Is this mere speculation or do you know of some specific form of aphasia or whatever where one can understand language, even produce meaningful yes or no signals, and yet other language skills are shut off or destroyed?
Severe transcortical motor aphasia, I believe it's called. The thing is, language is incredibly localized, and in a surprisingly simplistic way at that - the anatomical areas involved were identified long ago and have been extensively studied, especially through the study of trauma patients.
Anyway, it would seem to contradict what McCoy said.
Only in the 1960s sense of what he's saying. By modern understanding (post-eighties), McCoy would not be likely to equate aphasia with diminished capability to think, or with personality change or the like. Rather, by modern reading, he's including the aphasia in the list of things keeping Pike locked in his body.
Without the ability to form language, can you really think as well as any other man?
Probably. It's just that you can't tell whether I can.
...it might takes months or more. Wouldn't that be a more plausible explanation than a rarer form of brain injury that trashed his outgoing language ability (yet kept yes/no) and his ability to understand or think? If his brain is that bad, maybe even the Talosians won't find his mind useful or interesting, and he'd be nothing but a burden and require a full time staff to keep him healthy.
Pike's ability to understand doesn't appear in doubt, by any of the parties involved, and indeed this should not relate to his aphasia in any way. Understanding language and producing it are separate functions, apparently (and there's even further separation into native and learned languages etc.).
The thing is, Pike isn't expected to get better. If getting better were a matter of waiting for the right prosthetics, then surely the heroes would just say "Let's wait until he gets better and then we'll talk"?
Factually, Pike has hope - the universe is full of wonders of the right sort. But our heroes know too little to be of help. Yet at least McCoy knows all there's to know about what mankind or the Federation can do for Pike, with therapies or machines, and he sees no hope there.
Do you get the impression Spock had been in contact with the Talosians to help plan this and acquire prior consent? Even that was a serious offense. I wonder when he would have done that. Or did he just assume the Talosians would accept Pike like that?
I trust the Talosians were in full control of the events long before Spock knew there were events there. After all, they demonstrate the required control as the episode proceeds. Spock shouldn't and wouldn't know whether he's in contact with them, as he's controlled by them.
One can make up anything in fiction, but do you think this happened for a reason? I mean, was there some non-canon Trek novel or fan fiction you read that suggested their horrible demise soon after leaving?
Only the episode itself - and the rules by which anything
is made up in fiction. The spores would change everything, so since nothing changes, the spores can't work.
The cure being lethal is one way to stop the spores from working. It's one from the pool of "status quo" solutions, which I find preferable to "change" scenarios. Nobody in the episode indicates there should be change involved (say, Kirk deciding to destroy the spores, or McCoy discovering they are dying), and there's no external reason for change (Sandoval's colony or Kirk's eviction thereof only ever touched upon a tiny spot on the planet, the rest should be as it always was).
"Lack of hosts" certainly shouldn't work as a spore-negating element, as the spores we saw were doing fine before Sandoval came and thus should do fine after he left - and those spores would only be a tiny fraction of the total population anyway.
TImo Saloniemi
