Ss Columbia
- Thread starter PCz911
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Or then these intrepid explorers only explore places where there is the potential for people... Sometimes they only find ruins. Sometimes they crash and burn while exploring. But while some sort of seeding needs to be postulated to explain why there is so much of this potential, it's simultaneously quite possible that most of the Trek universe indeed is uninhabited. And nobody but Charlie Evans crashes on uninhabited worlds because nobody goes there.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
And they have yet to find MH370 a year on. Who is to say Starfleet didn't do an extensive search for the Columbia which yielded no results. Besides couldn't the Talosians have made any passing ship who might have picked up the signal not see it, we did witness their ability to influence people light years away.
One possibility is that there was more than one survivor, but all were badly injured.
Vina is a composite of all the survivors, mix and match, the Talosians had never seen a intact Human and had to employ a certain amount of guess work as to what went where.
Can we even be 100% certain that the Talosians really do look like humanoids? The pasty giant-brain look might have been a illusion as well. Maybe they are asymmetrical blobs and really had no idea what normal human looked like. If everybody was flattened or cooked to a crisp when the Columbia crashed with the exception of Vina, they might not have known was a normal human looked like until the Enterprise wandered into range and caught their attention...
That's still a case of the audience taking the "looks" thing way too literally. It would not help in the slightest in patching up Vina that the Talosians would know what an intact human looks like on the outside. If they tried to pour Vina into a mold that created a healthy-looking human on the outside, they'd simply kill her!
Vina isn't hunchbacked because the Talosians thought humans ought to look like that. She's hunchbacked because her back is badly broken, in various ways the Talosians do not even recognize as they have never seen a human spine intact. Aesthetics have nothing to do with it.
(Although personally I'm convinced Vina in that episode is fine, healthy and ready to breed: the hunchbacked looks are just for pity. They do their job in convincing Pike that the Talosians, for all their shortcomings, can provide the best possible medical care for Vina - that is, the ultimate painkillers - and that Vina should be left behind.)
((That is, assuming any Vina even existed in the first place. Everything about the Columbia could be a ruse, there never having been such a ship and crew, and the Talosians simply tried to catch their first-ever humans, found them unsuitable, and let them go.))
Timo Saloniemi
Vina isn't hunchbacked because the Talosians thought humans ought to look like that. She's hunchbacked because her back is badly broken, in various ways the Talosians do not even recognize as they have never seen a human spine intact. Aesthetics have nothing to do with it.
(Although personally I'm convinced Vina in that episode is fine, healthy and ready to breed: the hunchbacked looks are just for pity. They do their job in convincing Pike that the Talosians, for all their shortcomings, can provide the best possible medical care for Vina - that is, the ultimate painkillers - and that Vina should be left behind.)
((That is, assuming any Vina even existed in the first place. Everything about the Columbia could be a ruse, there never having been such a ship and crew, and the Talosians simply tried to catch their first-ever humans, found them unsuitable, and let them go.))
Timo Saloniemi
Naw. The whole premise of the episode is that the Talosians have a female sample already and are trying to trap a male version. Saying that Vina herself was an illusion with the goal of capturing a first specimen seems too much a stretch.
On the other hand, I don't think the Talosians were conscerned with how Vina looked in the end, only making her "work" in the sense of functionality. On the one hand, they are potent telepaths and certainly Vina would have recollections of what Humans look like which they would have had access to, given their talents. On the other hand, they are not real up to speed on how to preform actual science... their machines built by their ancestors are breaking down due to extreme age, and no one knows how to repair them. They probably did what they could with the equipment available, operating it as well as they could, given that they are all a bunch of addicts that have no real training on how to operate this old stuff. I can imagine one of them accessing the thought records of a long dead Talosian scientist or doctor and using what remained of the memories to operate on Vina. But what remains is more impressions than understanding. The reality of Vina's body is what we see at the episode's end. She is a functional mess with a healthy brain--the victim of spaceship crash and being patched up by telepathic junkies who were doing as well as they could.
This is the very reason why they want to breed a slave race of humans: they need people who are not hooked on telepathic sensations to soberly repair and maintain the technology. They feel their own species is irreversibly hooked to the mind-records and what they have learned of Vina suggests that humans might fill the role well. But then they meet Pike, and later Number One and Yeoman Colt. Perhaps the unsuitability of humans is not simply the violent streak and "unique hatred of captivity" but also the fact that they would be capable of learning the use of the thought-records also and would in turn themselves become hopeless crack-heads, wallowing in ancient memories rather than doing their jobs.
--Alex
On the other hand, I don't think the Talosians were conscerned with how Vina looked in the end, only making her "work" in the sense of functionality. On the one hand, they are potent telepaths and certainly Vina would have recollections of what Humans look like which they would have had access to, given their talents. On the other hand, they are not real up to speed on how to preform actual science... their machines built by their ancestors are breaking down due to extreme age, and no one knows how to repair them. They probably did what they could with the equipment available, operating it as well as they could, given that they are all a bunch of addicts that have no real training on how to operate this old stuff. I can imagine one of them accessing the thought records of a long dead Talosian scientist or doctor and using what remained of the memories to operate on Vina. But what remains is more impressions than understanding. The reality of Vina's body is what we see at the episode's end. She is a functional mess with a healthy brain--the victim of spaceship crash and being patched up by telepathic junkies who were doing as well as they could.
This is the very reason why they want to breed a slave race of humans: they need people who are not hooked on telepathic sensations to soberly repair and maintain the technology. They feel their own species is irreversibly hooked to the mind-records and what they have learned of Vina suggests that humans might fill the role well. But then they meet Pike, and later Number One and Yeoman Colt. Perhaps the unsuitability of humans is not simply the violent streak and "unique hatred of captivity" but also the fact that they would be capable of learning the use of the thought-records also and would in turn themselves become hopeless crack-heads, wallowing in ancient memories rather than doing their jobs.
--Alex
The thing is, if she really looked like that, she couldn't breed. Not efficiently enough to create the slave race at least. But if she looked better in reality, and this was just to elicit pity so that the Talosians would be allowed to keep her for further breeding schemes, why did they let Pike go? The next human male would probably have an even worse hatred of captivity or whatnot.
The whole "disfigured Vina" act makes the best sense if it's pure fiction, a propaganda maneuver designed to send Pike off thinking "These Talosians are in fact pretty nice folks and giving them their privacy back is the greatest service I can do to this poor girl"...
Very few humans know what humans should look like. Inside, that is, and that's all that matters. Vina is an unlikely candidate for knowing, being called mere "crew member" rather than "ship's surgeon".
Might be. But the Talosians would have no need for such a creature. If they could use the illusory shape of Vina to catch a fertile male, they could also use a pure illusion for that - and a corresponding illusion to catch a fertile female. Studying either the memories of any human they find, or the records of the Columbia, they would learn that human starships tend to have mixed-sex crews (both the Columbia and the Enterprise do, at any rate), and there would thus be no need to sustain Vina.
Perhaps. Or then that was just a desperate excuse to stop Pike from pursuing that threatening agenda of "trade relations" and other imperialism that would be the final undoing of Talos.
Even if humans did grow too lazy to be slaves, that would take a few years, and they would do good work in that time. They could then be killed off and the next species introduced - but why bother with that when the Talosians could simply bring in the next batch of fresh humans?
Timo Saloniemi
Couldn't disagree more....they have no privacy and are completely at the beck and call and MERCY of the aliens.
...I guess the big question is, are the illusions enough to make you forget that?
It's not as if the lack of privacy were manifest in the lives of the captives. Living in an apartment block means many people can hear you make love to your spouse or have a spat with selfsame. But it's very easy to (actively) forget about that and never consider it a factor in either activity, if the neighbors aren't in the habit of banging the walls or pipes in response. From what we saw, the Talosians don't bother Vina all that much, and definitely don't interrupt her fantasies except when they cease to serve their purposes.
In just a few years, privacy really will be an illusion for all of us, with spytech becoming too ubiquitous to fight or even complain about. I doubt we will really mind, as tinfoil hats simply aren't fashionable or comfortable.
Timo Saloniemi
It's not as if the lack of privacy were manifest in the lives of the captives. Living in an apartment block means many people can hear you make love to your spouse or have a spat with selfsame. But it's very easy to (actively) forget about that and never consider it a factor in either activity, if the neighbors aren't in the habit of banging the walls or pipes in response. From what we saw, the Talosians don't bother Vina all that much, and definitely don't interrupt her fantasies except when they cease to serve their purposes.
In just a few years, privacy really will be an illusion for all of us, with spytech becoming too ubiquitous to fight or even complain about. I doubt we will really mind, as tinfoil hats simply aren't fashionable or comfortable.
Timo Saloniemi
I don't know what apartment block you've lived in or what kind of neighbours you have but most people prefer privacy. Whatever about neighbours hearing you make .... noise
! they can't see what you are doing and telepathy is even worse. The aliens would know every thought inside your head. Privacy should be a human right!
So you're suggesting that on a show where the transporters can be used to split people into good and evil duplicates, deage them, combine them into a still-living Tuvix, and so on, and 23rd century Starfleet doctors can give people pills that grow them functional kidneys, that the super-advanced Talosians wouldn't have the facility to do what they needed to do to fix Vina if they really wanted to?
Yep. Pakleds. The Organians avoid them like the plague at all the super-advanced species get-togethers.
Coming late to the party, the episode never says that the Talosians are more technologically advanced than the Federation; in fact, it says exactly the opposite: that they barely know how to repair their own machinery, let alone perform advanced surgery on an alien life-form.
Powerful telepaths who are great at manifesting psychic illusions, sure. Brilliant surgeons who are great at rebuilding human bone and tissue . . . not so much.
We might as well ask why a Nobel prize-winning poet can't perform open-heart surgery or develop a cure for cancer. The Talosians are all about creating illusions; the nuts and bolts of reality is not their strong suit.
Hear, hear. (Unless that, too, is just an illusion and a lie!)
Even if it were, it wouldn't make much difference: most rights are not and cannot be respected in practice...
Doesn't mean we cannot pretend that they are in force, though. Pike and Vina could do the same (assuming either of them is in fact alive and part of a slavery scheme; the track record of the Talosians doesn't make it likely that they could really accomplish that much!).
Timo Saloniemi
Even if it were, it wouldn't make much difference: most rights are not and cannot be respected in practice...
Doesn't mean we cannot pretend that they are in force, though. Pike and Vina could do the same (assuming either of them is in fact alive and part of a slavery scheme; the track record of the Talosians doesn't make it likely that they could really accomplish that much!).
Timo Saloniemi
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