About

Big Brain Alien is a reaction image and image macro series featuring a picture of a Talosian alien from the pilot episode of the 1960's television series Star Trek. Online, the image is typically captioned with jokes about feelings of intellectual superiority, bearing many similarities to "tfw too intelligent".

Origin

In February 1965, the pilot episode of Star Trek titled "The Cage" was screened to NBC, in which Captain Christopher Pike is captured by Talosian^[3] aliens with large, bulbous heads (shown below).^[1] While the pilot was initially rejected, it was released on VHS in October 1986. Two years later, the episode premiered on television where it was restored to full color.

On June 9th, 2008, a screen-captured image of a Talosian was included in a gallery titled "Corny Star Trek Aliens" on the internet humor site Ebaum's World^[6] (shown below).

Spread

On July 23rd, 2015, the Talosian picture photoshopped with Nicolas Cage's face was submitted to the /r/onetruegod^[7] subreddit (shown below).

On March 19th, 2017, Redditor webbandid submitted a Jeopardy!-themed Talosian image macro to /r/me_irl] where it gathered upwards of 2,400 points (99% upvoted) and 20 comments prior to being archived (shown below, left). On October 20th, Redditor Le_trollfacexd submitted a Talosian screen cap with the caption "When you're at a bar trivia night with the homies and a meme category comes up" to /r/me_irl^[5] (shown below, right). The following day, Redditor tforpatato reposted the image to /r/memes.^[2] Within four months, the posts gained over 30,500 points (93% upvoted) and 10,100 points (92% upvoted) respectively.

Search Interest

Not available.

External References