Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Captain Pike

The story of The Cage was retold almost exactly in the two-parter The Menagerie, but there was one detail that was changed, causing a bit of confusion among fans until recently.

At the end of The Cage, there was a scene of Vina and Pike running off together and holding hands. In The Cage, the Pike in that scene was meant to be an illusion of Pike, created by the Talosians to keep Vina company after Pike and the Enterprise left. In The Menagerie, the same scene was used to show the real Pike running off with Vina—his injuries cured by the Talosians' illusions.

In the Discovery episode If Memory Serves (in between The Cage and The Menagerie), Vina used the Talosians' powers to speak to Pike again, and finally cleared up some of the confusion about what happened to the illusory Pike.

She explained to him that the Talosians allowed her to live a lifetime with the illusory Pike (created from the part of him that lived on inside her mind), and told him how her relationship with his reconstruction helped her stay sane and tethered to what she once felt. Despite this, she always knew that he wasn't real, but the illusion of him was enough to fight her loneliness until he returned in The Menagerie.