"The Menagerie" questions
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Pike could understand spoken English. He didn't need people tapping to him. But he couldn't perform Morse tapping because of his injury.
Futurama's Star Trek episode did a Pike-chair parody that involved Morse code, though.
OTOH, audiences at the time could not have comprehended what audiences of medical procedurals today could take for granted: that Pike would have been unable to use language.
That's a fairly common type of brain injury, actually. Pike could easily comprehend what was being said, but even if he had his vocal cords intact (perhaps he did?), he could not parse together an intelligible sentence. That definitely and fully qualifies as "his mind is still in there": it doesn't make him a lesser man any more than the loss of his legs would. But it totally precludes crude solutions like voice boxes.
One could even pretend the writers were blessed with foresight befitting science fiction here. Although I trust Roddenberry and his little helpers were not really thinking in those terms.
Timo Saloniemi
That's a fairly common type of brain injury, actually. Pike could easily comprehend what was being said, but even if he had his vocal cords intact (perhaps he did?), he could not parse together an intelligible sentence. That definitely and fully qualifies as "his mind is still in there": it doesn't make him a lesser man any more than the loss of his legs would. But it totally precludes crude solutions like voice boxes.
One could even pretend the writers were blessed with foresight befitting science fiction here. Although I trust Roddenberry and his little helpers were not really thinking in those terms.
Timo Saloniemi
Another possibility is that most forms of physical disability were conquered centuries before, so that when a new form of untreatable paralysis induced by delta radiation was encountered, it had been so long since anyone had needed assistive technologies that the Federation doctors were pretty much restarting from square one. Given time, they might've tracked down tech like gaze-tracking speech synthesizers in their historical studies, but Pike's treatment was still in an early stage.
Although Timo has a point that it could've been a matter of Pike's language center being damaged. Though he seemed quite capable of understanding speech, and I'm not sure whether the language center can be damaged in such a way that inhibits forming coherent speech without impairing the understanding of speech.
Although Timo has a point that it could've been a matter of Pike's language center being damaged. Though he seemed quite capable of understanding speech, and I'm not sure whether the language center can be damaged in such a way that inhibits forming coherent speech without impairing the understanding of speech.
Basically, damage specific to the Broca region has high odds of impairing expression (speech, writing, sign language, Morse etc.) without impairing comprehension. It appears to be currently considered a type of "motoric" impairment foremost, yet specific to language itself rather than to expression such as speech.
If the TOS society can almost trivially make the corpse of Spock ambulatory, I have difficulty believing they would despair in face of other types of "motor loss" as such. Rather, I'd think paralysis etc. would have been conquered, a quadruplegic only needing to wear a fanny bag of machinery to restore mobility - and Pike's chair is there because he no longer has a lower body...
Timo Saloniemi
If the TOS society can almost trivially make the corpse of Spock ambulatory, I have difficulty believing they would despair in face of other types of "motor loss" as such. Rather, I'd think paralysis etc. would have been conquered, a quadruplegic only needing to wear a fanny bag of machinery to restore mobility - and Pike's chair is there because he no longer has a lower body...
Timo Saloniemi
Yes, as Timo says. The brain area for speech comprehension and speech formation are actually two different areas. This is why you can have multiple types of aphasia, such as Broca's aphasia, where comprehension of words is intact, but the patient cannot form sentences, has word confusion, or cannot repeat words back. Wernicke's aphasia involves auditory processing and the individual cannot understand what is being spoken to them. Often times the patients cannot recognize written speech either.
That is a quick summary, but there are two different areas of the brain for speech formation and speech comprehension, so Pike's condition is at least somewhat realistic.
Getting back to the original question, the one thing that jumps out is that if the Talosians can project all the way to Starbase 11, and contact with Talos IV is so dangerous that capital punishment is required to suppress it, then what would the Federation do when all is said and done? Evacuate Starbase 11 I would think. We have NO indication that any Talosian is off Talos IV (they seem technologically atrophied and incapable of it) or that they are staging or boosting their telepathy by some off-planet method.
The Klingons would not be immune to Talosian illusions or mind control. Recall that, while Pike was caged up underground with Vina, we learned that the Talosians "can't read primitive emotions". That did not effect the Talosians' ability to make Pike and Vina experience any illusion the Magistrate chose for them, even while Pike filled his mind with hate, which the Magistrate referred to as "wrong thinking."
If a Klingon ship, or fleet or ships, discovered Talos IV, the natives would easily trick the Klingons into thinking there was nothing of value there, or that Talos was about to go supernova, or that the surface of the planet was a sea of volcanic molten lava, or that their sensors malfunctioned and it turned out there "really" was no planet there at all. If the Klingons persisted, the Talosians would simply trick the Klingons into accidentally self-destructing or piloting their ship into the sun or crashing into an asteroid or whatever.
A race of beings capable of tricking Kirk into a starbase shuttlecraft and making him think he was flying through deep space with a flag officer on board, all from "six days away at maximum warp", would have no problem keeping away unwanted guests. About the only lifeforms depicted in TOS that could possibly be immune to the Talosians would be other super-races like the Metrons, Organians and the Melkotians.
If a Klingon ship, or fleet or ships, discovered Talos IV, the natives would easily trick the Klingons into thinking there was nothing of value there, or that Talos was about to go supernova, or that the surface of the planet was a sea of volcanic molten lava, or that their sensors malfunctioned and it turned out there "really" was no planet there at all. If the Klingons persisted, the Talosians would simply trick the Klingons into accidentally self-destructing or piloting their ship into the sun or crashing into an asteroid or whatever.
A race of beings capable of tricking Kirk into a starbase shuttlecraft and making him think he was flying through deep space with a flag officer on board, all from "six days away at maximum warp", would have no problem keeping away unwanted guests. About the only lifeforms depicted in TOS that could possibly be immune to the Talosians would be other super-races like the Metrons, Organians and the Melkotians.
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If he could beep for "yes" or "no", I don't see what was stopping him from beeping in morse code. He clearly understood what was being said to him, so he could send morse code messages through the beeping.
^As discussed above, maybe he had brain damage that interfered with his ability to form speech. That doesn't just mean sounds, it means remembering the words and how to put them together in sentences. With that kind of damage, he couldn't communicate in Morse or anything else.
If general order 7 was to do with Talos IV, then just what was general order 4 in Turnabout Intruder? I always thought it was a script error but...
JB
Pike underwent an adventure that revealed a grave threat to the Federation, and a General Order clause about death penalty was activated as the consequence. Pike is but one starship skipper, and supposedly not a particularly adventurous one at this point, either; naturally, the other dozen flying "ships like this", plus the potentially hundreds flying other types, would also encounter threats, and some would be dealt with by activating GO death penalty clauses.
(Yes, we can thank a script error for this piece of fictional plausibility! And it's another appearance of 47 in Trek, too, sort of...)
Since nothing seems to have gone all the way down south despite "The Menagerie", it can be deduced that the Talosians are behaving, are not a major threat at the moment, and can be tolerated. If that situation changes one day... Well, that's the end of everything, since there's no known means of opposing the Talosian powers. But it also follows that Starfleet would be unlikely to actually do anything. Except remove the GO7 death penalty (and introduce the GO4 death penalty for some other hugely important reason, because starships and their intrepid captains probably come up with such things every few years).
We should appreciate that these are GENERAL orders, not specific ones. No doubt the Talos crisis touched upon the general subject matter of the already existing GO7 somehow (and some other crisis that of GO4, etc), rather than Starfleet suddenly formulating these General Orders with low numbers specifically in response to an event that happened centuries after the founding of the organization.
And many a crisis should relate to GO1, which supposedly says "Thou Shalt Obey the Prime Directive"! But whether any warrants a death penalty clause... Well, perhaps once or twice in Starfleet history, but apparently not during the adventures of our heroes. The death penalty is used sparingly, obviously. But it is used, and redshirts apparently always stand by to organize an execution squad if so ordered!
Timo Saloniemi
(Yes, we can thank a script error for this piece of fictional plausibility! And it's another appearance of 47 in Trek, too, sort of...)
Or then simply give up. If they mistook the range of Talosian powers once already, they may be mistaken again: there's simply no way to be sure, and nothing to be done to contain the Talosian "threat", such as it is.
Since nothing seems to have gone all the way down south despite "The Menagerie", it can be deduced that the Talosians are behaving, are not a major threat at the moment, and can be tolerated. If that situation changes one day... Well, that's the end of everything, since there's no known means of opposing the Talosian powers. But it also follows that Starfleet would be unlikely to actually do anything. Except remove the GO7 death penalty (and introduce the GO4 death penalty for some other hugely important reason, because starships and their intrepid captains probably come up with such things every few years).
We should appreciate that these are GENERAL orders, not specific ones. No doubt the Talos crisis touched upon the general subject matter of the already existing GO7 somehow (and some other crisis that of GO4, etc), rather than Starfleet suddenly formulating these General Orders with low numbers specifically in response to an event that happened centuries after the founding of the organization.
And many a crisis should relate to GO1, which supposedly says "Thou Shalt Obey the Prime Directive"! But whether any warrants a death penalty clause... Well, perhaps once or twice in Starfleet history, but apparently not during the adventures of our heroes. The death penalty is used sparingly, obviously. But it is used, and redshirts apparently always stand by to organize an execution squad if so ordered!
Timo Saloniemi
If GO1 was a death penalty and was used for The Prime Directive then Captain Ronald Tracey was for the high jump when he got back to the nearest Star Base! But somehow I see that he'd have spent the rest of his days in a penal colony to be honest!
JB
JB
It's not "GO X" has the death penalty, probably, but "GO X has a range of sanctions and in some cases the death penalty can be activated".
But why with Tracey? He was defending locals against genocide by brutes, with no known selfish motivation (he could have saved his own bacon simply by allying with the murderous Yangs). Kirk always got away Scot free defending locals against alien politics and ideals by themselves, typically with phasers.
Sure, gunning down fellow Starfleet personnel was naughty. But that's unlikely to be cause for execution, as "Kirk"/Lester in "Turnabout Intruder" was ordering the deaths of "his" own officers but the other heroes did not feel this in any way touched upon the only real death penalty in the books at the time...
As for spending a long time in a penal colony, in TOS that was only for those criminals who could not be cured of their mental illness of criminality (Elba II). The regular criminal only spent enough time to get cured (Tantalus V and other similar facilities). Would it be difficult and time-consuming to cure Tracey of what must be his self-perceived innocence? More so than with Garth, or less?
Timo Saloniemi
But why with Tracey? He was defending locals against genocide by brutes, with no known selfish motivation (he could have saved his own bacon simply by allying with the murderous Yangs). Kirk always got away Scot free defending locals against alien politics and ideals by themselves, typically with phasers.
Sure, gunning down fellow Starfleet personnel was naughty. But that's unlikely to be cause for execution, as "Kirk"/Lester in "Turnabout Intruder" was ordering the deaths of "his" own officers but the other heroes did not feel this in any way touched upon the only real death penalty in the books at the time...
As for spending a long time in a penal colony, in TOS that was only for those criminals who could not be cured of their mental illness of criminality (Elba II). The regular criminal only spent enough time to get cured (Tantalus V and other similar facilities). Would it be difficult and time-consuming to cure Tracey of what must be his self-perceived innocence? More so than with Garth, or less?
Timo Saloniemi
It must be. Both episodes treated the order in question as the one and only death penalty on the books; they just disagreed about which order it was.
Could it be that it was the same Talos IV order, but three of the earlier ones had been revoked in the interim, so it was moved up from 7 to 4?
It would be a bit odd for Starfleet to number its General Orders so that some obscure bit about going to Talos IV, devised more than a hundred years into the existence of the organization, got the prestigious seventh place... Whether those were running numbers or something else.
One set the precedent of "the only one" being a great mystery to everybody involved; the other treated "the only one" as something everybody readily recognized as not applying to the situation at hand. So there's a slight difference in dramatic treatment there.
Timo Saloniemi
One set the precedent of "the only one" being a great mystery to everybody involved; the other treated "the only one" as something everybody readily recognized as not applying to the situation at hand. So there's a slight difference in dramatic treatment there.
Timo Saloniemi
It must be. Both episodes treated the order in question as the one and only death penalty on the books; they just disagreed about which order it was.
Could it be that it was the same Talos IV order, but three of the earlier ones had been revoked in the interim, so it was moved up from 7 to 4?
Talos 4, general order 4? I think it was a simple mistake, especially at the end of the line, they knew it by then and I doubt the people that would have tried to fix it were still employed or cared.
^Yes, obviously it was a mistake in reality. I'm just trying to make up a possible in-universe excuse.
I know I read somewhere that it was a script error of dialogue ("there is no death penalty in Starfleet") that got picked up by someone at Deforrest Research who recalled the events of The Menagerie and drew the Trek writers to it. Unfortunately that person was relying on memory and when they recalled the wrong General Order number in their memo. Even more unfortunately, no-one on the Trek writing team noticed the change (from 4 to 7) either!!!
So much for the "real world" reasons
I'm really enjoying the in-universe explanations!
So much for the "real world" reasons
I'm really enjoying the in-universe explanations!
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