perl@rdin.UUCP (Robert Perlberg) (02/08/85)
The only indication we have that Spock cannot lie is his own statement
to that effect in "The Enterprise Incident", which was obviously a lie
in itself since he lied to the Romulan commander about just about
everything else.
As for "The Cage" ("Menagerie"), don't try to apply anything you know
(or even think you know) about Spock to that pilot episode. The series
was drastically changed after that. Spock was not supposed to be
logical any more than the human characters in that episode. Number one
(Majel Barrett) was the totally logical one. After that pilot, they
decided to shuffle the roles around a bit.
Related flame:
Remember, too, that this is a TV show (GASP! No, no, somebody tell me
he's just kidding!). A lot of things were done "wrong" because the
writers were not all super-geniuses, they didn't have 20 months to
write them, they didn't have all of the money in the world with which
to produce the shows, and most of the people involved didn't even think
that anybody would CARE whether or not the show was "perfect". I've
seen lots of questions asked in this newsgroup that were answered with
speculation or derivations of speculation presented as if they were
documented fact. I understand why people create their own explanations
for these things but I think that in such situations you should label
your responses to indicate whether the material you are presenting is
speculative (out of your own head or transposed from a pseudo-reference
like the tech manual) or factual (derived from the episodes themselves
or from an authority such as Roddenberry or the episode author).
Robert Perlberg
Resource Dynamics Inc.
New York
philabs!rdin!perl