Pike Going *Back* to the Talosians

Xaa, and yourself has exposed the weaknesses of the first pilot. An interesting cynicism theory.

 

Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of my days stuck with a debilitating condition that advanced Federation medicine can't fix, I would much rather live in a world of illusion and fantasy where I could do whatever I want to my heart's content. Pike is probably having an absolute blast, the time of his life.

Kor

 

From what I get from The Cage was the Talosians didn't know what a human was? The human anatomy was alien to them and they had trouble saving the survivors; knowing what they've done, they hoped to learn more about humans in order to find a compatible match for one of their survivors.

They realized human being are more dangerous then they thought and couldn't manipulate a human being to just... be whatever they wanted the subject to be. The methods were evil based on a certain point of view. From the captured? Yes, but from the Talosians side they just want to make their guess happy.

When Susan Oliver's character was screaming as she didn't obey the Talosians wishes, I thought it was an illusion for Pike to see. Although they punished Pike for not complying to their wishes, I think it was a tactic to justify the means. Companionship was their objective, and The Menagerie completed this endeavor.

 

Tommy Westphal says “Make it so.”

 

Kirk quite movingly asks Pike if he wants to go and Pike says yes. I've never seen any problem.

 

...Except for the fact that everybody there ought to know that nobody can trust their own eyes and ears?

The episode largely preempts any consideration of "issues", because every action there is reduced to illusion and entertainment. Which is the one issue we can discuss, outside the influence of the Talosians, even if only in hushed tones...

At the end of "The Cage", the hero left, taking with him the (unlikely to be true) message that the Talosians worry mankind would learn their art of illusion and degrade to couch potatoes like themselves. At the end of "The Menagerie", the hero returned, deliberately and knowingly surrendering to being a couch potato. The decision to surrender was putatively made outside Talosian influence, by the man (well, "half-Vulcan", as spelled out twice in the Starfleet document!) who originally recommended the quarantine.

If even Spock thinks entertainment trumps ideals and convictions, who are we to argue?

Timo Saloniemi

 

There isn't but what we do here is analyze things ad nauseam and make things up out of head canon.

 

Just so. They have an illusion, and you have reality. Life is but a dream.

 

every event depicted in every episode, every series, every book, every comic, etc from the moment Pike and the rescue team beamed upon Talos IV has been illusions generated by the Talosians.

Talosians have no 'canon' issues, I guess.

 

May your way be as pleasant!

 

I think what I need to do is pick a TOS episode and just invent whatever stuff I can come up with that I imagine happened in between scenes.

 

Well, it can be fun and it's certainly safer than playing upon a busy highway!

 

No way to know if the real Pike wanted to go, or everyone else just saw that he did.
Likely Vina cannot have children but maybe Talosian tech has artificial wombs?

 

Oh, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

There aren't going to be kids as a consequence; neither Pike nor Vina are capable. If the Talosians really still wanted slaves, they could clone Vina so Pike offers them no value added - no reason to entice him. If they lack the ability to clone, then they most likely lack the ability to find other practical ways to recombine DNA - but then, if they can rebuild a human being found in a crashed spaceship which was described as "a lump of flesh" then they do retain a pretty high level of medical and scientific skills.

BTW, the "they had never seen a human" excuse for Vina's physical condition is nonsense, because even if she were in a coma they should have been able to read images in her brain - she was unconscious, not brain-dead. They were able to pull horrific images from Pike's subconscious; the notion that the only detailed information in our brains is contained in whatever we're awake and thinking about at this very moment is a nonstarter.

All of which is to say, nothing much about the motivations of the characters, the world-building or the plot logic of "The Cage" bears close examination, and "The Menagerie" is even worse.

 

I doubt that even the Omicron spores could heal the crippled body of Captain Pike! But it was a good post to draw our attention to!
JB

 

The Talosians look enough like humans to allow them to make a better guess. Perhaps if they were the original crab creatures it might make more sense.
They may have not had time to muck around sorting through Vina's probably very erratic dying sub-conscious when they were busy doing surgery on an alien. At first they would probably be happy just to have a specimen left alive. Looks aren't probably as important to them Too late they may have realised it was important to Vina and they should have perhaps taken care in the beginning. To me the Talosians were just making excuses for their incompetence - if they were able to do surgery properly they would have at least have made her symmetrical. I just don't think the Talosians were up to the task.

 

All of which is to say, nothing much about the motivations of the characters, the world-building or the plot logic of "The Cage" bears close examination, and "The Menagerie" is even worse.

Why did the Talosians even let Pike's crew know they had captured him? Had they kept up the illusion of the survivors, and let them believe that Pike was beaming up with them, the Enterprise would have sped away from Talos IV, with no one the wiser.

 

But maybe once out of range of the Talos star system Pike's image may have disappeared? That or the Talosians have learned to increase the range of their illusions in the last two decades!
JB

 

The simplest answer would be that the Talosians could not maintain illusions indefinitely, otherwise why let the specimens ever even realize they were in a zoo? Sadly, "The Menagerie" made their powers waaaaay too off the scale.