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Pike's Wheelchair was Nightmare Fuel

ZapBrannigan

ZapBrannigan

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
I started wondering why they didn't just give Captain Pike an open wheelchair for his quadriplegia, dressed up in the TOS esthetic, meaning sleek, angular shapes in light gray or off-white, indicator lights, hidden wheels). There would be a safety harness to hold him up and whatnot.

I think the literal black box they put him in was done for the same reason Tom Leighton didn't just have an eye patch. They wanted the chair to be horrifying, and sometimes it's what you can't see that scares you. We're afraid to imagine what condition this poor man's body must be in.

Money and technology give you the Borg Queen with her spine hanging out. Good thing TOS didn't have it. The first season was influenced by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and they wanted to creep us out with limited resources.
 
I've always wondered if JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN was an inspiration for Pike here, though Pike has it worse in some ways. (He can only beep yes and no, while Joe Bonham could at least do morse code with his head to communicate more.)

This was never established in "THE MENAGERIE", but you have to wonder if they even bothered to ask Pike if he wanted to keep living in that condition.
 
Why couldn't Pike Morse Code his needs? It seems like a logical extension of his abilities since he has his mental faculties and quickly answers yes or no. He can also blink repeatedly for periods of time;

"KIRK: (watching Pike on monitor) He keeps blinking no. No to what?
MCCOY: They've tried questioning him. He's almost agitated himself into a coma.
KIRK: How long will he live?
MCCOY: As long as any of us. Blast medicine anyway. We've learned to tie into every human organ in the body except one. The brain. The brain is what life is all about. Now, that man can think any thought that we can, and love, hope, dream as much as we can, but he can't reach out, and no one can reach in.
KIRK: He keeps blinking no."

Roddenberry certainly knew about Morse since he was a bomber pilot in the war and most messages sent by the radio operator in his planes were keyed instead of voiced.

Guess the knowledge of Morse was lost by then. Needs of the plot.

Farscape, Dalton's book was truly horrifying. Blind, Deaf, Limbless, Jawless... Hopefully the 1918 Spanish Flu killed him. That's my head canon.
 
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The Salt Umpire said:
Why couldn't Pike Morse Code his needs? It seems like a logical extension of his abilities since he has his mental faculties and answer yes or no. He can also blink for periods of time;

"KIRK: (watching Pike on monitor) He keeps blinking no. No to what?
MCCOY: They've tried questioning him. He's almost agitated himself into a coma.
KIRK: How long will he live?
MCCOY: As long as any of us. Blast medicine anyway. We've learned to tie into every human organ in the body except one. The brain. The brain is what life is all about. Now, that man can think any thought that we can, and love, hope, dream as much as we can, but he can't reach out, and no one can reach in.
KIRK: He keeps blinking no."

Roddenberry certainly knew about Morse since he was a bomber pilot in the war and most messages sent by the radio operator in his planes were keyed instead of voiced.

Guess the knowledge of Morse was lost by then. Needs of the plot.
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I can see Morse Code being mostly forgotten by Kirk's time, considering how people have become more and more reliant on computers and machines and forget to do even basic stuff since the computers can do it for them. (I say mostly because there are always going to be at least a few outliers who keep knowledge of older things alive, for various reasons.)
 
1001001 said:
Like breaking Kirk and Spock out in ST:V.
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There's a LOT of years between "THE MENAGERIE" and TFF. Kirk and Spock could have read up about Morse in the intervening years because something related to it may have come up.

In any case, it wasn't brought up in "THE MENAGERIE", which is why I always wondered.
 
The Salt Umpire said:
Roddenberry certainly knew about Morse since he was a bomber pilot in the war and most messages sent by the radio operator in his planes were keyed instead of voiced.

Guess the knowledge of Morse was lost by then. Needs of the plot.
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Needs of the plot, perhaps, but 10 episodes later, we get this:

SPOCK: Definitely a space vessel of some type.
KIRK: Origin?
SPOCK: Unknown. It could hardly be an Earth ship. There have been no flights into this sector for years.
UHURA: I'm picking up a signal, sir. (a series of beeps comes over the speakers) Captain, that's the old Morse code call signal.
KIRK: Thank you.
UHURA: CQ. CQ.
KIRK: We're reading it, Lieutenant. I thought you said it couldn't possibly be an Earth vessel.
SPOCK: I fail to understand why it always gives you pleasure to see me proven wrong.
KIRK: An emotional Earth weakness of mine. There it is.​
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ZapBrannigan said:
I started wondering why they didn't just give Captain Pike an open wheelchair for his quadriplegia, dressed up in the TOS esthetic, meaning sleek, angular shapes in light gray or off-white, indicator lights, hidden wheels). There would be a safety harness to hold him up and whatnot.

I think the literal black box they put him in was done for the same reason Tom Leighton didn't just have an eye patch. They wanted the chair to be horrifying, and sometimes it's what you can't see that scares you. We're afraid to imagine what condition this poor man's body must be in.

Money and technology give you the Borg Queen with her spine hanging out. Good thing TOS didn't have it. The first season was influenced by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and they wanted to creep us out with limited resources.
Click to expand...
Because him being a quadriplegic was just ONE aspect. That entire chair was needed to keep Christopher Pike alive after the accident. Yes, Commadore Mendez mentioned Pike's battery driven heart; but that wasn't the only organ they had replaced the function of via that chair.
 
The Salt Umpire said:
It's not just a chair, it keeps TOS Pike alive.

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Noname Given said:
Because him being a quadriplegic was just ONE aspect. That entire chair was needed to keep Christopher Pike alive after the accident. Yes, Commodore Mendez mentioned Pike's battery driven heart; but that wasn't the only organ they had replaced the function of via that chair.
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But that was a choice Roddenberry made. If Pike was just a quadriplegic who couldn't speak, such would still be enough to justify Spock's harebrained Talos IV scheme. I think the extent of Pike's injuries, and that nightmarish black chair, was a purposeful horror element meant to stir up some of the old Twilight Zone feeling. And I think Vina's reveal in "The Cage" served the same purpose.
 
ZapBrannigan said:
But that was a choice Roddenberry made. If Pike was just a quadriplegic who couldn't speak, such would still be enough to justify Spock's harebrained Talos IV scheme. I think the extent of Pike's injuries, and that nightmarish black chair, was a purposeful horror element meant to stir up some of the old Twilight Zone feeling. And I think Vina's reveal in "The Cage" served the same purpose.
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Has someone who's used a lot of wheelchairs during my lifetime (mostly when I was a lot younger because of surgeries that I had as a result of my cerebral palsy) honestly I didn't find his wheelchair that much of a nightmare.

If anything it looked very self-contained; and didn't need to have a lot of extra equipment hooked into it to perform the functions it needed to do - so from my perspective that was a big plus.

It could easily keep him alive and still allow him to go where he needed to go without a lot of fuss.:shrug:
 
Yep. I was given hearing loss, cerebral palsy and retinopathy of prematurity by a Rh factor conflict between me and my mother. My gross motor is clunky but serviceable, it's my fine motor control that is a bother. That's why I edit my comments so much, because at some point midst screed, fingers fumbled, and I like spelling and punctuating correctly.

I lucked out tho. My twin died despite the same blood transfusion that saved me.
 
With some kind of suspension system to prevent decubitious ulcers. Maybe even a therapeutic massage manipulation system inside. There's also a need for waste disposal, something for feeding and drinking plus cleaning the suspension gel of skin dander and oil. Air filters for his lungs if he has them, he might be on permanent dialysis and mechanical blood oxygenation.
 
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