Though women seem to feature in more important roles in this pilot than is usual in the series proper (i.e. Number One and the yeoman that figures into the plot), their actual role is as seducer or sex object. The yeoman is described as having 'unusually strong female drives', and it is described that the Orion slave girls 'actually like being taken advantage of'.
Our first glimpse of the crew of the *Enterprise*.
Captain Pike and Spock.
The good doctor. Sometimes, he says, a man will tell his bartender things he'll never tell his doctor.
Spock and Pike enjoy some (apparently) very amusing native flora.
Ack! It's the planet of old men!
Aliens! Mean ones that kidnap you and mess with your head.
Vina has been done up as an Orion slave girl. We're told that they "actually like being taken advantage of".
The aliens pick out the useful members of the crew–useful for their purposes. Number One, who is very intelligent and secretly has the hots for Pike, and Yeoman Colt, who conveniently also has the hots for Pike, and apparently has "unusually strong female drives". Colt's character was described by Roddenberry in the outline thus:
Except for problems in naval parlance, J. M. Colt would be called a yeo-woman. With a strip-queen figure even a uniform cannot hide, Colt serves as Captain's secretary, reporter, bookkeeper--and with surprising efficiency. She undoubtedly dreams of serving Robert April with equal efficiency in more personal departments.
Undoubtedly.
The whole group, as Number One takes the initiative and sets her gun to overload and destroy them all, rather than create a race of slaves.
Vina, as she truly looks. One of the more effective lines in the episode:
They found me in the wreckage, dying. A lump of flesh. They rebuilt me. Everything works, but they had never seen a human. They had no guide for putting me back together.
So they give her an imaginary Pike, and she's apparently satisfied with that. Good for her, I guess.
