Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review Vina, a character who appeared on a few episodes of TOS before appearing again on Discovery this week. Note that spoilers regarding Discovery will be at a minimum here.
With the character of Captain Pike coming back to a bigger role on Discovery than he had on TOS, you knew the show writers would not miss the opportunity to tie in some TOS stories and characters during his appearance on Discovery. Although Spock is of course the featured attraction on season 2 of Discovery, another character from Pike's past has now appeared in Discovery, that being Vina.
Vina first appears in The Cage, the pilot episode where Captain Pike is leading the Enterprise. She is a crewmember on the SS Columbia, which is a ship that crashes in 2236 on Talos IV while carrying a group of scientists on an expedition to the Talos star group. She turns out to be the sole survivor, and the Talosians nurse her back to health when they take an interest in the human race.
This leads to the events of the The Cage, in which the Talosians lure the Enterprise to their planet and select Captain Pike to be a mate for Vina, hoping they can learn about human sexuality and companionship in the process. However, the Enterprise crew proves that they would prefer death to life in captivity, and the Talosians lost interest in having humans grow to reclaim the surface of their planet. Vina chooses to be left behind rather than go with the Enterprise because her beauty is just an illusion created by the Talosians, and she would rather maintain that than die with the humans.
Footage from her encounter with Pike is seen again in The Menagerie two-part episode, and she is determined to still be alive when the Enterprise returns to Talos 13 years after this original appearance. With Discovery taking place 10 years before TOS, that means it's only been 3 years since the events of The Cage when Pike is aboard Discovery. And that leads to Vina's appearance in the Discovery episode If Memory Serves.
While the purpose of her visit to Captain Pike will be left in spoiler land for this segment, Vina's reappearance in Discovery allows the show writers to explain what happened to Vina after the events of The Cage. This helps bring a little closure to a relationship with Pike and a story that was aborted thanks to the reshuffling of the crew after the original TOS pilot.
QUOTE: ""There's something I need to say. When you came to Talos, I'd been alone for so many years. I never imagined happiness or love. And when the Talosians decided we were...unsuited for each other...when you left, it was worse. Because I knew what I'd lost.""
In TOS, Vina was played by Susan Oliver, who spent multiple weeks preparing for and filming the role thanks to all the different appearances she plays, including learning to dance so she can play an Orion slave girl version of herself. Oliver acted for about 30 years before her death in 1990, including memorable small roles on shows like Love, American Style, Magnum, P.I., and Murder, She Wrote. In Discovery the role was played by Melissa George, who is an Australian actress who has starred in the movie Triangle and the series Hunted. She can be seen playing Charlotte as a co-star in the Bad Mothers series currently airing on Australian TV.
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