Remarkably, the whole premise of the adventure is that the Talosians are presenting the heroes with falsehoods. Their explicated agenda really is more likely to be one of those than not!
That Vina would be capable of bearing children is debatable; so is her continuing existence as of the time of the adventure, or indeed the existence of the Columbia expedition in the first place. All of this is sort of academic in light of the greater (un)truth of it all, though. If the Talosians truly wanted a slave race, they wouldn't need to rely on Vina or Pike, but could command any or all of the hundreds of people in the ship to start breeding for them. Or, as we later learn, order all the good folks of SB 11 to start doing it, and inviting people from all across the Federation to participate. In that scenario, the games with Pike and Vina would be purely for initial testing purposes. And the tests may indeed have turned out negative, so out of the two choices here, of the Talosians getting their slave race (and the heroes / the audience not noticing) or them dropping the project, the latter could be true. It's just that we have no way of telling.
Given the great powers of the Talosians, though, it's difficult to believe they wouldn't have succeeded with their slave race project - indeed, that they wouldn't have done so centuries ago already, with all sorts of species including the allegedly strong-willed but demonstrably harmless humans if need be.
Choosing to believe their words thus involves attempting to reduce the scope of their powers. "Making people press the wrong buttons" was Spock's probably erroneous speculation. Perhaps the Talosians use crude machinery to interfere with starships, allowing them to scan the files but not to truly initiate autodestruct; we know that merely projecting illusions (such as the black hole in "If Memory Serves") is not sufficient for making the heroes do harm to their own ship or endeavor.
If all the Talosians do is make people dream controlled dreams (perhaps even through the use of machinery, which involves e.g. the viewscreen they were gawking at, and not their pulsating brains, which are merely the control interface for the machinery), they could achieve what we have seen them achieve (by definition!) but not half the things they claimed they could achieve, and they could indeed be fumbling with a slave race project. Or pretending to be fumbling with a scary project like this, to cover the fact that they aren't really capable of anything much and simply want to be left alone with their dream machines.
In the latter case, their act of luring in Pike could be part of a greater scheme to keep the expanding Federation from engulfing their planet, an efficient step in the wanting-to.be-left-alone project where merely letting Pike fly past would not be. But that would be a convoluted interpretation and thus not superior to the other convoluted interpretation, that of taking the liars for their word against seeming evidence...
So in the end, we might never know. We get three takes on these guys, and with every one, their powers (say, their range) just seem to grow, while with every one, an artificial-sounding limitation also pops up. The one judgement call I'd feel safe making here is not to trust any of the seeming evidence, and to treat every Talosian claim as a lie. But with born liars, that latter bet may not be safe after all.
Timo Saloniemi
