allowed on U.S. Navy ships until the 1970s) yet still being pretty misogynistic (the idea that hundreds of years would pass before women would be allowed to serve in the space service is sexist on its face given the context of the second-wave feminist movement going on during the production of the pilot, and given that Valentina Tereshkova had already become the first woman in space the previous year).

See, the problem is that you're overlooking the difference between intent and impact. Miniskirts may have originally been intended as an act of emancipation, but when it's done in the context of a bunch of white guys making the women they hire show off their legs because they can't imagine a future where women wouldn't agree to be living ornaments for men, well, that's a sexist impact no matter what the intent of the miniskirts in real life were.

And as I just outlined above, something can be more progressive than is common relative to its own era, and yet still be objectively sexist/racist/what-have-you. Here's a good example: Abraham Lincoln was more progressive relative to most white Southerners since he wanted black people freed from slavery, but he was still objectively a white supremacist who didn't want black people to have the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, or political equality, and who wanted black people to leave the U.S. after Emancipation. It is right to remember how much better he was than most of his contemporaries, but it's also important to remember that he was still objectively a white supremacist, and to remember that others of his contemporaries (such as Representative Thaddeus Stevens) were far more progressive and anti-racist than Lincoln.

I mean, obviously sometimes Federation Standard uses characters from Earth languages in place of the native names of a given planet or species: I find it hard to believe that Vulcan, Romulus, Remus, Orion, Kronos, Betazed, Borg, Bynar, Grazer, Delta, Kelpian, etc., are the native names of these places and peoples, and that they all just happen to be identical to or sound very similar to English names for Greek mythology, letters of the alphabet, terms like "cyborg" or names for Earth animals.

I would hope that standard practice would be to adopt the native name rather than to impose a foreign name onto them. Though presumably they wouldn't start calling it My Place, but would instead start calling it [Alien Term That Translates As "My Place"].

 

See, the problem here is that you're discounting the fact that the women themselves wanted to wear the miniskirts, as they objectively had the intent of making the impact of showing their emancipation from long-standing societal norms of sexlessness and enforced modesty they didn't feel and didn't want. Context is everything, and looking back on these events using today's interpretation of the details without the broader worldview of the time is the definition of ignoring the context in favor of your own personal agenda.

Today's worldview is informed by forty years of conservative enforced modesty across the board, a backlash against both the sexual revolution and the advent of the so-called Age Of AIDS. Anything that promotes a more open, relaxed view of sex and modesty is viewed as counter to the conservative mindset, and against the conservative public morals it represents. It's actually astonishing how willing the women's movement is to proceed in lockstep with the very conservatives that want to force them back into the kitchen.

 

I understand that just fine. But the reality is that that ideal very quickly became another mechanism of enforcing patriarchy -- this time through compulsory sexual objectification. Because showing skin or not showing skin isn't actually the source of the problem -- men controlling things is the source of the problem. So, yes, the practical effect of this failed attempt at asserting female equality is that instead of female actors being cast on the basis of how well they adhere to the June Clever/"Good Girl" archetype, they get cast on the basis of how hot they look in a miniskirt or a dress that looks like it's about to fall off.

I would agree. But that's not what I'm doing. I'm looking at the context of the time and noting the ways in which patriarchy found new ways to assert itself by making compulsory what used to be voluntary. The problem is that you're too busy romanticizing the past to see the ways in which its social structures actually functioned.

Some of the most sexually explicit and objectifying popular culture have tended to come out at times of conservative dominance. Consider how much teenage girls and young women like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, et al, were sexualized during the Bush years, for instance.

Which conservative mindset? The Christian nationalist mindset, maybe. But there are plenty of conservatives who are more than willing to sexually objectify women while keeping them in subordinated positions in society.

I think you need to read some more feminist theory -- and, yes, remember that there are different strains of feminism -- if you can't understand how sexual objectification can be as much a tool of patriarchy as enforced modesty.

 

Ignoring that line....ignoring that line....ignoring that line....

RAMA

 

I admit, I do like the headcanon (that is totally ignoring the context), Pike is trying to make a joke and is just horrible at it. Mind you, I think this fits with the Ansom Mount version who seems to carry a somewhat dorky quality that Kirk never had.

Certainly, both can be dangerous. In the end, it's telling women what their sexuality should be versus allowing them ownership of it. I say that as a sex-positive feminist.