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This Side of Paradise and Pike

I don't think SNW has broken canon. It may have bent it a wee bit...

As much as I love Mount's Pike, I'd rather not change his future *as far as we've seen it*. I have no objection to finding a way to fix him (and/or Vina) after the events seen in The Menagerie. In fact, it might be interesting seeing him adjust to normal life again. And boy, the drama possibilities in Vina being "fixed" are endless! Additionally, they could easily find that they don't have what it takes to have a good relationship.
 
As much as I love Mount's Pike, I'd rather not change his future *as far as we've seen it*. I have no objection to finding a way to fix him (and/or Vina) after the events seen in The Menagerie. In fact, it might be interesting seeing him adjust to normal life again. And boy, the drama possibilities in Vina being "fixed" are endless! Additionally, they could easily find that they don't have what it takes to have a good relationship.
I wouldn't mind them giving Pike a happier post-"Menagerie" ending, but I would really dislike it if they have Vina fade into the background or end her relationship with Pike. We've had nearly 70 years of Vina being Pike's endgame, and I'd hate to see them undo that part.
 
Well, the end of Menagerie lets us suggest that Pike can overcome his disability with help of the Talosians.
So it's actually a happy end.
In SNW Pike thinks he will die what isn'tn true.
 
Well, the end of Menagerie lets us suggest that Pike can overcome his disability with help of the Talosians.
So it's actually a happy end.
In SNW Pike thinks he will die what isn'tn true.

He knows he won’t die, he’ll just be horribly disfigured and confined to a Beep Chair.

But yes, we know what he doesn’t know.
 
Well, the end of Menagerie lets us suggest that Pike can overcome his disability with help of the Talosians.
So it's actually a happy end.

No, the intent was just that the Talosians would let him live in an illusion of being well again, like they gave Vina an illusion of being young and beautiful. Vina's true condition made it quite clear that the Talosians have no skill in human medicine; all they can offer is illusion. That's the whole reason their society decayed and they needed to abduct outsiders, because they'd become so addicted to illusion that they'd lost their other skills.
 
No, the intent was just that the Talosians would let him live in an illusion of being well again, like they gave Vina an illusion of being young and beautiful. Vina's true condition made it quite clear that the Talosians have no skill in human medicine; all they can offer is illusion. That's the whole reason their society decayed and they needed to abduct outsiders, because they'd become so addicted to illusion that they'd lost their other skills.
Sometimes an illusion is better than the truth, especially when it feels like the truth ;)
 
The whole point of Pike is that he knows full well the fate that awaits him (confined to a beep-beep chair) and yet he ACCEPTS his fate. In the grand scheme of things, he knows his place.

That's a level of humility that one rarely sees in Trek.

As for the Talosians, it still kills me that their telepathic abilities can sustain such realistic illusions, and STILL they have no idea what a human body is supposed to look like or how it is supposed to fit together? Really? :guffaw:
 
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The whole point of Pike is that he knows full well the fate that awaits him (confined to a beep-beep chair) and yet he ACCEPTS his fate. In the grand scheme of things, he knows his place.

That's a level of humility that one rarely sees in Trek.

As for the Talosians, it still kills me that their telepathic abilities can sustain such realistic illusions, and STILL they have no idea what a human body is supposed to look like or how it is supposed to fit together? Really? :guffaw:
No X-Ray Vision
 
Telepathy isn't magical insight, it's just reading minds. If Vina was the only survivor, then even if she was conscious, she wouldn't have had the medical knowledge of how to repair her injuries.

Although I suppose the whole "They had never seen a human being" bit would've made more sense in the original outlined premise where the Talosians were "crab creatures."
 
Although I suppose the whole "They had never seen a human being" bit would've made more sense in the original outlined premise where the Talosians were "crab creatures."

Indeed.

The Talosians, as we saw them onscreen, were still humanoid. Even if they'd never seen an actual human being, one might expect them to put Vina back together as a Talosian might be. There's really no excuse for Vina to have been as horribly misshapen as she was. Apart from the obviously larger head, a Talosian looks pretty much the same as a human.

and I'm just going to hazard a guess that the Talosians couldn't have, for example, read the computer systems of the Columbia (assuming any of it survived the crash) to gain some kind of insight as to what Vina was supposed to look like.

Yeah, I think it's more likely that the Talosians being "crabs" - while obviously not being so onscreen - somehow survived the script editing.
 
Indeed.

The Talosians, as we saw them onscreen, were still humanoid. Even if they'd never seen an actual human being, one might expect them to put Vina back together as a Talosian might be. There's really no excuse for Vina to have been as horribly misshapen as she was. Apart from the obviously larger head, a Talosian looks pretty much the same as a human.

and I'm just going to hazard a guess that the Talosians couldn't have, for example, read the computer systems of the Columbia (assuming any of it survived the crash) to gain some kind of insight as to what Vina was supposed to look like.

Yeah, I think it's more likely that the Talosians being "crabs" - while obviously not being so onscreen - somehow survived the script editing.
Humans and Talosians may look marginally similar, but there’s no reason to think their differently-evolved insides are anything like each other. Presumably, what they did with Vina was the best they could do — and probably a remarkable job at that, if it was just basically physical surgery.

(EDIT: That’s the other thing: Everybody reacts like Vina turned out a piteous, horrible mess — but she basically just looks like a senior citizen with a hump. )
 
Although I suppose the whole "They had never seen a human being" bit would've made more sense in the original outlined premise where the Talosians were "crab creatures."

The idea in the Menagerie is that "everything works" but the shapes are off because they didn't know what to do. Except Vina (whose mind they can read) had see LOTS of human beings. If they can figure out how to repair all the functioning organs (the speech capabilities seem a bit rough) it would seem that getting the aesthetics right shouldn't be that hard.

For a helpless society that lives on illusion they still manage to repair a near-fatally wounded person and keep her alive and fed for twenty years.
 
Maybe they ARE crab creatures, and the humanoid, big head Talosian appearance is only another illusion... :vulcan:

That would work, except for the scenes with only Talosians in them. If the humanoid appearance is an illusion, why would they use it when they're alone?
 
Maybe they ARE crab creatures, and the humanoid, big head Talosian appearance is only another illusion... :vulcan:

That's a cool idea, but if anything, it's too frightening. Being captured and caged by little Meg Wylie is one thing. By giant crab creatures is something else entirely, because they would inherently have no empathy for us whatsoever.

When humans catch and cage crabs, the crabs are in a lot of trouble. It's not going to go well for them. We should assume the reverse would also be true. So I'll take my Talosians as petite humanoids.
 
That would work, except for the scenes with only Talosians in them. If the humanoid appearance is an illusion, why would they use it when they're alone?

Everything we saw in "The Menagerie" was imagery projected to the Enterprise by the Talosians, so they would've maintained the illusion there. That wasn't the case in "The Cage," but "The Menagerie" is the canonical version.
 
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