Healing Vina

Spocks brain.

Return to tomorrow

Star trek 3

Star Trek 2

 

I know there's an issue of the DC Star Trek comic book, set in the TOS movie era, in which Spock gets permission to visit Talos IV to tell Pike there have been sufficient medical breakthroughs that he could come back but he declines.

Personally I always found it odd that the Talosians medical care left Vina looking like that because "they'd never seen a human before", when they're very much humanoid. It's not like she crashed among the Sheliac or Horta...

 

Well. Look at Lt cmd Airiam. Not much left after an accident.

 

Maybe the damage caused by the Delta radiation left Pike unable to survive in any other fashion? His withered body may have only been the top half of his body and down to his waist! Plus the ability to construct androids came from Sargon while the machines of Exo-Three may have been taken over by research teams from the Federation but they hadn't made much headway into learning the functions or science of the Old Ones!
JB

 

The idea of the Talosians never having seen a human before and having no guide to putting her back together is likely a holdover from when GR originally envisioned the Talosians as crab like creatures. Then the idea could hold water, but they didn’t have the resources to depict the Talosians as non bipedal crab like creatures so the notion no longer makes any real sense.

I believe GR initially called them Sirians in his earliest drafts.

 

It sounds like, given time, humans can learn the power of illusion. Vina had 18 years on planet, so, there is a chance that she did learn the power, at least, to some rudimentary level over her own memories, and if so, she would not be allowed to leave the planet. Just pulling the plot string presented in the dialog...YMMV .

 

And Star Trek IV where pills can grow new organs. Or, at least, restore damaged ones.

 

I think the hump was used as a medical sack of some kind, camel like.

There can be blind spots in medicine, the use of leeches made a return after being forgotten. Michigan State just grew a small human heart

 

I think I have that one - Door in the Cage, I believe.

 

Is that the one with the Klingons and Pike and Vina have a child and live on the surface?
JB

 

I'll have a look..

 

Nobody put Hawking together; he fell to pieces and medicine could do nothing about it but watch and write peer-reviewed papers.

Suicide was always an option for Hawking. He didn't want that. Many others do, though, and I can't blame Vina for being one of 'em. (Except in the scenario where she merely playacts to get Pike's sympathy and thus to deflect him from nuking Talos back to stone age a second time.)

Umm, no. In real real life, we still can't put crash victims together. Most die outright. Some die in prolonged agony. And many end up looking like Vina, after the sixteenth round of corrective surgery. Nothing substantial has changed in that respect since the sixties.

Or would run on positronics or whatnot. Soul transfer was the whole issue there, though, and that was not a Federation technology. Sargon's folks were the ones who had the power to move between shelved spheres and assorted androids, and Scotty's powers had nothing much to do with that.

...Again not a Federation technology. But animating a corpse is, and probably provides endless amusement at medical student parties. The thing is, Pike is what you got after Federation medicine had had a go with that body. For all we know, there was no body from the neck down. But more probably, there was, and they didn't want to give up on that and screw Pike's head on a sexy chromium-steel body.

And put the two together for immortality. Except again, the Feds apparently never really got possession of the alien half of that tech, the consciousness-transfer thing: their own best attempt came a century later, in "The Schitzoid Man", and was halfway successful at best.

Androids are a dime in a dozen. Changing your address from Me to It is the trick the Feds hold no real claim to mastering, and probably understandably so: the alien machines they may have captured would no doubt be hellishly difficult to reverse-engineer when the Feds have no theoretical basis for understanding them.

Not really. All we ever heard was the opposite: that they couldn't when they didn't. It's not the same thing at all.

It doesn't work like that. You don't take a dying woman and build an outer shell for her, then expect the pieces within to somehow fall in place. You fix what you can, end up with a monstrosity, and then decide whether you can do cosmetics on top of that. And generally, you can't: medicine today is basically powerless in face of humps. Or faces, for that matter, but at least there we're a bit better off than in the sixties. With spinal surgery... Not really.

High school depictions never saved a life in reality. And nobody on this bbs knows what a human being looks like, in the sense that would save a life.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I see this raised so often, but it overlooks a central crux of the story with respect to the Talosians' practical deficits versus their illusory strengths. They quite obviously did know what humans, and specifically Vina, were supposed to look like; they recreated them perfectly...as illusions. But they had little or no experience in accomplishing anything of substance—let alone delicate surgery—in the physical realm. That's why they needed slaves to rebuild their world, and why they made no discernible progress on that front when they didn't get them. It's why their heads are huge, but their bodies are soft and frail.

PIKE: Did they ever live on the surface of this planet?
[Vina nods]
PIKE: Why did they go underground?
VINA: War, thousands of centuries ago.
PIKE: That's why it's so barren up there?
VINA: The planet's only now becoming able to support life again.
PIKE: So, the Talosians who came underground found life limited here, and they concentrated on developing their mental power.
VINA: But they found it's a trap, like a narcotic, because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating...you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.​

It's a miracle they were even able to ensure that "everything worked"! Which, incidentally, raises my nagging question: once they had a starship full of able-bodied humans within their grasp, why even bother anymore with damaged goods? Why not disregard misshapen Vina and her reluctant "perfect man" entirely, and simply lure down these two, for example?



And why stop at one breeding pair at all, when they could have taken the whole ship's complement? But then, I suppose that's more or less where they're heading at the point where they nab Number One and Colt. And as to their continued interest in Vina, we have the lines that follow on from the above exchange...

VINA: You're better than a theater to them. They create an illusion for you, they watch you react, feel your emotions. They have a whole collection of specimens, descendants of life brought back long ago from all over this part of the galaxy.​

Besides being potential fodder for (or mother to) a slave race, Vina was a favorite character in a beloved soap opera.

-MMoM

 

they knew what humans looked lioke once they were able to access Vina's mind and memories - but they WEREN'T able to do that until she was repaired. Plus from their point of view (like she said) "Everything works" <--- And that's all the Talosians cared about - IE It explains why (if they even could); they didn't take her back into surgery to 'rebuild her' to look more like your average Human because they could do what they did; give her a 100% 'real to her' illusion of her being a fully functional, pain free, athletic and beautiful woman - no matter what the reality of her actual physical body was.

She was now alive, reasonably healthy; and could reproduce, and in their grand plan, that's all they needed Vina to be.

 

That's a plausible possibility, but rather speculative, as it isn't specified in the story. We don't know what condition Vina's mind was in when they found her, merely that her body was "a lump of flesh." "If Memory Serves" (DSC) indicates that they are adept at gleaning information from a disorganized or impaired mind, and "The Cage" itself would seem to imply that they can pull from the subconscious and unconscious, and thus consciousness of the subject would not seem necessarily to be a requirement. But one way or the other, it's ultimately academic and beside the point, this being that knowing internally what the result of their efforts should look like and actually achieving that end externally are vastly different things.



I know that something obviously went very wrong here...but that doesn't mean I have the skill or resources to do any better. Even if I were able to absorb the total knowledge and experience of a master painter out of the "thought record," there's still the matters of my fine motor function, muscle memory, having the right paints and brushes, etc.

The Keeper also claimed that they wished their subjects to be happy, and even if we doubt their altruism in this (as Pike quite sensibly does), it tallies with the idea of them deriving emotional catharsis in sympathy. And while physical fitness wouldn't affect happiness in a world of illusion, it surely would be a crucial factor in successfully bearing and rearing children in the harsh wilderness above. And remember, they let her stay to live out her fantasies with them even once their 'grand plan' went out the proverbial window, and later did the same for Pike. (Not trying to be overly argumentative when we're basically on the same page, just highlighting that the stories seem to point more toward them lacking the practical aptitude/capacity to do any better for Vina's body than them being able but not bothering.)

-MMoM

 

Or we'd invent some kind of deck full of hollows that'd let us do mostly the same thing...

 

Is that a Harry Potter thing?

 

Holos. I meant hollos. I blame spellcheck.

 

Is that a Harry Potter thing?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Even a crab should be able to figure out not to attach her head to her right shoulder.