Just thought about this recently and appreciate commentary.... Toward the end of the first pilot when Vina's true appearance is revealed, she says the Talosians had never seen a human and had no guide for reassembling her. However, since the Talosians read alien minds and create illusions, they should have seen Vina, as well as the rest of her crewmates, in their pre-crash form, and based on Vina's memories, so reassembling shouldn't have been a problem. Thoughts?
The Cage/ Menagerie fault
- Thread starter billsantos
- Start date
I guess you are assuming that she was conscious after the crash and had the needed medical information for them to work from. That and the fact that the Talosians had lost most of their technical abilities (which most likely included medical prowess) makes it highly unlikely that they would be able to do much more than stabilize her. Once she regained consciousness, her actual physical form wouldn't have mattered anyways, so why would they risk losing such an interesting specimen attempting to do cosmetic changes?
This is a race that had gotten so addicted to illusion that they couldn't repopulate the surface of their planet or repair technologies that they once had mastered. It was the addiction to illusion that led to their downfall and made having contact with them dangerous (because it could be learned by others).
This is a race that had gotten so addicted to illusion that they couldn't repopulate the surface of their planet or repair technologies that they once had mastered. It was the addiction to illusion that led to their downfall and made having contact with them dangerous (because it could be learned by others).
These "degenerate survivors" of a supposedly higher civilization were more than clever enough to save the life and restore (by her own account) full functioning to an alien life form that had crash-landed in an interstellar spaceship. Yet they were supposedly incompetent mechanics. There's a lot of faulty logic to "The Cage."
Wasn't Vina a child, though, when rescued? I would imagine as she aged naturally as a human, the bad outwardly physical patch job by the Talosians would be exaggerated more. Plus, if you are more concerned with getting something to work internally, you might assume the outward stuff was just fine.
Next.
The Talosians were originally going to resemble large arachnids, IIRC, and the line would have worked better. They became humanoids in appearance when the Screen Actors Guild reported they had no large arachnids on their books.
Similarly, I was bemused how Gropler Zorn (TNG's pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint") was so outraged at a Betazoid attending his meeting with the human Enterprise crew - but when the scene was written, no one knew what a Betazoid was going to look like. Three or four breasts had been suggested.
Betazoids have black (or no) irises, which is how they can be distinguished visually from humans.
Also, I often think that Trek species which are hard to tell from humans by sight may be easily distinguishable by scent, something we couldn't detect while watching on television or film. After all, we've seen lots of episodes where a character was immediately recognized as human, even though visually they could just as easily have been something like an Argelian, Rigel IV native, or the like. Maybe the other characters can tell the difference by smell. After all, ENT did establish that humans have an odor that Vulcans find particularly strong.
No, that was the claim made by the illusory survivors - later, Number One announces that there was "a Vina listed as an adult crewwoman" and begins to calculate in the cattiest fashion that the Vina they're seeing as a young woman is (gasp) middle-aged at best.
Wouldn't the Talosians need to see into a doctor's mind in order to have properly "repaired" Vina? Knowing what someone is supposed to look like on the outside is little help when their bones are crushed and organs squelched.
Of course. But, at first glance, so do many humans with very dark brown eyes. I teach several Pakistani and Afghani students who appear to have Betazoid irises. I just found it amusing, knowing that the production team had had numerous talks/arguments about what a Betazoid might look like (Troi was using the Ilia template from "Phase II" - and female Deltans were stunningly bald, and gave out pheromones that gave men erections), and yet Gropler Zorn was able to take one glance at an otherwise human-looking woman and know she was a Betazoid.
Perhaps they also smell funny?
number6
Vice Admiral
She did kinda behave a little "cougary" at that.
Which is simply more evidence contradicting the assertion that they'd degenerated to the point of incapability. They clearly have their own advanced medical knowledge and technology, or Vina would have died.
And hey, rather remarkably the Talosians are bilaterally symmetrical - would it have been such a leap for them to conclude that both of Vina's shoulders, say, should be the same?
A slightly more plausible explanation for her appearence would be not that they didn't know but that they simply didn't care - they were just trying for whatever reason to save the life of a simpler creature, like a useful farm animal, and cosmetic surgery for the sake of the animal's hypothetical self-esteem was just not on the menu. When Vina recovered the Talosians came to the conclusion through observation that the species had unusual potential and then became concerned with her state of mind.
Even that wouldn't probably help much, because a doctor's mind is pretty much helpless without a bunch of colleagues, books and tools around.
People seem to take Vina's words far too literally here. "Never seen a human before" is not an expression for the failure to casually glance over an intact human's exterior - it's an assertion that humans were alien to the Talosians. And the inability to make Vina pretty did not stem from a lack of understanding of what was pretty - it stemmed from a fundamental failure to heal a badly hurt human.
The Talosians need not be particularly "degenerate" in order to be unable to heal a badly hurt human. Mankind today isn't particularly adept at healing badly hurt humans, either; many car crash victims end up looking like Vina and never get much better despite years upon years of further surgery. Getting both shoulders back at the same height is usually beyond the capabilities of human surgery today; even evening out the length of two legs is pretty darn difficult.
It'll apparently get a little better by the 24th century, though...
Timo Saloniemi
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