That's exactly what it was, and attempts to rationalize it further are a foolish waste of time.
Why was Pike's wheelchair in "The Menagerie" so Poor ?
- Thread starter sonak
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That's exactly what it was, and attempts to rationalize it further are a foolish waste of time.
I always wanted to know what the hell "delta radiation" was. If there's one trope Trek abused, it was made-up radiation. It's one thing when you want to travel back in time or de-age people or do something else stupidly impossible that the story requires, but real ionizing radiation works perfectly well when all that you want to do is just melt a guy's face.
Bingo!
I mean, there's no way that you could build any kind of information system on the premise that a switch is either on or off, right?
Doofy continuity violations in this one include Spock suddenly being the communications officer aboard the Enterprise - he's apparently intercepted and deep-sixed months of "subspace chatter" about Pike's condition.
Morse code would have been a genius invention for the 23rd century. 
LOL Yes; I suppose they were!
Love the South Park take on it:
Officer: "Is that how it happened, ma'am?"
Lady in Pike's Chair: BEEP, BEEP
Officer: "Two beeps: Yes, Yes. Book 'em, Dano."
Or some such...
Officer: "Is that how it happened, ma'am?"
Lady in Pike's Chair: BEEP, BEEP
Officer: "Two beeps: Yes, Yes. Book 'em, Dano."
Or some such...
For how long given rate of neurolgical degeneration?
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. This consideration seriously undercuts Pike's credibility to still be on active duty. McCoy doesn't say he's a vegetable. The context in saying "his mind is as active as yours and mine" implies a fully cognitive mind without the ability to speak. If he couldn't think in terms of language anymore, he'd really be a vegetable. He wouldn't even be able to control his chair movements or Yes/No responses in a coherent manner. From what is implied in the episode, it looks like he could be given a battery of multiple choice questions and he'd be able to answer them intelligently.Timo said:
The use of "The Cage" helped defer budgetary costs for "The Menagerie", but there was still a lot of pressure to keep total costs down for the season. They probably didn't give a lot of thought about the chair beyond Yes/No. Allowing Pike to speak would mean too easy a way for Pike to tell on Spock. It was a key plot device for the story to be authored as it was. There was too much else for them to focus on rather than spending more time making the chair believable.
It's important to remember the context. Look at other productions at that time. There wasn't the kind of sophistication to represent a chair that could read Pike's mind and make a mechanical incarnation of his voice for him to speak.
What kind of bothered me about Pike was that they should have made it possible for him to speak, but that he wouldn't be able to say anything really intelligible due to damage from the Bertol rays. And thus, he'd have to rely upon the Yes/No mechanism. Also, his head should have been secured in some kind of support. Without it, he'd need to use his neck muscles to support his head as shown, which would mean shaking his head up/down and side-to-side should be possible. And if that's possible, no need for Yes/No, except of course with computer interfaces.
What credibility? He's gone - his career is in ruins for good, and he will never, ever recover. That's the whole point of his predicament.
Huh? If a guy can't use his left hand, he's a vegetable? If a gal can't pronounce "r", she's a vegetable?
That's the sort of thinking that should have been left in the 1960s. "Mind" isn't something that gets soiled for good by a little trauma to Broca's or Wernicke's. "Mind" comes in a great many varieties, most of them not "invalid" by today's standards. Hopefully, McCoy's standards would be less medieval, not more so...
Of course he could. That's what science has learned since the 1960s - that language is a separate functionality that a person can lose without losing anything else. Just like a person can lose the ability to control his movements but retain language.
Screw the context - writer intent is often misguided, writer imagination lacking, and the end result far too tied to its time to be of entertainment value later on. Here, happily, Pike's predicament has become more plausible as time goes on.
So he'd be a vegetable? After all, he couldn't speak intelligibly, so he must be a moron.
Why should that support be external?
Timo Saloniemi
If he were a vegetable, he wouldn't be on active duty. The fact that his mind is still there, as active as anyone else, he was given the courtesy of still being listed as active.
Very funny, insulting my intelligence gives you gratification, does it? If you can't keep the discourse civil, then there won't be any point in discussing anything. Being a vegetable is about the mind not being coherent. And his IS coherent--he just has too much physical damage to his body to be able to communicate beyond a simple Yes/No mechanism.
You proposed that Pike lost his ability to think in coherent language, to the point where even a mind meld wouldn't achieve any sense of what he's thinking. And this is what I contest. We THINK in language, because we're raised with language at a very early age. We make label assignments to objects and ideas, to organize them in complex ways to express ideas, which enables us to think in ways far superior than we could without language. By saying Pike can't think in language anymore would essentially mean he's a vegetable. That the damage was more than physical to his body, but also resulted in brain damage. You think he could understand anyone in that case? His Yes/No responses wouldn't have any connection to questions put to him. But clearly that wasn't the case. The damage to his body took away his ability to move anything with his body more than his eyes. Paralysis. Not brain damage. A neural hook-up allows basic chair movement and Yes/No responses... and who knows, maybe waste disposal. There's lots more to consider, but again the budget constrained the chair from being more elaborate.
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I wonder if the chair contained a Porta-Potti.
Because otherwise, how would we know it was there? Unless it was explained by a line of awkward expository dialogue.
Actually, Mendez says of Pike "We didn't have the heart to retire him." He's on active duty not because of his condition, but in spite of it and in honor of the great man Captain Pike is.
Yeah, it would have to! They weren't sophisticated enough to put in a micro transporter that would beam out his waste automatically.
Exactly! Thanks for your support, Scotpens.
That's true. Pike can move his chair around and provide yes/no responses to questions in an intelligent manner. His mind is there, it's just his body that has failed him. So, I do see how they kept him on out of respect. If his mind were in an incoherent state, I think it would be a different matter. He'd probably be retired in a convalescent home of some kind.Potemkin_prod said:
Another thing is, the Talosians were able to give Pike the illusion of an unfettered physical body for the rest of his life. This allowed his mind to have the freedom to be as he was. If he were a vegetable, or incoherent, he'd be zombie like and quite useless to the Talosians (as well as Vina). Their relationship is symbiotic. The Talosians get to be an audience to Pike's mind, while Pike can live on as though his body was normal.
Very, very much to the contrary, claiming the above is a Nelson Mundy "Ha ha!" level insult to every victim of aphasia out there, and completely ignorant of the advances in understanding the brain that I referred to.
Saying that Pike suffers from advanced aphasia shouldn't really alter the plot or the mood of the episode. It's just one among the many injuries his body is riddled with, another physical shortcoming that Talosian treatment will help alleviate.
Of course, it's interesting to note that even the "illusorily restored" Pike remains as speechless as ever in the final scenes of "The Menagerie"...
...But really, calling him a vegetable for that is an act beneath contempt today. Perhaps it wouldn't have been in the 1960s... In the same way calling Uhura a coon mightn't have been. Back then. Possibly.
If Pike were "of use" to the Talosians, Starfleet would probably feel compelled to nuke the planet till it glowed thirty miles deep. The conclusion of the episode is that Talosians (claim that they) give up their attempts to exploit Pike and mankind, and instead perform a purely benevolent act, apparently getting their reputation restored in the process.
In the objective sense, a severely aphasic Pike could still live a full life where the need to turn thoughts to words would never emerge. And if the Talosians were lying bastards who still wanted to continue with their breeding program, hell, aphasia would be the least of their worries. And if Pike still produced sperm, it would be no worry at all: aphasia wouldn't be in his genes, merely in his body, and his children would be born quite healthy.
Timo Saloniemi
And? This debate has two aspects: things that could have been done differently in "The Menagerie" to produce better drama, and the fallacy that a person with aphasia should be declared a vegetable.
If the latter aspect of this debate were to be carried out in person, your approach would be considered insulting in the loss-of-teeth-will-follow sense: essentially, you're counterfactually exaggerating an invalid's problem the same way one might call a stammering person a moron. And the counterfactuality is not in doubt: aphasia exists, in forms that may reduce a person into communicating with simple "yes" and "no" but without making his mind passive.
Whether aphasia ought to be quoted as the "excuse" for Pike's sorry state is a classic Trek debate of writer intent vs. dramatic convenience. Whether aphasia ought to be accepted as a bodily shortcoming for a person with an active mind is something different altogether: a classic Neutral Zone debate where there exists the politically correct side and the despicable side, and both are largely unrelated to the facts of the matter, which may be clear to both sides and fully acknowledged.
What I'm honestly interested in is whether you acknowledge the existence of aphasia as an ailment that doesn't reduce the victim to a vegetable the way many other types of brain damage do.
Timo Saloniemi
If the latter aspect of this debate were to be carried out in person, your approach would be considered insulting in the loss-of-teeth-will-follow sense: essentially, you're counterfactually exaggerating an invalid's problem the same way one might call a stammering person a moron. And the counterfactuality is not in doubt: aphasia exists, in forms that may reduce a person into communicating with simple "yes" and "no" but without making his mind passive.
Whether aphasia ought to be quoted as the "excuse" for Pike's sorry state is a classic Trek debate of writer intent vs. dramatic convenience. Whether aphasia ought to be accepted as a bodily shortcoming for a person with an active mind is something different altogether: a classic Neutral Zone debate where there exists the politically correct side and the despicable side, and both are largely unrelated to the facts of the matter, which may be clear to both sides and fully acknowledged.
What I'm honestly interested in is whether you acknowledge the existence of aphasia as an ailment that doesn't reduce the victim to a vegetable the way many other types of brain damage do.
Timo Saloniemi
With respect, unless you're a neurologist I don't think you can make any statement about how the mind of someone who suffers from aphasia works without being one yourself (and I'd wager you'd have a hard time communicating that to us here).
In the context of trying to rationalise things from a TV show made over 40 years ago given what we know today as an amusing thought exercise (remember, "it's just a TV show" folks!), I think Timo has come up with an elegant and consistent explanation. Bravo!
We're not told he has any brain damage. If he'd lost the ability to comprehend words (aphasia), his responses to Yes/No wouldn't follow any sense, because of an inability to comprehend language. Trying to imply aphasia would make the whole situation of Pike much more complicated.
Kirk asks Pike "Chris, do you really want to go there?" (with the Talosians) Pike blinks "Yes"... random response due to inability to understand the question? How do they know for real he's responding with understanding? It would make the story ridiculous to believe he isn't, that he's suffering from aphasia.
This whole conversation started with the question about Pike's chair, why it was so "poor." It has been raised that it was for budgetary reasons. There wasn't enough script time to cover numerous details about Pike and his chair: How does Pike eat? Does he have an intravenous food system, with a little compartment where synthesized liquid food canisters are inserted? What about waste disposal? How come he doesn't have a neural socket to connect his brain directly to a computer? If they can rig him up to operate his chair with his mind, why not that? Or, why not some neural interface to a computer processor that can translate his thoughts to words on a display screen on the front of his chair? And what about his mind? What exactly did they do to test him to be sure that his mind is coherent, that he can still understand language? Etc., etc, etc... Again, not enough time in the two-part episode to devote to this. We have to make certain assumptions. And from what is said in the episode, we gather that his chair is designed to take care of his life support. That his mind is active and normal, just trapped in a body that can't speak (no muscular control of his mouth/jaw). So he's rigged up to a Yes/No communication system so at least he can answer those kinds of questions put to him. If he couldn't understand language, what would be the point??
Kirk asks Pike "Chris, do you really want to go there?" (with the Talosians) Pike blinks "Yes"... random response due to inability to understand the question? How do they know for real he's responding with understanding? It would make the story ridiculous to believe he isn't, that he's suffering from aphasia.
This whole conversation started with the question about Pike's chair, why it was so "poor." It has been raised that it was for budgetary reasons. There wasn't enough script time to cover numerous details about Pike and his chair: How does Pike eat? Does he have an intravenous food system, with a little compartment where synthesized liquid food canisters are inserted? What about waste disposal? How come he doesn't have a neural socket to connect his brain directly to a computer? If they can rig him up to operate his chair with his mind, why not that? Or, why not some neural interface to a computer processor that can translate his thoughts to words on a display screen on the front of his chair? And what about his mind? What exactly did they do to test him to be sure that his mind is coherent, that he can still understand language? Etc., etc, etc... Again, not enough time in the two-part episode to devote to this. We have to make certain assumptions. And from what is said in the episode, we gather that his chair is designed to take care of his life support. That his mind is active and normal, just trapped in a body that can't speak (no muscular control of his mouth/jaw). So he's rigged up to a Yes/No communication system so at least he can answer those kinds of questions put to him. If he couldn't understand language, what would be the point??
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